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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My Experiences with Xen on Ubuntu(Semi-rant)

I can understand that nothing is easy the first time around, but this is completely different. There is such a huge learning curve for Xen. I think it’s due to the lack of proper documentation.

New Virt-Manager

I hadn’t used it in awhile, but I wanted to write up a post about Xen, so I ended up launching it only to find a surprise. Ubuntu Lucid Lynx has updated to 0.8.2 of Virt-Manager, which included a new interface design. Here are a few screens.