Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX

Virtual Geek Week?

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It must have been Virtual Geek week this week! I guess most of you already know Virtual Geek, and if you didn’t you’ve been missing out on the good stuff. Virtual Geek is being maintained by Chad Sakac of EMC and let’s say there’s a reason why his blog is called “Virtual Geek”. Chad posted a series of blog articles which are a must read for anyone interested in storage related to VMware and storage/VMware in general.

It started out with the “VMFS best practices and counter FUD” article where he sets the facts straight and debunks several myths like max amount of vm’s per VMFS volume and the use of extents. Besides countering this FUD there are also some very valuable tips in this article, for instance the advanced setting “Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding” and the why/where/when.

In his second post this week he revealed that the upcoming release of ESX/vCenter(vSphere) will include the counterpart of the EMC Storage Viewer (vCenter plugin, youtube demo to be found here.). For all Clarion/Celerra customers who are planning on upgrading to vSphere a nice “little” extra!

The third one was the one I have been personally waiting for, the brand new version of the Celerra VSA. If you want to run a virtual “virtual environment” this virtual storage appliance is a must have. Especially if you want to test SRM this VSA will come in handy. Be sure to also download the how to guide that Chad provided in the “HOWTO 401” article.

Number four and five deal about multipathing and MRU behavior. I fully agree that understanding how MRU works is essential if you are using the policy. Post number 5 contains the script that is demoed in post 4. The script load balances the LUNs on the backend of the array(storage processors) and of course makes sure this is reflected on ESX for an optimal performance.

Let’s hope there’s more to come over the next weeks…

Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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I was exploring the next version of ESX / vCenter again today and did a Storage VMotion via the vSphere client. I decided to take a couple of screenshots to  get you guys acquainted with the new look/layout.

Doing a Storage VMotion via the GUI is nothing spectacular cause we all have used the 3rd party plugins. But changing the disk from thick to thin is. With vSphere it will be possible to migrate to thin provisioned disks, which can and will save disk space and might me desirable for servers that have low disk utilization and disk changes. [Read more…] about Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

Pre-installing the vCenter agent?!

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You might wonder why you would want to pre-install the vCenter agent on an ESX box? Well if you have several remote offices which need to be connected to a central vCenter Server it will take a while before these agents are pushed and installed. Especially if the connection between these sites isn’t as fast as most of us are used to at home. (I’m talking 128KB here for instance…) One of my colleagues, as mentioned in a previous article, is doing a major roll out of ESX. With their current bandwidth adding an ESX server to the central vCenter Server took over 20 minutes. With the vCenter agent pre-installed this was cut down to only 2 minutes. That will save you a lot of time when you need to do over 200 hosts…

  • On the vCenter Server, look for the following files in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\upgrade 
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215.sig
  • copy the files to the ESX host and run the following commands: 
    sh vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    service mgmt-vmware restart
  • wait 5 min…

Disk latency and esxtop

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We just had a very good and interesting VMTN Podcast on virtualized MS SQL performance and best practices. One of the questions was about disk performance. Hemant Gaidhan talked about esxtop and how to discover possible performance issues, and specifically mentioned latency. I’ve never really looked into this section of esxtop and did a quick search and of course the “Interpreting esxtop Statistics” answered which counters to watch and what each counter represents:

Section 4.2.2 Latency Statistics
This group of counters report latency values measured at three different points in the ESX storage stack. In the context of the figure below, the latency counters in esxtop report the Guest, ESX Kernel and Device latencies. These are under the labels GAVG, KAVG and DAVG, respectively. Note that GAVG is the sum of DAVG and KAVG counters.

I recommend reading the rest of the 4.2.2 section to anyone looking for more indepth info on esxtop and storage performance. Also read page 14/15 of Hemant’s document on SQL Server performance/best practices. Another great read and tip from Hemant was the “Scalable Storage Performance” whitepaper.

VMware ESX(i) 3.5 U4 released!

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VMware has just released ESX Update 4. You can find the release notes here. I’ve picked a couple of bullets which I think are important, please read the release notes for the other improvements and known issues!

Be sure to also read the compatability matrix, ESX(i) 3.5 U4 requires vCenter 2.5 U2 or higher, and be sure to check if your Hardware Management Agent is still supported.

Newly supported features:

Newly supported Guest Operating Systems:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Server Edition (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • Windows Preinstallation Environment 2.0 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Newly supported SAS/SATA controllers:

  • PMC 8011 (for SAS and SATA drives)
  • Intel ICH9
  • Intel ICH10
  • CERC 6/I SATA/SAS Integrated RAID Controller (for SAS and SATA drivers)
  • HP Smart Array P700m Controller

Newly supported Storage Arrays:

  • Sun StorageTek 2530 SAS Array
  • Sun Storage 6580 Array
  • Sun Storage 6780 Array

Expanded support for the Enhanced VMXNET driver :

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (64-bit)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Web Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional (32-bit)