I signed up for the VMware Users Group last year at VMworld. I don’t remember, why I decided to do it but I assume that it had something to do with a free T-shirt. Since then, I’ve been to several meetings, all at my local Chicago VMUG chapter www.chicagovmug.com . At first I was pretty skeptical, but it turns out it’s been one of the best things I’ve done for my career. ...
I recently got my hands on a pair of HP P4300s in the lab and wanted to see how the performance was with Network RAID. One of the most read posts on this site is on Understanding RAID Penalty and I was curious to see how Network RAID played into this equation. Basic Setup I have 2 HP P4300s, each with eight 15k SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration. This means that I should have a total of 1400 RAW IOPS (8 disks * 175 IOPS) on each lefthand node. Since I have 2 of them, I’m calculating 2800 RAW IOPS. In order to get some real world functional IOPS, we’ll assume that we have 50% Reads and 50% Writes, and don’t forget to take out the RAID Penalty for the RAID 5. Let’s plug this into our Functional IOPS equation to get: ...
I have been recently thrown into the world of HP Storage, and have been trying to learn all of the storage techniques that are in the HP product line. I noticed that I couldn’t find anything that really did a compare and contrast of each of the products so I started to put one together. Anything I couldn’t understand, I asked a great guy named Calvin Zito (@hpstorageguy) to give me a hand with. He was more than gracious so follow him on Twitter. ...
After attending VMworld this year, I decided I needed to try to understand VXLANs a little better. Based off of the basic concept that it stretches a layer two broadcast domain over layer three networks, I was worried that I knew how this was accomplished. What is VXLAN? VXLAN stands for Virtual Extensible LAN and is a fairly new method of making the datacenter network elastic. Suppose for example that you want to be able to move your virtual machines from your own server room to a co-location and then to a public cloud depending on what the load was on your environment. In order to do this without causing downtime, you’d need a way for your layer two ethernet frames to continue getting from your clients to your servers even, if a router is in that path. ...
VMworld 2012 was in San Francisco this year and the weather was beautiful. San Francisco was a lovely host and the Moscone Center proved to be very capable of handling the large crowds that were around for the event. The Solutions Exchange was massive. It included companies like HP, EMC, Netapp as well as some startup companies like Tintri, PHD Virtual and a very new Cloud Physics which was the talk of VMworld this year. Check them out at http://www.cloudphysics.com. ...
I gave an overview of how HP blades are mapped to Virtual Connect Interconnect Modules in my last post. /2012/08/09/hp-virtual-connect-basics This post focus more on understanding the networks created through HP Virtual Connect Manager. In the last post I described out blade NICs map to the Interconnect Bays in the back of an HP C7000 Chassis using the downlinks. Now let’s talk about how those NICs can get added to a specific Network. HP calls these networks inside of a c7000 chassis “vNets”. ...
HP Virtual Connect is a great way to handle network setup for an HP Blade Chassis. When I first started with Virtual Connect it was very confusing for me to understand where everything was, and how the blades connected to the interconnect bays. This really is fairly simple, but might be confusing to anyone that’s new to this technology. Hopefully this post will give newcomers the tools they need to get started. ...
I recently took a closer look at Veeam to do some replication work. I’ve used Veeam to do VMware backups, but never really considered it to do any replication work. Most of the time VMware Site Recovery Manager is my tool of choice to do replication if my storage array can’t do it. But Veeam makes a great alternative for doing replication. The current version of Veeam can re-ip, run on a schedule, do bandwidth throttling, as well as remapping networks. ...
Now that we’ve entered the virtualization age, we’ve become accustomed to moving workloads between hosts in order to get better performance. We’re so used to it, that VMware DRS will move workloads around automatically and many administrators don’t even care what host is running their virtual machines. Hosts are now more like a resource container, where we move our servers to the resource that is most available. VMware lets us take DRS one step further, where if we have extra resources available that aren’t being used, we can power off the hosts in order to save on power consumption. If we have 50 hosts running, but only using the resources of 30 of them, let’s power off the remaining 20 hosts to save on power and cooling. Over a year, these types of savings can really add up. ...
Sometimes we need a quick set of statistics to see what is going on inside a vSphere host. Sort of like using Microsoft’s task manager on a Windows server, we can quickly take a look at what some performance stats on the VMware hosts. A couple of the tools to do this are the esxtop and resxtop commands. Esxtop and resxtop are basically the same with the exception that esxtop must be run directly on the vSphere host by connecting via SSH. Resxtop can be run remotely from the vMA perhaps. Below is a screenshot of the two tools running side by side. Aside from the refresh rates not being matched up, you can see that they are both showing the same information. ...