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.

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.

Community Lab

Sid Smith has posted a great initiative to provide the community a free open ESXi lab. Please donate if you can!

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.

VMFS on SSD

I just read Eric Sloof’s post on VMFS(VMWare datastore filesystem) on SSD vs SATA drives. The stats show a HUGE(understatement) performance gap in disk IO and IOPS. I hope to atleast get 2 of these sometime within the year after I build a 2 or 3 blade server for a real ESX cluser as opposed to my current virtual(VMWare Workstation) created environment.

vSphere multipathing, easy as cake…mmm cake.

I had already gotten through most of the stuff while getting my hands dirty with vSphere and vCenter. One of the things I had forgotten about was multipathing redundancy in iSCSI.

The outcome of enabling this is having a redundant connection to your shared storage. It’s configured through having 2 VKernel connections with opposite unused NICs. Reasoning for not just configuring 2 active NICs is the fact that only 1 active connect can be used with a VMWare datastore. You’ll notice how there are 2 adapters at the very bottom, one active and one not, on the other VMKernel, it’s the opposite setup.

After configuring the VMKernels you just need to add the vmk adapters to the initiator using the command where “x” equals the VMKernel number: “esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmkx -d vmhba32″

And refreshing….wa-la, you now have 2 paths and you can set Round Robin afterwards. There’s more to this method than just redundancy, I’ve heard this is also a method(with more NICs) to do loadbalancing.