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By admin, March 21, 2011 12:42 pm

After several months of testing with real world loading, I would say the most optimized way to utilize your SAN storage is to enable Thin Provisioning at BOTH the Storage and Host.

• By enabling Thin Provisioning on Equallogic, you will be able to create more volumes (or luns) for the connecting ESX hosts to use as VMFS or RDM space for the connecting VMs.
• By enabling Thin Provisioning on ESX host, actually this is on VMFS to be exact, you will significantly gain VMFS space utilization and put more VMs on it, I was able to get at least 40 to 100% space saving on some of VMFS. It’s definitely great for service providers who always want to put those under-utilized VMs and group them together using Thin Provisioning.

One thing you need to constantly check is space will not grow over to 100%, you can do this by  enable vCenter Alarm on space utilization and stay alerted, I’ve encountered one time that a VM suddenly went crazy and ate all the space it allocated, thus tops VMFS threshold as well as Equallogic threshold at the same time. 

This is the only down side you need to consider, but the trade off is minimum considering the benefit you get when using Thin Provisioning at BOTH Equallogic and ESX Level.

Of course, you should not put a VM that constantly need more space over the time into the same thin provisioned volume with others.

Finally, not to mention it’s been proved by VMware that the performance penalty for using Thin Provisioning is almost none (ie, identical to thick format) and it’s amazing using VMFS is even faster than RDM in many cases, but that’s really another topic “Should I or Should I NOT use RDM”.

* Note: One very interesting point I found that is when enabling Thin Provisioning on storage side, but use Thick format for VM, guess what? The storage utilization ONLY shows what’s actually used within that VM, ie, if the thick format VM is 20GB, but only 10GB is actually used, then on thin provisioned storage side, it will show ONLY 10GB is allocated, not 20GB.

This is simply fantastic and intelligent! However, this still doesn’t help to over allocate the VMFS space, so you will still need to enable Thin Provisioning in each individual VM.

Sometimes, you may want to convert the original Thick to Thin by using vMotion the Datastore, another great tool without any downtime, especially if your storage support VAAI, then this conversion process only takes a few minutes to complete.

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By admin, March 13, 2011 9:46 pm

After watching the demo of VMware vCenter Operations, I would say it’s just another monitoring and diagnostic tool besides the leading two: vfoglight from Vizioncore and Veeam Monitor from Veeam, nothing really special, but it does present the trouble ones in an intuitive way by using color icons.

Personally, I found Veeam Monitor Free Edition is already more than enough to identify the problem and find out where the latency is, the key is to look at the lowest or deepest layer, in other words, into VM itself, as the problematic VM is the most fundamental element causing the contention on Resorucs pool, ESX Host, vCenter, etc.

Then I ask myself why would VMware release such product while there are already two great products in the market? Well, I will leave this question to you in the comment.

Update Apr 5

I’ve tried the Free Xangati for ESX and don’t like it, it’s not as intuitive as Veeam Monitor.

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By admin, March 9, 2011 10:29 pm

Originally I thought we are going to have a small footprint and easy managed software finally arrived from Dell, but I was wrong totally.

After spending hours and hours of trying to install DMC 2.0 on Physical and VM, both failed multiple times, I finally gave up. It was a buggy software and not to mention the size of it (over 1GB) and the bunch of crap modules it’s trying to load to your server (there are more than 80 stages during the installation).

I would strongly recommend everyone with a common sense to avoid using this product even it’s free of charge. Simply because it’s way over complicated and the pre-requirement can make anyone big headache, took over 1 hour to install on latest hardware server and finally failed during installation!

I would rather use PRTG as the tool for my monitoring purpose and I was hoping DMC can do me only one thing (hardware failure alert), now I will skip it forever and never look back, I will depend on vCenter’s hardware monitoring and iDRAC’s alert to help me to achieve the same goal.

Bye Bye DMC 2.0, the crappiest software I’ve ever encountered since MS Commerce Server back then.

