Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

virtual appliance

ESX Deployment Appliance v0.90

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For those who don’t own vSphere Enteprise Plus licenses it’s a bit more difficult to set up a consistent virtual environment. I’m glad Herco van Brug aka Brugh put a lot of time and effort in developing the ESX Deployment Appliance.

Herco just released a brand new version, v0.90. Here are the release notes:

  • ESX 4 support
  • ESXi 4 support (installable and stateless!)
  • ESX 4 script parts (post any good scriptparts on this forum or PM me and I’ll integrated it into the appliance)
  • new first config screen
  • some bugs removed (patch system, backups, host input routine, apache tweaks)

Download it now!

HyTrust Appliance, the community release

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I wrote about HyTrust a month ago. Today HyTrust announced a community version. In short, for up to three host you can use a fully featured version of the Hytrust Appliance for free…

HyTrust Appliance, Community Edition is now available for download now as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community. To join the community free of charge, go to http://www.hytrust.com/community/register. Support for Community Edition is provided by the Community via online forum participation and direct community member interaction.

You can find the full press release here.

Now, back to the VMware vSummit again… and I hope to do some technical blogging again soon.

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…

Managing iSCSI startup with Lefthand and their VSA

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Do you have a LeftHand Networks VSA or are you using LeftHand’s VSA for demoing purposes?  Would you like your ESX to shutdown faster, and in fact when it starts up to have the VSA started, and then have the VM’s held on the VSA to be automatically started?

If you have a VSA now, while it may auto start, the VM’s on it will not.  Plus, your ESX host shutdown will take longer than normal.  All of this can be addressed by a great script that LeftHand’s Product Manager Adam C. has posted on the LeftHand Community forums.  Find out more at  http://vsaforum.lefthandnetworks.com/Topic244-9-1.aspx .

Source: Email newsletter, Michael White – Specialist SE.

vCenter Mobile Access technology preview available today

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I received a private message on the VMTN Community that the vCenter Mobile Access forum had been opened up. I wasn’t sure if I could blog about it but John Troyer just posted a message on twitter so it’s out in the open. Read the VMTN blog post about vCenter Mobile Access for more info or just watch the youtube movie and discover what it is all about. Go to the VMTN Community forums, join the program and manage your virtual environment from your mobile phone!