FREE EMC Vplex Training
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https://education.emc.com/cust/training/featured_courses/?WT.mc_id=eml_custednl_vplex_09272010
From their Website…
Take advantage of these limited time zero-cost promotional offers. Whether you are new to us, or have already taken advantage of our broad course offering set, these promotional offers will allow you to come up to speed on specific topics without any investment!
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EMC / NetApp Deployment Documents..
Here are some quick links to some great documents recently released…
NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices v2.1 08/2010 – This is a great read!
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf
EMC with View using XP and Windows 7 – These are some of the best View documents I’ve seen!
http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8043-windows-virtual-desktop-view-wp.pdf
Vmworld 2010 – Opening was too cool
If you haven’t seen this yet it’s worth a look…
VMworld 2010 – TA8623 Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge EMC, NetApp, HP, and Dell
At VMworld I got a attend TA8623 Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge with Adam Carter of HP, Eric Schott of Dell, Vaughn Stewart of NetApp, and Chad Sakac of EMC.
It was really nice to see and hear these that these Super-Heavyweights could sit on the same stage, answer questions from the audience, and talk about what they do best – STORAGE.
At times there was a punch or two, but it was really minor. What I took away from this session was it didn’t matter who you go with but buy a product that works best in your environment.
KUDOS to these guys who put their differences behind them and really talked about technology and less about who they worked for!
Here’s the Video – (BTW – I ask the first question in this session, it was a lame question but the best one I could think of at the time, someone had to get things going..)
VMware View Technical Deep Dive with Trace3, NetApp, and VMware
You might want to check this conference out… I went to their road show last year and it was top notch!
This time they are focused on View 4.5, very cool!
http://www.goresponse.com/vmware/go/rshow/lp.cfm/x/0af2e42c17
Here are the dates and times…
Orange County, CA
Tuesday, September, 28
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
San Diego, CA
Wednesday, September, 29
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Los Angeles, CA
Thursday, September, 30
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Denver, CO
Tuesday, October, 5
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Scottsdale, AZ
Wednesday, October, 13
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
See you there!
Storage – LUN Naming Standard
I started working with my networking and storage teams to develop a LUN naming standard in hopes to better organize our LUN names.
We have a Fibre Channel SAN and needed a standard that is easy for us to follow and ID our LUNS quickly.
Some of the information in the standard might seem redundant (Like LUN ID) but we wanted to have a LUN name that was informational and would work for multiple teams.
Here are some Examples…
GP1_AC_MED_02_00ABC_NRPL
General Purpose LUN, Building AC, MED Resource Pool, Disk Tier 02, LUN ID 00ABC, Not Replicated
NOTES02_AB_MAX_1_00CDF_RPL
Notes Server 02, Building AB, MAX Resource Group, Disk Tier 02, LUNC IS 00CDF, Replicated
Here is the breakdown…
LUN ID Name (No more than 10 characters, Normal is 3) – Is the name of the LUN, or specific server, or purpose
Location (2 Characters) – The building where the LUN is normally located
LUN Priority (3 Characters) – Is the name of the resource pool the LUN is attached to, this helps with DR recovery
LUN ID (5 Characters) – This is the LUN ID assigned by the SAN at the time of creation, helps with combination with the SAN team
Replication (4 Characters) – Use NRPL for not replicated and RPL for replicated
vSphere 4 – Increase a VMs Hard disk under Windows 2008
Here’s how I recently changed the C: boot drive on a Windows 2008 VM
One of our older Windows 2008 templates has a 40GB C:\ hard disk, however I’d like it to be 50GB.
With the combination of vCenter Server 4, Windows 2008 and vSphere 4 this couldn’t be easier!
Prerequisites:
- Have admin access to vCenter Server and the Windows server
- A quick snapshot is always a good idea
Steps:
- While the server is still ON, yes I said “While the server is still on”, in vCenter Server right click on the VM
-
Choose Edit Settings, Choose the Hard disk you want to expand and type in the new size, Choose OK
- In Windows 2008 server open Server Manager, Click on Storage, Click on Disk Manager
- Note the extra space on your hard disk
- Right Click on the C: drive and choose Extend Volume
- Choose Next on the Welcome Screen
- Type in the amount you want to extend by or just click next the max
-
Click Finish to start the expansion, in about 2 seconds you’re done…
vSphere: NUMA 706: Can’t boot system as genuine NUMA
If you install vSphere on NON-NUMA hardware the following warning message will be displayed on the Service Console splash screen
cpu0:0)NUMA: 706: Can’t boot system as genuine NUMA. Booting with 1 fake node(s)
To resolve the warning message uncheck the option setting vmkernel.boot.usenumainfo
Windows 2003 – Page Faults (Soft and Hard)
Here is one way you can determine if your server is doing soft or hard Page faults.
Hard vs. Soft
Hard Page faults indicate the server is going to the Hard Disk to retrieve needed data and place it in RAM.
Soft Page faults indicate it is going to RAM or Cache to get the data it needs. This is a normal for most programs
Performance Monitor
Setup Windows performance monitor with the following…
SOFT Page Faults = Cache Faults/sec & Page Faults/sec
Hard Page Faults = Page Reads/sec & Avg. Disk Sec/Read
As you can see from this screen shot this server isn’t doing any hard page faults.
If you notice consistent hard page faults, this could be by design, or you need to add RAM to the server or allocate appropriate RAM to the application. Either way, I’d recommend consulting with the application owner or company who created the application for proper guidance.
Reference…
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2008/06/10/the-basics-of-page-faults.aspx
c7000 – Enclosure Interlink
Today I was able to interlink my 3 HP c7000 blade chassis. I used the document listed below as guidance and here are some of my brief note/findings around this.
- Interlinking the HP c7000 blade chassis (BC) is simple as connecting a CAT5e or better network cable to the UP and DOWN interlinks ports on the back of your C7000.
- Keep in mind the BC at the top of the link (or last BC pointing down) will become the master.
- Per the document link below, HP recommends you interlink BC’s per rack vs. across multiple racks and the max BC’s to be interlinked is 7.
- The linked enclosures will enforce a common rack name on all the linked enclosures; however, the enclosure name will remain unique.
- Interlinking the c7000 chassis allowed me to have a one-stop web page for the BC’s. However, the BC’s are still unique in their settings, user accounts, etc.
Note: If you’re using local accounts then the account names and passwords for each BC need to match for single login to work.
Reference Links…
Updated link on 09-20-2017 http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=1844065&docId=emr_na-c00698286&docLocale=en_US
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