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By admin, March 5, 2011 5:15 pm

It’s a common question: “Are there any BIOS settings Dell recommends for VMware ESX/vSphere?” Primarily, Dell recommends reading and following VMware’s best practices. The latest revision (as of this posting) can be found in their article “Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere™ 4.1”. Here are a list of additional points of interest specifically regarding Dell PowerEdge servers:

• Hardware-Assisted Virtualization: As the VMware best practices state, this technology provides hardware-assisted CPU and MMU virtualization.
  In the Dell PowerEdge BIOS, this is known as “Virtualization Technology” under the “Processor Settings” screen. Depending upon server model, this may be Disabled by default. In order to utilize these technologies, Dell recommends setting this to Enabled.
• Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and Hyper-Threading Technology: These technologies, known as “Turbo Mode” and “Logical Processor” respectively in the Dell BIOS under the “Processor Settings” screen, are recommended by VMware to be Enabled for applicable processors; this is the Dell factory default setting.
• Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA): VMware states that in most cases, disabling “Node Interleaving” (which enables NUMA) provides the best performance, as the VMware kernel scheduler is NUMA-aware and optimizes memory accesses to the processor it belongs to. This is the Dell factory default.
• Power Management: VMware states “For the highest performance, potentially at the expense of higher power consumption, set any BIOS power-saving options to high-performance mode.” In the Dell BIOS, this is accomplished by setting “Power Management” to Maximum Performance.
• Integrated Devices: VMware states “Disable from within the BIOS any unneeded devices, such as serial and USB ports.” These devices can be turned off under the “Integrated Devices” screen within the Dell BIOS.
• C1E: VMware recommends disabling the C1E halt state for multi-threaded, I/O latency sensitive workloads. This option is Enabled by default, and may be set to Disabled under the “Processor Settings” screen of the Dell BIOS. (I will keep the default to Enabled as I want to save more power in my data center and be enviornmental friendly)
• Processor Prefetchers: Certain processor architectures may have additional options under the “Processor Settings” screen, such as Hardware Prefetcher, Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch, DCU Streamer Prefetcher, Data Reuse, DRAM Prefetcher, etc. The default settings for these options is Enabled, and in general, Dell does not recommend disabling them, as they typically improve performance. However, for very random, memory-intensive workloads, you can try disabling these settings to evaluate whether that may increase performance of your virtualized workloads.

Finally, in order to take the advantage of ESX 4.1 Power Management feature in vCenter to show up, you need to change the setting in BIOS Power Management to “OS Control”.

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By admin, March 2, 2011 12:36 pm

As usual, I would suggest to wait another 1-2 months before upgrading your EQL firmware since the latest firmware may always contain bugs.

Since none of the followings applies to my enviornment, so I will just skip this update completely.

Issues Corrected in this version (v5.0.4) are described below:

• Contention for internal resources could cause a controller failover to occur.

• In rare circumstances, after a communication problem between group members, a PS6000, PS6500, PS6010, or PS6510 member may become unresponsive or experience a controller failover.

• In some cases, a controller failover may occur during a drive firmware update that takes place while the array is in a period of low activity.

• Drives may be incorrectly marked as failed. (happened mostly in PS4000 series)

• An invalid authentication failure may occur when using a RADIUS

• A hardware failure on the primary controller during a firmware update may inhibit failover to the secondary controller. server for CHAP authentication.

• Out-of-order network packets received by the array may cause retransmits.

• The array may not be able to clone a snapshot if the following scenario occurs: the parent volume was replicated to another group, the remote copy was promoted, and the changes were subsequently copied back to the original group using the Fast Failback process.

• Cannot clone snapshots of volumes with replicas that were promoted and subsequently failed back.

• Replication sometimes cannot be completed due to a problem with communication between the replication partners.

• In some cases, replication of a large amount of data may cause a shortage of internal resources, causing the GUI to become unresponsive.

• A network error may cause a failback operation to be unable to complete successfully, with the system issuing a “Replication partner cannot be reached” error.

• Exhausting the delegated space during replication may require that the in-process replica be cancelled in order to permit the volume to continue replicating as expected.

