Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

Automatic rescan of your HBAs….

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As some of you, and I hope all of you, have noticed by now when you create / expand / extent / delete a datastore a rescan of your HBAs will automatically be initiated. This however can lead to a “rescan storm” when you are building a new environment.

You can imagine that it’s pointless to rescan your HBA 25 times in a row when you are adding more than 1 new datastore. I can even imagine you would like to be in control; when, which server and at what time. This behavior was introduced with vCenter 2.5 U2 I believe but as I just found out can be disabled. Now keep in mind that disabling is not a best practice. This should be avoided as a default setting but will come in handy when you are building a new site.

  1. Open up the vSphere Client
  2. Go to Administration -> vCenter Server
  3. Go to Settings -> Advanced Settings
  4. If the key “config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter” is not available add it and set it to false

Make sure to set it to “true” as soon as you are done because you would like to make sure the environment is consistent in the future when you or your customer is adding/removing/expanding a datastore.

Drummonds vs Crosby

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I was just watching the Drummonds vs Crosby debate. Many people have analyzed the videos already but the one worth reading is the article by Mr Stevie Chambers. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look it’s definitely worth it. One thing I would like to note is that in my opinion this was the wrong match. I don’t think Crosby is a performance expert. He seems to be more focused on: sales pitch, eula’s and features included in the hypervisor but not in Xenserver. In other words, Drummonds definitely won… knock out in the third round by EPT 😉

Now, my comment to Citrix… As Scott openly challenged you guys to show benchmark reports(Spec etc) and compare them to VMware’s reports please step up to the plate! That’s what ours and your customers would like to see!

Ask your questions while you still can…

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The floor is still open, so take your chance and ask a question. We’ve already got some great questions about current designs and new designs but we, Rick Scherer, Tom Howarth, Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and myself, are up for the challenge. Ask anything you like as long as it is virtualization related of course. Don’t limit yourself, if you would like to send us a Visio diagram to explain a situation that’s even possible. Also make sure to add TA2259 to your schedule builder as soon as it comes online!

@depping becomes @DuncanYB

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I was so sick and tired of waiting for Twitter.com to give a decent reply to my support requested I decided to open up a new account. From what I’ve been told unsuspending accounts can take up to 30 days. I guess their focus is on suspending accounts cause that only takes them seconds. Well I’m not going to wait anymore, I will delete my @depping account if and when it ever comes back and just continue to use my new account: http://www.twitter.com/DuncanYB

Please start following @DuncanYB instead of @depping and thanks all for your support and retweets. And if you don’t mind spreading the word about my new account I would appreciate it, cause I was down to 0 followers instead of the +800 I used to have.

I also decided not to auto tweet new blog articles anymore as it floods my and your time-line and most of you probably also use a RSS reader. Besides that PlanetV12n is already auto tweeting my articles, so I will probably retweet those once in a while.

Now lets just hope twitter doesn’t close down this account…