I found my self talking with Xangati today, and I was told I can release this information. I am looking forward to seeing this product in action at a later date.

“Xangati, the emerging leader in infrastructure performance management, today introduced a new and completely free Xangati for ESX management tool, giving virtualization administrators unprecedented situational awareness into the dynamic environment they are responsible for managing – at absolutely no cost. In addition, Xangati concurrently announced sweeping product enhancements across the Xangati Management Dashboard line, while achieving 10 industry firsts in the process (see related release).

The two announcements further solidify Xangati’s position as an innovator to watch in the IPM market, providing administrators with the most comprehensive solution available today for managing their entire virtualized infrastructures, as well as a 100% free mechanism for trial. To get started and see for yourself, download Xangati for ESX free-of-charge

Xangati for ESX: Features and Functionality

Xangati for ESX is the most fully-featured free VMware tool available today, giving virtualization administrators the ability to actually solve problems in real-time for both server virtualization and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. Providing ESX host level visibility, Xangati for ESX offers an unparalleled user interface (UI) presentation with live, continuous “scroll bar” views, DVR recordings and reports – surpassing all other free solutions in terms of its sheer usability. Xangati for ESX expands the number of data sources typically covered and includes breakthrough functionality not found in other free offerings. Features include:

multiple data sources, including: traffic traversing vSwitches and VMware API;

optimized for visibility and troubleshooting;

superior UI with live navigational drill-down and streaming views with full details for VMs and the ESX;

DVR recordings triggered by VMware alerts; and,

20+ top 10 real-time views.

With a rich feature set available right after install, Xangati leads the market in terms of the turnkey nature of the download and the immediacy of the value it provides. Xangati for ESX installs as an .OVF virtual appliance in less than 10 minutes, giving administrators a much smoother installation process than many of the other free options on the market today, which require pre-existing operating systems be set-up for install. “

I will post a full link once they have the info on the website.

I am glad to see more companies offering a free product, and expanding existing product lines like this.

I am looking forward to many more product announcements for the up coming VMworld.

Thanks to Xangati for this information.

Roger L.

August 23, 2010 0 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Finally bought a Drobo for home

by Philip Sellers June 14, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

Last week, I found a deal I could not pass up. B&H Photo has a deal on a Drobo for $299 though 6/30/2010. If you’ve never heard of a Drobo, it is an external storage enclosure from Data Robotics that offers some enterprise-class, automated mirroring/striping for your data across multiple hard drives. Data Robotics calls it Beyond-RAID because unlike a RAID set where drives should be the same size, their technology allows mix and match drive sizes and handles striping and leveling the data across whatever mix of SATA drives you buy. If a drive fails, pull it and replace it and the device will rebuild.

I had been worried about losing my digital home movies. That data is really too large to really push out to a backup service like Mozy and when I load new movies, its usually to the tune of 20 or 30GB at a time, which would take weeks to push up. In addition to that data, I also have Movies and TV shows that we have purchased through iTunes.

June 14, 2010 3 comments

Datacenter Networking Storage Virtualization

Monitoring challenges moving critical systems in virtual infrastructure

by Philip Sellers June 3, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

Like many shops, we have finally attained buy-in from all our stakeholders for virtualization. As a result, we’ve pushed more and more into our infrastructure. And while VMware is the most datacenter ready solution for virtualization, it is not without its shortcomings — monitoring and visibility into the infrastructure being one of the biggest.

While we were first deploying VI3 and performing our consolidation, the primary focus was on the non-critical systems and moving them into the virtual infrastructure to get the best utilization of hardware. Since completion of this phase, the next focus became moving some of our mission critical systems to VMware in order to establish disaster recovery for our non-clustered systems. Disaster recovery through VMware is accomplished by 1) relocating the boot and data onto SAN storage which is replicated to our secondary data center and 2) by the ability to utilized VMware HA in the event of hardware failure to establish resiliency we do not have on a single-server, hardware deployment.

As we have expanded VMware’s role in our data center, new challenges have emerged. First, when a network issue is occurring, we don’t have our traditional monitoring tools (like PRTG) in a position where they are able to alert for large changes in traffic. In our physical environment, HP agents are run and PRTG is able to query against these systems with SNMP to retrieve information about traffic. In the virtual environment, we don’t run these agents (because they are largely non-applicable since these are virtual boxes). Our preferred way to monitor is through something that can look directly into the virtualization layer and retrieve information.

June 3, 2010 1 comment

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Path failures on ESX4 with HP storage

by Philip Sellers April 8, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

Since we began upgrading our clusters to ESX4, we have been having strange “failed physical path” messages in our vmkernel logs. I don’t normally post unless I know the solution to a problem, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Our deployment has been delayed and plauged by the storage issues that I mentioned in an earlier post. Even though we have fixed our major problems, the following type errors have persisted.

Our errors look like this:

vmkernel: 19:18:05:07.991 cpu6:4284)NMP: nmp_CompleteCommandForPath: Command 0x2a (0x410005101140) to NMP device “naa.6001438005de88b70000a00002250000” failed on physical path “vmhba0:C0:T0:L12” H:0x2 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

vmkernel: 19:18:05:07.991 cpu6:4284)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRequestFastDeviceProbe: NMP device “naa.6001438005de88b70000a00002250000” state in doubt; requested fast path state update…

After several cases with VMware and HP technical support, we are no closer to resolving the issues. VMware support, for its part, has done a good job of telling us what ESX is reacting to and seeing. HP support, on the other hand, has been circling around the problem but has made little progress in diagnosing the issue. We have had an ongoing case for several months and our primary EVA resource at HP has continually examined the EVAperf information and SSSU output that we have sent to HP for analysis. Those have turned up nothing, and yet the messages continue from VMware.

The errors in the log make sense to me – we are losing a path to a data disk (sometimes even a boot-from-SAN ESX OS disk!) – but why HP cannot see anything in our Brocade switches or within the EVA is beyond me. Our ESX hosts, whether blade or rack-mounted hardware, are seeing the problems across the board. The one cluster we waited to upgrade never saw the issues in ESX3.5, but sees them now in ESX4. And perhaps it is a VMware issue that is just too sensitive in monitoring its storage, but I suspect its something else. The messages don’t seem to affect operation on the hosts, but it certainly makes investigating problems difficult when trying to determine what is a real problem versus just another failed path message. Anyone else seeing this?

April 8, 2010 4 comments