• A group running V5.0 firmware might be unable to perform management functions due to a lack of resources if a group running V3.3 firmware is replicating data to it.

• A restart of an internal management process could result in drives temporarily going offline in PS6010 and PS6510 systems.

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By admin, February 26, 2011 9:35 pm

I’ve encountered a problem when installing Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 today and found the reason and solution pretty easy. It was due to Veeam B&R v5.0 automatically Disabled automount for SAN mode and W2K8 R2 SP1 requires automount to be enabled.

Solution:

1. Disconnect all active iSCSI connections and REMOVE the Target Portal from iSCSI favourite tab. 

2. From command prompt, issue the followings:
> diskpart
> automount enable

3. Reboot the server then go ahead and upgrade your W2K8 R2 with SP1, it will take about 50 minutes to complete, yes, it did take that long even on latest powerful server.

4. Then issue the following AFTER reboot:
> diskpart
> automount disable

5. Reboot the last time and then re-establish all previous iSCSI connections as usual.

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By admin, February 5, 2011 10:05 pm

I just came across this GREAT PowerPoint presentation today, I wish I had it 6 months ago, it really helps you to clear the sky and understand many things before making the design and purchase decision.

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By admin, February 4, 2011 4:10 pm

At first, I got very poor performance when I was trying to svMotion a 20GB VM within the same Equallogic SAN between different volumes, it took over 20 minutes to complete, I thought there must be something wrong as I’ve already enabled VAAI.

After searching the net and discovered the problem is due to Different Block Size between the two volumes (1MB vs 2MB) that will actually disabled VAAI feature.

So choosing the volumes with the same block size, I was able to reduce the time by almost 10 times!!!

See attached graph, 15:22 to 15:42 is the one without VAAI, 15:50 to 15:52 is the one with VAAI.

In additional, I have implemented Storage I/O Control today and found Storage vMotion with VAAI isn’t affected by SIOC as the whole svMotion is offloaded on to the EQL array, so SIOC won’t really kick in, you may say svMotion with VAAI is “Out of Control ”, this is another great thing about VAAI!

Finally, I do think SIOC is one of the best feature in ESX 4.1 for many cloud hosting providers as they can finally meet their storage SLA now besides the CPU and memory.

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By admin, February 3, 2011 12:29 pm

It’s nice to have this compliment plug-in for your Equallogic and VMware vCenter.

• EqualLogic Datastore Manager – Allows administrators to provision new Datastores, expand existing Datastores, and monitor storage usage in the VMware Datacenter.
• Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware® Edition 3.0 – Creates and restores Smartcopies of Hypervisor consistent Virtual Machines (VMs). Utilizes snapshots, clones, and replicas within PS Series group allowing for fast restoration or disaster recovery.
• EqualLogic Virtual Desktop Deployment Tool – VMware View aware desktop provisioning wizard which allows the deployment of manual virtual desktop pools using array based space efficient thin clones and also allows the refresh of these pools.

  
  Note: These tools can be launched from the Home screen of vCenter and also from the new context sensitive tabs and right-click menu options that are added with the plug-in.
  

Btw, I am also getting the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware very soon from my Dell account manager, can’t wait to try it!

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By admin, February 2, 2011 11:55 pm

Got this information from DellTechCenter:

Beginning in March 2011, Dell will launch the next generation of OptiPlex desktops. OptiPlex delivers business-class control with industry leading security, manageability and services. These systems are designed to integrate seamlessly into any office environment and provide business-class control with industry leading security, manageability and services. They will have a common ID design across our entry, mainstream and performance business segments for consistent look with the 2nd generation of Intel’s Core processors.

The new OptiPlex 990 w/Intel Q67 iCore CPU aims at delivering best-in-class productivity and business-class control. The new mainstream OptiPlex 790 w/Intel Q65 iCore CPU delivers strong Office productivity with flexible remote control. OptiPlex 390—Affordable, latest technology iCore OptiPlex packaged in our newest chassis design.

•Available in DT, MT and SFF form factors
•200W up to 265W Power Supply options
•i3-2100 up to i7-2600 CPU options
•USB3.0 ports