vmexplorer

Test Lab – End of Day 1

Posted on January 7, 2011 Updated on January 20, 2011

Day one was pretty simple it mostly comprised of hardware installation.

Below are my notes from todays adventure!

Work completed…

• Network team mounted and configured the EX4200 switches with appropriate vlans (NFS, VM Service Console, vMotion, and others)
• Severs were mounted and remounted to make room (see Installation gotchas below)
• One Xsigo was mounted, and due to some missing brackets the other will have to be mounted tomorrow
• Ethernet CAT and Infiniband cables were all cabled and routed
• Physical Servers for VMware ESXi 4.1 were installed

Installation Gotchas…

Installing & Mounting the Xsigo VP780 proved harder then I expected, this in no way is a slam against Xsigo, and it is totally my fault for not fully reading the manual.

I suggest you run through the Quick Install Manual prior to installing the VP780. There are a LOT of brackets and about 5-8 bolt packages. All are necessary for their intended purpose.

My mistake was I just looked at the VP780 which is 4U in size and planned out 8U for both.

However the mounting / support bracket requires 1U of space… This brings the total to 5U per Xsigo or 10U for both.

This miscalculation caused a bit of a delay and I had to remount some servers to make up this space.

Lesson learned, read the manual before installing.

Xsigo Stuff..

From a DC cooling and cabling perspective the Xsigo is designed very well. In the front there are 4 massive primary fans and 4 smaller fans for the Power Supplies.

This design puts the intake in the front pulling cool air though the Xsigo and out the rear. All the cabling is done in the rear and cable management is a breeze as I can directly cable the rear of my servers to the rear of theXsigo.

Front View

Rear View

Physical Server Front..

Physical Server Rear (Look Mom No Cables!!) – It’s Pretty Sweet that 2 Cables can do so much

Still to do…

• Install Vmware on site 1 and 2 cluster with Xsigo Drivers
• Install 2^nd Xsigo into rack
• Copy vCenter Server & other VM’s from Production to this test environment
• Test, Test, Test and more testing..