Posts

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. ...

It’s a pretty common best practice to not install the Infrastructure Master (FSMO) Role on a Global Catalog Server. This post should help to explain why that is, and the circumstances where you can get away with it. Global Catalog Review A Global Catalog contains a full set of attributes for the domain that it’s a member of and a subset of information for all domains in its forest. So basically, what this means is that all of the little attributes that are stored on objects in Active Directory, in the GC’s domain, will be housed on Global Catalog servers. The global Catalog will also have a replica of the objects from other domains in the forest, but only a smaller set of their attributes. ...

While I was studying for the VCAP-DCA I realized that many people might not have access to a lab that includes the capability to do VMDirectPath I/O. My own lab is using nested ESXi hosts inside of VMware Workstation so I don’t have access to DirectPath either, but I was able to borrow some equipment in order to test my skills. If you don’t have access to this type of equipment but want to study for the VCAP5-DCA, the below setup should suffice for you to learn it, as the setup is not very difficult. ...

I was recently helping out a company attempt to upgrade their Netapp Filer from OnTap 7.3 over to Data OnTap 8. We ran the Netapp Upgrade advisor and got to a section that wanted us to run the AggrSpaceCheck tool to make sure that the aggregates had sufficient space available. Normally, I skip this step because I usually have plenty of space available, but in this particular case, some of the aggregates were already 99% full. Since we didn’t want to have a serious failure during our upgrade we decided to error on the side of caution (and best practices) and run the AggrSpaceCheck tool. ...