I have the displeasure of being hosted by one of the worst providers in the UK and I will now be moving away from them.  Until I have migrated away, I’ll be expecting a multitude of issues, so just beware.

Any suggestions as to a reliable provider in the UK would be much appreciated.

It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this point in the 9 months I have worked with the team, but it has all been worth it.

Well done to all of my colleagues at ANS Group.

The biggest issue and the one that caused me greatest consternation was the fact that Brocade have hard-coded all the new FC switches to accept only Brocade branded SFP modules.  Now this isn’t that big a problem for your shortwave connections due to the fact that the SFP modules you already own are probably not 8GB capable so you’ll have ordered new SFP modules at the same time as ordering the switch.  However, it is entirely feasible that any Longwave SFP modules you currently own are 4GB capable (which is equivalent speed to any Brocade LW SFPs) and thought you might be able to reutilise them and save a few grand.  You can’t!

Basically if you issue an SFP show command and any of the SFP Modules are listed as anything other than BROCADE under the Vendor ID, then they will not work in the new 8GB FC Switches.

The second issue is actually an IBM related problem and if you have ordered the SAN24B (8GB) Express then it doesn’t come with the capability of using E-Ports (ISLs).  I found this out the hard way as well, so save yourself a lot of irritation and don’t order the ‘Express’ version of the any of the new IBM 8GB fibre switches because in the long run there is nothing express about them!

An essential addition to any infrastructure running both VMware & NetApp it allows guaranteed crash consistent versions of Virtual Machines to be replicated to secondary sights.

New functionality and enhancements include:

• Singe file restore (SFR)
• A single wizard for creating manual and scheduled backup jobs
• New backup job options:
  • The ability to include independent disks
  • The ability to exclude specified datastores
  • The ability to trigger prebackup or postbackup scripts per backup job (the scripts must be in the server/scripts folder on the SMVI server before you can select them in the SnapManager 2.0 for Virtual Infrastructure user interface)
• An advanced find option to search for specific backup jobs:
  • Most recent backup (default)
  • Backups within a specified time period
  • Backups that include VMware snapshots
• New restore granularity option (besides SFR):
  • VMDKs

So a lot going on here and certainly worth the wait.  You can grab a copy now from the NOW site.

It has been a very long time since I have posted as I have started a new job that has completely consumed my life for the last 6 months.

I have been working on NetApp and VMware pretty much exclusively so expect to see lots of posts with NetApp focus as well as the traditional VMware topics from now on.

It’s good to be back!
Paul

I’m personally very excited, because I work with a lot of NetApp kit and NetApp are one of the very early adopters of FCoE, so I should be getting my hand on some exciting new kit soon.

If you want to read the T11 paper confirming the standard, then check it out here:

http://www.t11.org/ftp/t11/pub/fc/bb-5/09-056v5.pdf

#1 – TA01 – Managing VMware With PowerShell
#2 – DV02 – VDI versus Terminal Services
#3 – AP02 – Best Practices for Deploying Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 on VMware Infrastructure
#4 – AP11 – Performance Best Practices
#5 – DC21 – VMware – Standardised Platform Provisioning
#6 – AP01 – Best Practice for Successfully Virtualising Active Directory
#7 – DV07 – Server & Storage Sizing for VMware View
#8 – AP05 – SQL Server Performance on VMware: est Practices, Recommendations, Tuning & Troubleshooting
#9 – TA11 – Best Practices to Increase Availability & Throughput for the Future of VMware
#10 – TP12 – Consolidation of Performance Sensitive Applications

I managed to see most of these, but missed a few, so I will be getting in there if I can.  Check this photo here to see what is repeated when and where.

I can highly recommend Brian Madden’s presentation (#2) as I saw it first time round and it was great.

Some excellent stuff, particularly the demos from Bruce & jerry Chen.

vCompute

Stephen outlined that in the upcoming version of VMware – vSphere – a single VM has been able to achieve 23,000 total DB transactions per seconds – 250mbmb/sec of disks I/O, which equates to 510 disks spindles to saturate the I/O.  Pretty impressive and as Paul Maritz said yesterday and Stephen reiterated today – “No excuses not to run databases in a VM”

Also an area that has been seen as a weak point for VMware is web workload.  This can now scale so well that VMs have been tested and can scale up to the equivalent of serving 3bn page hits a day  – eBay ‘only’ gets 1bn!

vStorage

Thin provisioning will utilise the vStorage API and can fit straight into the alarms system in vCenter to alert the admins/storage admins as to when thin provisioning thresholds are about to be breached.

vNetwork

Distributed Switch – Allows single confiugration for all hosts and maintains state
Nexus 1000v – brings visitbility at the per VM level, lots more Cisco related functionality and management can be completed by networking team and takes the onus away from the VMware admin team.

Green Credentials

On the green side vSphere will take advantage of CPU related power saving functionality as well as IPMI using DPM.  When using DPM 50% power savings were made when comparing a cluster to it without DPM enabled.  There’s a video of this section of the keynote here.

Fault Tolerance

Fault Tolerance gets particular mention here and the difference between HA & FT were discussed:

HA – restarts a VM on a different hosts, but causes outages whilst the VM is powered up and the VM is in a crash consistent state

FT – lock-steps a VM with a shadow VM of itself on a different ESX Server – it also reproduces another copy onto another ESX Server to ensure it is still protected even while the original ESX Host is down

VMsafe gets briefly mentioned in the context of vSpere & the VMware ecosystem becoming almost completely policy driven in the future.

vCenter

Linked mode was also discussed and a demo also executed by a guy called Bruce.  You can view the video here.  This now means that you can managed 10 VirutalCenters from a single VI Client GUI.

An enhanced search capability has been added that runs across the whole VMware estate.

Host profiles also got discussed, again with a demo by Bruce. You can view the video here.

vCenter Linux Virtual Appliance was announced and met with whoops of delight from the crowd, who seem to ooze their Open Source credentials whenever possible.

Then Jerry Chen came out alongside Stephen and talked about a couple of cool developments.  For which I have videos:

MVP – Mobile Virtualisation Platform
PCoIP – software implementation of PC over IP to be incorporated into VMware View

Jerry Chen’s section was excellent, so check out the official VMware video of the keynote here, when it becomes available.