Moving hosts

Decided to bite the bullet and move hosts, mostly because of some missing features here at WordPress.com. I’ve moved over to DreamHost.com‘s hosting which seems to be pretty good for the price. Please adjust your bookmarks to: http://blog.jasonruiz.com/

Posts since then:

OpenSolaris Storage with iSCSI on ZFS

HP LeftHand VSA: Love at First Sight

Been meaning to do this since I first saw it when messing around with ESXi, but never got around to it. As of now it’s actually called the HP StorageWorks P4000 virtual SAN, way too long. After a quick registration, you can download it from here. The website states that it is a 60 day trial, but that only turns on once you enable one of the 4 advanced features, such as clustering or remote copy, else it’s free forever.

Redhat LE 6 Beta – iSCSI install?!

I must have glazed over this previously. Since I haven’t done many RHEL installs, don’t own any licenses, etc. I’ve installed 5 before, but I don’t remember these options just so blatantly obvious. Now you have tons of options to choose from: Multipath devices, regular SAN devices, and FCoE/iSCSI protocols. I’ll see what else it’s got to offer later, but here’s the stuff:

vSphere: Enabling SSH users without Console Access

I had a bit of a perdicament yesterday with my network, so I wanted to do some ping tests, but I had forgotten to enable root SSH access when I first did the installs. Luckily Veeam’s RootAccess software saved my day.

EMC Celerra VSA: Adding More Storage

I thought with the VSA that came out and its improved performance, that I would start using this instead of OpenFiler. One thing I had never done before was of course adding more harddrives and storage to it, it turned out to be a bit different than I had originally imagine. I will give credit where credit is due, Chad’s videos explain everything, but I’m doing this for myself and people who can’t watch Youtube videos at work, or just like a simple text copy of the instructions.

New EMC Celerra VSA(5.6.48.701) and Book!

Chad Sakac has posted in his blog that there is a new version of the Celerra VSA which should boost performace in many ways from the details he explained, take a look. I’ll be posting a tutorial on adding storage to this based on my experience now that I have found out to later so I can use this for my ESX hosts instead of OpenFiler. He also posted that the EMC team has also released a lovely new book on the Celerra and vSphere here.

Managing Physical NICs with CDP

Now that my ESX servers are setup, I’m setting up my storage. As I might have said before, I’d like to segregate my storage traffic on another VLAN. Having just plugged the cables in I had never bothered to check which NIC had what relationship with the VMNICs and on what ports they were on. I found out a couple of months ago that vSphere can pull information via CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol) for the NICs located on ports that have this enabled. If you click that little thought bubble next to the VMNIC in Networking, you’ll see this lovely information, you might have more than me depending on the switch’s model.

If you don’t know if you have CDP enabled on a port, it’s very simple to do via these commands:

Cisco#conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Cisco(config)#int fa0/3
Cisco(config-if)#cdp run
Cisco(config)#^Z
Cisco#

After that I was able to segregate all of the ports I wanted to use for iSCSI over to the VLAN I had made prior.

Storage Best Practices with EMC

Eric Sloof(NTPro.nl) stumbled upon a great Storage Best Practices from EMC’s Nicholas Travers which I’d also like to share with everyone.

VLAN Trunking with DD-WRT and a Catalyst 2950-24

I’ve been a bit lazy lately with setting up my home lab, mostly because I wanted to do everything in order. I had already gotten vSphere on all 4 of my servers, but I needed to setup my switch to communicate with the outside word. I was having a bit of difficultly since I wanted to have VLANs for this setup and I only have a L2 switch. And an FYI, I am by no means a networking person, take my experience with a grain of salt.

DRS to add IO Resource Management into the new vSphere

Woohoo. I was just asking myself when is vSphere going to have IO management? Here’s a wonderful blog post about it.