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:

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.

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.

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.

Adding iSCSI storage to KVM with Virsh(CLI)

As a follow up to my previous post, here’s one way of doing it via virsh.

ONTAP CLI Quick Reference

I was actually surprised to find a quick breakdown of all the important commands in a PDF document. Have fun and stay tuned for a v8 post.

Netapp’s ONTAP 7 Simulator Quickstart

After doing a post on EMC’s storage app, I thought it’d be a great idea to do one on NetApp’s. While not openly available, I was able to obtain a copy of the latest 7 and 8 versions. I’ve setup a VM to run this, based on Hardy.
If you’re a NetApp customer you can obtain it here.

iSCSI on EMC’s Celerra VSA

Until I get a real SAN, I remembered that Chad Sakac of EMC had posted half a dozen articles on their FREE Celerra VSA. Having given that a shot, I thought that I’d make my own simple walkthrough of creating a LUN and mapping it to ESX. I’ve noticed quite a few differences compared to how OpenFiler handles these, most of it comes down to configuring other parts of the Celerra system.