Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere

Alarm Actions, exploring the new version of ESX/vCenter

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Eric Sloof(1, 2, 3) already explored the new “alarms and actions” capabilities. There’s one that really stands out in my opinion in the next release of ESX/vCenter(vSphere):

Indeed, “Enter maintenance mode“. Now you might wonder when you would want to use this. Wouldn’t it be nice that when your hardware is degraded, for instance memory status changed or hardware power changed, the host enters maintenance mode. I wouldn’t want to run virtual machines on a host that has a memory error or runs on only one power supply. Of course this action only applies to the “host” objects:

The dawn of a new era

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While most virtualization vendors are still catching up on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, VMware prepares for the official unveiling of the next generation of virtualization software! April 21 – 2009, mark that date! It’s the dawn of a new era! I know that it’s way over the top, but you can’t half imagine how excited I am about this upcoming announcement!

Click the picture for more details, and be sure to sign up!
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Just some highlights of what VMware is launching.

  • Saves enough energy to power Denmark for 10 days
  • Frees up enough storage to host 50 times the current volume of photos on Facebook
  • Offers 4 times more memory per virtual machine
  • Handles 8,900 transactions per second in a virtual machine
  • Handles 3 times eBay’s daily traffic on a single server
  • Supports 4 times more operating systems than the competition

April 21, 2009 – 9:00 – 10:30 AM, PDT – Via live Simulcast – Register NOW!
(thanks Mike for letting me borrow your pic and bullet points!)

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

Resizing your VMFS the right way, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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I’ve been playing around with my vSphere/Next gen ESX lab. I was replaying the VMworld lab and one of the assignments was to  resize a VMFS volume. Yes that’s correct, resize not extent. Extents have been discussed by many and the general consensus is avoid them if/when possible. But when running out of diskspace you don’t always have the option to avoid them. Some can’t afford the downtime that comes with a “cold migration”, and most aren’t willing to take the risk of using storage vmotion when running out of diskspace. (Snapshot is placed on source VMFS volume) This has all been solved in the next version of ESX/vCenter. You can resize your VMFS volume without resorting to extents, and you can do this with the vCenter client.

The original size:

First thing you will need to do is increase the size of the LUN on your SAN. If your SAN doesn’t support LUN resizing you can still do it the old fashion way, extent. [Read more…] about Resizing your VMFS the right way, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter