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Roger Lund

VMware and Storage crazy man, vExpert.

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Xiotech Market information and Points of Interest.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

A local vendor sent me these links, and I thought I would share.

 

“

http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-09-17-08 Virtual View, recognized in Storage Software for Virtualization category, dramatically simplifies storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks in VMWare virtual environments
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2100  “Xiotech gets my nod for best technology initiative of 2008”
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169956&WT.svl=news2_1  Article featuring Dan Lewis of USC Marshall School of Business. Lewis declares that his Emprise 7000 system provides an 8x better performance than his old HP EVA3000. He also praises Virtual View, self-healing capabilities, and reduced energy consumption
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/28223-Five-hot-storage-technologies-for-2-9-and-five-flops- ISE among the top 5 technologies for 2009
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2085 Jon Toigo comments on the most important IT-related things that happened in 2008. Xiotech holds both the #1 and #2 spots – with ISE and Web Services based management.
http://www.crn.com/storage/212501502;jsessionid=4JXY4Y42KKETWQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?pgno=9 The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2008
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-12-15-08  Xiotech Selected as 2009 Hot Companies Finalist
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press.aspx#  More, more, more
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc1/012609-storage-rethink.html?page=1 Article on Web Services and ISE

 

“

Source Xiotech and local Vendor.

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Exchange 2003 Outgoing SMTP delivery issues

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Exchange 2003 Outgoing SMTP delivery issues

We have had an Exchange 2003 mail server for a few years and have had great results without many big configuration changes, until now. Recently we added a new Qwest T-1 and changed our firewall to a Watchgaurd. After the change we have had a number of problems delivering mail to certain hosts. These hosts require that your mail server send mail with certain mail header requirements.

I am trying to get input on what’s required on all levels for mail delivery.

For outgoing mail to pass header requirements what should be in place at your DNS provider Ex: A record, your ISP Ex: Reverse DNS, your firewall and internal Windows DNS server, and your Exchange server?

Currently our mail server is sending an EHLO that won’t resolve. The format is internalhostDNSserver.internaldoamin.xxx.
Here is an example display of full headers received portion when I receive mail in my Yahoo account.

Received:

from 209.188.99.98 (EHLO appsrv10.mahowaldins.net) (209.188.99.98) by mta152.mail.re2.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:14:08 -0800

What should this be? If the internal mail server is called “exch” can you use mail.doamin.com then rely in internal DNS to do the rest?

How should this also correlate with your ISP reverse DNS, should they matchup some how?

Solution:
The solution was provided by Web: http://www.linkedin.com/in/astorrs Twitter: twitter.com/astorrs
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Sender-Policy-Framework.html
SPF or Sender Policy Framework will help your Exchange Server delivery mail smoothly.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Going Tapeless in Enterprise

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Dave Graham @ http://flickerdown.com wrote a blog about going tapeless.

“

I was asked the other day about the potential for finally going tapeless in Commercial and Enterprise spaces. Truth be told, this is becoming a more common occurence as those mechanical beasts hit the tail-end of their maintenance windows. With that in mind, what are some (not all) of the business drivers that move enterprises from tape to disk (or other mediums)?

“Tape is Dead!” has echoed through the halls of storage IT for quite some time. It’s been an ideological pursuit of the “next generation backup” mantra hawked by the Tier Ones in the storage space. What has been noted is the continued price depreciation of disk as capacity has increased, the tighter compliance metrics from government agencies, as well as the legacy of natural disasters that have arrived on the scene since 2001. Let’s unpack these a bit.

“

He discusses the following topic’s.

Price Depreciations and Increased Capacity

Tighter Compliance

Natural Disasters

Remediating the Problem

Price Depreciation and Capacity Increase – Tapeless

Tighter Compliance – Tapeless

Natural Disasters – Tapeless

Please check out the full post

http://flickerdown.com/2009/01/going-tapeless-in-enterprise/

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Converting a Linux Virtual Machine With an LVM

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://technodrone.blogspot.com has a write up on Converting a VM from A older version of Xen to VMware using the VMware Converter 4.0 titled : Converting a Linux Virtual Machine With an LVM

He went through quite a process. Make sure to check it out.

“

I was entrusted with the task to try and migrate a VM from Xen 3.2 to ESX. Well you would think that is a trivial task – it should be. But let us not forget that we are talking here about version 3.2, which is two generations back from the current Citrix Xensource which is in use today.
After successfully migrating it I would like to share with you the procedure.
This was done on a Xen Guest VM runnning Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 7)

“

 

 

Full Source Post.

 

http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2009/01/converting-linux-virtual-machine-with.html

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DatacenterNews

VMware KnowledgeBase Articles released to do with Time

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

I saw these come across the VMware RSS feed today, and I have personally had time problems in Linux VM’s, so I wanted to post these links.

 

Time in a Linux virtual machine jumps backward when using clock=pit

KB Article
1006086

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time runs slower than real time due to lost timer interrupts

KB Article
1006088

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time in a Linux 2.6 guest operating system runs faster than real time due to lost tick overcompensation

KB Article
1006113

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time in virtual machine drifts due to hardware timer drift

KB Article
1006072

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time runs too fast in a Windows virtual machine when the Multimedia Timer interface is used

KB Article
1005953

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time falls behind in a virtual machine when the memory of the virtual machine is paged from disk by the VMkernel

KB Article
1005861

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

Time drifts in virtual machines and the service console due to the HPET misreporting its frequency

KB Article
1006090

Updated
Jan. 27, 2009

 

I hope these help those of you that are having time issues in VM’s are able to

 

Thanks to VMware.

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Notable KB Articles from the week from TheVMguy and me.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php posted his weekly Notable KB Articles from the week.

“

27 Articles new or updated this past week.  The first one is very relevant.

“

 

None of these hit home for me, ( just didn’t apply) so I went looking for more, and found the following.

 

How to Store Snapshot Files on an Alternate LUN

Datastores no longer available during upgrade

 

I’ll quote them below.

 

“

How to Store Snapshot Files on an Alternate LUN

KB Article
1003023

Updated
Jan. 26, 2009

Products

VMware ESX

VMware VirtualCenter

Details

Snapshot files are stored in the directory where the <VMname>.vmx file exists.

If you have limited space on the LUN where the <VMname>.vmx file exists, it may be necessary to specify an alternate location for the delta files that are created when you take snapshots of a VM.

Solution

This can be accomplised by defining an alternative working directory in the <VMname>.vmx   for the VM. The side effect of defining an alternative working directory is that the swap file will also be created in the alternative location.

The step to do this are:

1) Power off the VM

2) Edit the <VMname>.vmx file

      * add a line that looks like the following **

workingDir = "/vmfs/volumes/47384c5e-41fd4f1c-69c3-00163581bcf/directory_for_vmname_snapshotfile/"

3) Remove the VM from inventory in VirtualCenter

4) Add the VM to inventory in VirtuaCenter

5) Power on VM

6) Take snapshots as desired

Note: It may not be necessary to remove from inventory and add back into inventory, but in repro this produced consistent results.

You cannot use the advanced edit setting feature in VirtualCenter to add this line to the <VMname>.vmx file and have this take effect.

Note: This appears to only work as expected when you edit the .vmx file directly.

“

And

“

Datastores no longer available during upgrade

KB Article
1008031

Updated
Jan. 25, 2009

Products

VMware Lab Manager

Product Versions

VMware Lab Manager 3.0.x

Symptoms

  • Cannot complete an upgrade from Lab Manager 2.x to 3.x.

  • Required VMFS datastores no longer available.

  • An error is received while upgrading Lab Manager from version 2.x to 3.x after specifying VirtualCenter credentials in the configuration wizard.

  • The wizard does not proceed forward until each unavailable datastore is deleted from the configuration.

Resolution

This issue occurs when the credentials you gave for VirtualCenter do not have sufficient permissions to access the datastores and other required objects.

To verify the permissions, connect to VirtualCenter using the same credentials specified in the Lab Manager configuration wizard. If you are not able to see the configured hosts, clusters, or datastores, you must reconfigure the account privileges to make these objects accessible, or use a different account.

For more information on configuring VirtualCenter permissions, see the Basic System Administration guide, specifically the Managing Users, Groups, Permissions, and Roles section.

“

Those two caught my eye.

 

Thanks to The VMguy and VMware.

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DatacenterStorageVMware

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

 

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek posted a nice blog post titled : A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

 

“

Today’s post is one you don’t often find in the blogosphere, see today’s post is a collaborative effort initiated by me, Chad Sakac (EMC), which includes contributions from Andy Banta (VMware), Vaughn Stewart (NetApp), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand), David Black (EMC) and various other folks at each of the companies.

Together, our companies make up the large majority of the iSCSI market, all make great iSCSI targets, and we (as individuals and companies) all want our customers to have iSCSI success.

