I have recently completed a 2GB SAN Fabric upgrade to 8GB on Brocade switches and came across two issues.
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!
NetApp have finally released the latest and greatest version of their SnapManager for VI product.
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):
So a lot going on here and certainly worth the wait. You can grab a copy now from the NOW site.
NetApp have released the eagerly anticipated Virtual Storage Console:
It does a lot of useful things for a 1.0 release, but probably the most important are the remediation options for the following:
- Storage adapter timeouts
- Multipathing settings
- NFS settings
- Guest OS disk timeout values
- Correct misaligned disk partitions
It is available for vSphere ESX & ESXi right now from the
NOW site. I will be providing more information on this useful utility very soon.
Enjoy!
Hello All
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
It has been confirmed that FCoE has been ratified as a standard by T11.
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
VMware have just announced the 10 highest rated sessions that will be repeated this afternoon (Thursday). Here’s the list in order:
#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.
