Lately I visited a customer who, depending on their customers SLA, provided either SRM protected VM’s (SLA-1) or non-SRM protected VM’s (SLA-2). The technical difference between these SLA’s is that SRM protected VM’s must be placed on LUN’s that are replicated between storage arrays. Different departments are responsible for creating either SLA-1 or SLA-2 VM’s and operational procedures are in place to make sure that the right [...]
All posts in category vSphere
Microsoft Cluster Service support on vSphere (iSCSI)
Lately a customer asked me about Microsoft Cluster Service support on a vSphere iSCSI environment. The VMware Documentation for vSphere and vSphere Update 1 states: Before you set up MSCS, review the list of functionality that is not supported for this release, and any requirements and recommendations that apply to your configuration. The following environments and [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on March 19, 2010
http://virtualkenneth.com/2010/03/19/microsoft-cluster-service-support-on-vsphere-iscsi/
How to quickly discover a "VM to Resource Pool" mapping
Everyone knows the situation in where a (s)VMotion asks you to select a Resource Pool. I would love to see that VMware automatically selects the current VM’s Resource Pool but unfortunately we have to make a selection since it defaults to the cluster. When we leave it to default it obviously causes the VM to [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on January 29, 2010
http://virtualkenneth.com/2010/01/29/how-to-quickly-discover-a-vm-to-resource-pool-mapping/
SCSI Bus Sharing on the VM Boot Disk SCSI Card
Lately I’ve been asked to review a PID (Project Initiation Document) for a new File Server project based on Linux/GFS v2 (General File System) hosted on VMware vSphere. I noticed that the PID was talking about a dynamic File Server that could (and even would) grow towards 100 TB storage space. That number immediately set [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on January 18, 2010
http://virtualkenneth.com/2010/01/18/scsi-bus-sharing-on-the-vm-boot-disk-scsi-card/
VMware vCenter Storage Views: Partial/No Redundancy
While exploring my software iSCSI initator environment I noticed that all my VM’s on every host are reporting a “Partial/No Redundancy”-status within the Multipathing Status even though I have Round Robin in place and thus 2 paths to the storage. This behavior is a bug as confirmed by VMware Technical Support. The rule for displaying [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on December 15, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/12/15/vmware-vcenter-storage-views-partialno-redundancy/
Testing Scenario's VMware / HP c-Class Infrastructure
Since my blog about Understanding HP Flex-10 Mappings with VMware ESX/vSphere is quite a big hit (seeing the page views per day) I decided to also write about the testing scenario’s which should all be walked through before taking a design as this into production. In my blog I stated: Last word of advice: while implementing [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on December 4, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/12/04/testing-scenarios-vmware-hp-c-class-infrastructure/
Creating easy to identify LeftHand Volumes on ESX/vSphere
Coming from mostly HP EVA environments I got used to identify a Volume/LUN by there LUN number which was a real unique identifier. I could always ”talk” LUN number and be sure that it was understood and unique. So ever since I’ve been working with our LeftHand environment I disliked the way that every Volume/LUN is marked [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on December 3, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/12/03/creating-easy-to-identify-lefthand-volumes-on-esxvsphere/
vSphere: Freezing VMs after deleting a volume from the SAN
We are running a newly designed vSphere 4.0 environment connected to a very big LeftHand iSCSI environment. Lately we discovered some major problems with a couple of VM’s totally freezing for about 30 seconds, this problem seemed to only occur on several VM’s from one specific host, so time to do some research on this [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on December 2, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/12/02/vsphere-freezing-vms-after-deleting-a-volume-from-the-san/
VMotion and Exchange 2010, not supported
Just a short blog post about Microsoft Exchange 2010 in combination with VMware vMotion. We are running this combination hosted on vSphere platform and noticed that whenever we vMotion over a Exchange 2010 Mailbox server that is using DAG (Database Availability Group’s), the DAG will fail. 25-05-2011 Update for Exchange 2010 SP1: Thanks to Toti [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on November 20, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/11/20/vmotion-and-exchange-2010/
VMFS- and Block Size is important for virtual RDM's
A little post from me since I got an error message while working with large RDM’s. While I twittered out the message it seemed that Duncan Epping from VMware had a posting ready at which he only had to press the “Publish”-button. See his very helpful article over here. What you might have noticed is that a RDM’s size is displayed as the real size [...]
Posted by Kenneth van Ditmarsch on November 10, 2009
http://virtualkenneth.com/2009/11/10/vmfs-and-block-size-is-important-for-virtual-rdms/
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