Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Wrapping up 2011, it was another great year

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2011 was a great year for me from a career / blogging perspective. I moved over from the delivery side (PSO/Cloud Practice) to the “marketing” side. I used quotes as it is technical marketing and our focus is technical enablement. I was a speaker at both VMworld Las Vegas and VMworld Copenhagen. Of course the publication of our new book, vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive. Especially during VMworld Las Vegas the book was a hot topic. It seemed that everyone wanted to either buy it or get it signed… Crazy times. Nice fact about the book is that the e-book is outselling the paper version currently, I guess the price might have something to do with it!

2012 is going to be crazy as well, Partner Exchange in February and of course VMworld in San Francisco and in Barcelona. On top of that I will be working on a lot of collateral around Cloud Infrastructure integration. All in all it was a great year and there’s a lot of cool stuff already planned for 2012! Before I sign off for a couple of days, I wanted to share a couple of cool facts with you:

Once again, thank you for participating in the discussions. Thank you for email me your ideas / thoughts. Lets make 2012 at least as successful!

Win a free vSphere 5.0 Clustering Book by leaving a comment…

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This month four years ago I created my own blog. Yes indeed, Yellow-Bricks.com had its 4th birthday this month. I want to thank all of you for contributing to the success of Yellow-Bricks by commenting / emailing / tweeting etc. As a token of my appreciation I want to give away 4 copies (paper version) of the vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.

What do you need to do? Not much! Just leave a comment with a valid email address! On the 30th of this month I will announce the 4 winners who will be randomly picked, they will get a signed copy of the book!

Last but not least, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each and everyone of you! Enjoy the holiday… I know I will.

vSphere HA Isolation response when using IP Storage

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I had a question from one of my colleagues last week about the vSphere HA Isolation Response and IP Storage. His customer had an ISCSI storage infrastructure (applies to NFS also) and recently implemented a new vSphere environment. When one of the hosts was isolated virtual machines were restarted and users started reporting strange problems.

What happened was that the vSphere HA Isolation Response was configured to “Leave Powered On” and as both the Management Network and the iSCSI Network were isolated there was no “datastore heartbeating” and no “network heartbeating”. Because the datastores were unavailable the lock on the VMDKs expired (virtual disk files) and HA would be able to restart the VMs.

Now please note that HA/ESXi will power-off (or kill actually) the “ghosted VM” (the host which runs the VMs that has lost network connection) when it detects the locks cannot be re-acquired. It still means that the time between when the restart happens and the time  when the isolation event is resolved potentially the IP Address and the Mac Address of the VM will pop up on the network. Of course this will only happen when your virtual machine network isn’t isolated, and as you can imagine this is not desired.

When you are running IP based storage, it is highly (!!) recommend to configure the isolation response to: power-off! For more details on configuring the isolation response please read this article which lists the best practices / recommendations.

Multi NIC vMotion, how does it work?

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I had a question last week about multi NIC vMotion. The question was if multi NIC vMotion was a multi initiator / multi target solution. Meaning that, if available, on both the source and the destination multiple NICs are used for the vMotion / migration of a VM. Yes it is!

It is complex process as we need vMotion to able to handle mixes of 10GbE and 1GbE NICs.

When we start the process we will check, from the vCenter side, each host and determine the total combined pool of bandwidth available for vMotion. In other words, if you have 2x1GbE NICs and 1x10GbE NIC, then that host has a pool of 12GbE worth of bandwidth. We will do the same for the source and the destination host. Then, we will walk down each host’s list of vMotion vmknics, pairing off NICs until we’ve exhausted the bandwidth pool.

There are many combinations possible, but lets discuss a few just to provide a better idea of how this works:

  • If the source host has 1x1GbE NIC and the dest 1x1GbE NIC, we’ll open one connection between the these two hosts.
  • If the source has 3x1GbE NICs and the destination 1x10GbE NIC, then we’ll open one connection from each source-side 1GbE NIC to the destination’s 10GbE NIC – so a total of three socket connections all to the dest’s single 10GbE NIC.
  • If the source has 15x1GbE NICs and the destination 1x10GbE NIC and 5x1GbE NICs, then we’ll direct the first 10 source-side 1GbE NICs to connect to the dest’s 10GbE NIC, then the remaining pair of 5 1GbE vmknics will connect to each other – 15 connections in all.

Keep in mind that if the hosts are mismatched, we will create connections between vmknics until one of the sides is “depleted”. In other words if the source has 2 x 1GbE and the destination 1 x 1GbE only 1 connection would be opened.