I have to say, I see this one often – customer struggling to get high throughput out of iSCSI targets on ESX.   Sometimes they are OK with that, but often I hear this comment: "…My internal SAS controller can drive 4-5x the throughput of an iSCSI LUN…"   

Can you get high throughput with iSCSI with GbE on ESX?   The answer is YES.  But there are some complications, and some configuration steps that are not immediately apparent. You need to understanding some iSCSI fundamentals, some Link Aggregation fundamentals, and know some ESX internals – none of which are immediately obvious…

If you’re interested (and who wouldn’t be interested with a great topic and a bizzaro-world “multi-vendor collaboration”… I can feel the space-time continuum collapsing around me :-), read on…

We could start this conversation by playing a trump card; 10GbE, but we’ll save this topic for another discussion. Today 10GbE is relatively expensive per port and relatively rare, and the vast majority of iSCSI and NFS deployments are on GbE. 10GbE is supported by VMware today (see the VMware HCL here), and all of the vendors here either have, or have announced 10GbE support.

10GbE can support the ideal number of cables from an ESX host – two. This reduction in port count can simplify configurations, reduce the need for link aggregation, provide ample bandwidth, and even unify FC using FCoE on the same fabric for customers with existing FC investments. We all expect to see rapid adoption of 10GbE as prices continue to drop. Chad has blogged on 10GbE and VMware here.

This post is about trying to help people maximize iSCSI on GbE, so we’ll leave 10GbE for a followup.

If you are serious about iSCSI in your production environment, it’s valuable to do a bit of learning, and it’s important to do a little engineering during design.    iSCSI is easy to connect and begin using, but like many technologies which excel in terms of their simplicity the default options and parameters may not be robust enough to provide an iSCSI infrastructure which can support your business.

 

“

This is a very long post, and worth reading more than once. Included are diagrams and links. This is a very nice overview for anyone considering iSCSI for their San.

 

Here are some topic’s he covers.

 

“

Understanding your Ethernet Infrastructure

Understanding: iSCSI Fundamentals

Understanding: Link Aggregation Fundamentals

Understanding: iSCSI implementation in ESX 3.x

(Strongly) Recommended Additional Reading

  1. I would STRONGLY recommend reading a series of posts that the inimitable Scott Lowe has done on ESX networking, and start at his recap here: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/19/vmware-esx-networking-articles/
  2. Also – I would strongly recommend reading the vendor documentation on this carefully.

ENOUGH WITH THE LEARNING!!! HOW do you get high iSCSI throughput in ESX 3.x?

As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.

This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.

Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:

Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?

Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?

Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?

Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?

In closing…..

I would suggest that anyone considering iSCSI with VMware should feel confident that their deployments can provide high performance and high availability. You would be joining many, many customer enjoying the benefits of VMware and advanced storage that leverages Ethernet.

To make your deployment a success, understand the “one link max per iSCSI target” ESX 3.x iSCSI initiator behavior. Set your expectations accordingly, and if you have to, use the guest iSCSI initiator method for LUNs needing higher bandwidth than a single link can provide.

Most of all ensure that you follow the best practices of your storage vendor and VMware.

“

Thanks to VirutalGeek for content.

Full Source Post http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-iscsi-customers-using-vmware.html

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Where to start with your VMWare ESX Whitebox

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://www.virtualpro.co.uk has a cool write up on building a ESX White Box.

I know a lot of small shops that could find this very interesting, so I wanted to share this blog.

 

“

There have been a couple of postings recently by people who have spent some time custom building PC’s capable of running VMWare ESX. A great example is Eric Sloof who has built a monster white box capable of running the new VI4 Beta software.

That’s got me interested in building one,  perhaps to road test new features if I can ever get invited to participate in a VMWare beta program,  or perhaps just to run ESX 3.5i so I can play about with new Microsoft Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 Beta.

One of the main issues with building a whitebox is ensuring compatibility with the VMWare HCL,  so where on earth do you start looking so you can ensure your whitebox works.  Well I’ve put togethere some links together to get you started,  I hope they’re of some help.

VMWare Hardware Compatibility List

The new fully searchable HCL just has to be on the list,  double check your planned components,  you may be suprised to find they are actually supported on the HCL.

VM-Help.com – The unnofficial VMWare ESX whitebox HCL

This site is stacked full of useful information on tried and tested hardware combinations

The Ultimate Whitebox web site

Though this is a relatively new site it has some really well laid out information on hardware combos

Tim Jacobs post on his Whitebox

This post is just under a year old but still contains some good information.

