How cool is this video about Distributed Power Management, it demonstrates how DPM works and what the possible utility savings could be. Just watch it:
by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
How cool is this video about Distributed Power Management, it demonstrates how DPM works and what the possible utility savings could be. Just watch it:
Duncan Epping · ·
I’m really looking forward to the podcast tonight. We’ve got Chad Sakac from EMC joining in to elaborate on topics like:
Duncan Epping · ·
There has been a lot of discussion(check Scott’s take on this) around this advanced NFS setting called “NFS.LockDisable”. In short, you can disable the locking mechanism on NFS volumes with this setting.
In the past NetApp had a best practices document which stated that it should be disabled by setting it to “1”. But, as some noticed this can and probably will result in corrupt file-systems. So this “best practice” mysteriously disappeared from the NetApp VI3 Best Practices guide and a KB Article with the VMware best practice on this setting popped up.
So if you did set “NFS.LockDisable” to 1 please change it back to “0”.
It might be beneficial to also implement the “prefvmx.ConsolidateDeleteNFSLocks” that Scott discussed along with patch ESX350-200808401-BG. This setting is to avoid long delays when deleting ESX snapshots. This can take up to 30 seconds, which is quite long compared to iSCSI or FC. So you should only implement this fix if you run NFS and do VMware snapshots at them same time and are experiencing these dalays.
I do recommend that everyone with an NFS filer takes a look at the NetApp best practices document because it does contain valuable information, but before you apply it besure that it doesn’t conflict with a VMware best practice!
Duncan Epping · ·
VMware just changed their VCB multipathing support. Before the KB article stated “Powerpath and other multipathing software.” The KB article has been changed and contains specific version of Powerpath which are officially supported and the “other multipathing” has been removed. Still I’m no fan of multipathing software on the VCB host, I would prefer using 1 HBA for uploading to a holding tank and 1 HBA for downloading the images from the SAN.
Duncan Epping · ·
I get this question a lot:”Does the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy host need to have the same LUNs with the same ID’s presented?”.
VMware Consolidated Backup needed to have identical LUN ID’s to be able to match LUN’s but that has changed. It doesn’t matter anymore which LUN ID your host and proxy server see cause VCB just compares VMFS signatures. So I can hear you guys thinks, what about my RDM’s? (Raw Device Mappings) Well obvious VCB can’t compare the VMFS signatures, but it can compare the NAA ID’s and that’s what it does as of VCB 1.1. So in other words, as long as you just publish all LUNs you want VCB to backup it doesn’t matter which LUN ID they have.
And if for some reason your SAN doesn’t support NAA ID’s, well then you will be stuck with the “matching LUN ID’s” method you have been using for a while.
By the way NAA stands for “Network Address Authority” and is a unique identifier for you LUNs.