Now HP were doing some crazy deals on their HP ML tower server range last year.  I was having a look at servers direct in the UK today and the prices are pretty good,  I’m tempted to buy one of these  rather than build a solution from scratch.

So how have people got on with ESX on the HP ML Series server? Well here are a few more links that may help.

instaling ESX 3.5 on the HP ML110 G5

Kiwi Si who runs the TechHead has a great lab article about installing ESX 3.5 on the ML110 G5

ESX 3.5 operating on a ML115 G5

Virtual VCP has put this article together detailing the changes required to get ESX 3.5 working on the new ML115 G5 servers.

Thing to remember with all whiteboxes are they are not supported by VMWare and you will be relying on the VMWare community to help you out with any problems.  My advice is,  if someone has listed the exact components that worked for them,  copy it as it will most likely work for you.

“

 

I think that a White box is the way to go for testing, and I think it is great that people are blogging about their experiences and or where to start the process when building these.

Thanks to VirtualPro

Full Source Link http://www.virtualpro.co.uk/2009/01/17/where-to-start-with-your-vmware-esx-whitebox/

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Are you a EMC ControlCenter and VMware customer? Good hotfix to know about..

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Virtual Geek has a write up on EMC ControlCenter and Vmware, and a hotfix. I wanted to post this as it is one of those things that is good to know.

“

Was working a customer case where they were having issues with VMotion and Control Center. Control Center is one of the only Storage Resource Management tools with tons of VMware integration – and has had it for more than a year.

Ok, Control Center has active discovery (i.e. agent) and passive discovery mechanisms (i.e. leverage an API). Most VMware-integrated features use the passive mechanism – basically ControlCenter has a VM-proxy (i.e. a host which can be a VM that has software that queries the ESX CIM API and the VC APIs). Some customers want more. For example, they want file-level reporting for chargeback and analysis WITHIN the VM. Or, they want drill-downs into databases in VMs. These require agents to run inside the VM if you want that (again, ESX-layer chargeback, utilization reports, thin provisioning use, performance and VMDK->Datastore->LUN/filesystem->backend details – those have no agent requirement).

So, the problem only arises when ControlCenter components running on a guest systems (ergo agents to provide file-level reporting or application integration) are Vmotioned and ControlCenter has discovered the ESX server hosting the VMs that those ControlCenter components are running on.

The root cause is that the ControlCenter store component incorrectly interprets a Vmotion activity as a deletion of a VM (i.e. at the ESX CIM level, the VM just disappeared, and requires correlation at the VC layer). That deletion is not allowed by other rules within the ControlCenter repository and the discovery of the ESX server fails resulting in stale data in ControlCenter and sometimes corruption to ControlCenter component configuration data.

We just released a hotfix for this problem for EMC Control Center 6.1 (HF4486) and will be releasing one for 6.0 shortly (HF4485).

This primus case contains more information regarding the problem. emc203588

http://knowledgebase.emc.com/emcice/documentDisplay.do;jsessionid=0735EE24ACC9E5D50A82A6A5D8CF9820?docType=1006&clusterName=DefaultCluster&resultType=5002&groupId=1&page=&docProp=$solution_id&docPropValue=emc203588&passedTitle=null

Based on our testing, once the correct hotfix is applied, Vmotion of VMs with ControlCenter components installed will work fine and there will be no support limitations.

Thanks ControlCenter team!!

“

Thanks for the write up, gives people a chance to know about it.

Full Source Post

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/are-you-a-emc-controlcenter-and-vmware-customer-good-hotfix-to-know-about.html

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Setting clients to Reboot at 12:15 A.M

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

 

Some of our client devices have a need to do a daily reboot, and I didn’t feel like manly setting up a scheduled task on each device. I needed something I could run via login script or USB stick, that only takes a couple of seconds of time per device.

Therefore, with some help from the Internet I developed the following.

 

schtasks.exe /create /RU SYSTEM /SC DAILY /TN Reboot /st 00:15:00 /TR "shutdown -r -f -t 60"

Copy the above line and paste it into notepad, or your text editor of choice, and save it as a .bat file.

This will set the device you run this on, to make a new scheduled task, which is daily reboot at 12:15 , which is run as system, with a 60 sec count down.  Admin rights are required to create this task.

Run it once per PC you want to reboot .

 

 

I hope someone can find this useful.

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