Recently QNAP gave us the opportunity to review their QNAP TS-459Pro II NAS solution. We gladly accepted this opportunity and we got the NAS shipped to us a few weeks ago.

The TS-459Pro II is a NAS device that is aiming at the SMB market. QNAP also has bigger versions in the TS line that could be used in larger organizations. The TS-459Pro II is certified as VMware and Citrix Ready and is compatible with Windows 2008 Hyper-V and fail-over clustering.

(more…)

Ever since I’ve been working on a Apple Classic II, many many years ago, I was caught by the way of thinking at Cupertino. Design combined with functionality was actually possible! Well, back then we thought it was beautiful, anyway

Now, many years have gone by, a lot of people in the world seem to have recently discovered Apple. With the consumerization of the IT business, more and more Macs appear in the landscape. And why not? Sleek design combined with a stable OS where you don’t waste performance and money on staying free from virii and other malware (at least, for now), who doesn’t want that? So, it’s logical that wishes and demands for a virtual server or desktop in the Windows world, also be true for OS X. With vSphere 5, this might be possible!

(more…)

EMC has announced a new storage system called Isilon 108NL. The Isilon storage system consists of 36 disk 4U nodes which can be joined together to create a 144 node storage system with a capacity of 15 PB.

It’s a scale-out storage system where each node contains its own 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps interfaces so you can add capacity while maintaining throughput.

According to EMC, the Isilon 108NL can achieve a throughput of 85 GBps and a maximum of  1.4 M IOPS. The Isilon can be equipped with 1, 2 or 3 TB Hitachi SATA disks giving it 36, 72 or 108 TB per storage node. The Isilon is by powered by the OneFS operating system which supports NFS, SMB, iSCSI, http and FTP and delivers N+4 data protection on cluster, directory or file level.

14 years ago, on May 11, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue II chess-computer won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws against world champion Garry Kasparov.

In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer achieving 11.38 GFLOPS running 30 parallel RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips.

But how does that relate to computing power in 2011 and especially to virtual computing power running VMware vSphere 4.1?

(more…)

Last Friday I attended a VDI presentation from an Oracle (formally Sun) reseller on the brand new Oracle VDI solution. First of all, the audience was very different from the ‘usual virtualization’ crowd. A lot of former Sun enthusiasts, who have a very different view on solutions. This article is from my viewpoint. Not all participants of the meeting might agree with me.

The first statement from the Senior VDI manager: ‘ Oracle VDI is here to stay. It’s being heavily invested in. Larry Ellisson wants to be number 1 in the VDI market. Therefore, VDI has been positioned as a separate global business unit within Oracle.‘

(more…)

In May 2010 HP introduced the new HP Storageworks IO Accelerator modules for HP Blade and ProLiant servers.

So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is available for HP C-class Blades or a PCI-e I/O card for HP ProLiant servers.

It is available in three different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB. But the MOST interesting is that it can deliver 100,000 IOPS.

Because it was not certified by VMware this IO Accelerator could not be used in ESX implementations. Until now! And today HP released drivers for VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

(more…)

At the client site that I’m currently working they are using these USB anywhere hubs from Digi. These USB hubs give you the ability to use USB on virtual machines over a TCP/IP connection. Each USB hub can service one virtual machine and holds up to 4 USB ports.

The down side of these USB hubs is that they can take up quite some room in the datacenter. The currently used type  isn’t rack mountable and for each virtual machine you  need a new USB hub, even if you don’t use all 4 ports.

(more…)

Some weeks ago I posted an article about some bad network performance when moving VMs to a new ESX host.

Last week I got an e-mail which announced some updates and among it was the one promised to us by the engineer that helped us with our problem.

Description of the patch is exactly what we where experiencing with our VMs:

“When you access remotely using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from a client machine to a Microsoft Windows virtual machine with TCP segmentation offload (TSO) enabled and EnablePMTUDiscovery parameter set to 0, the network connection is slow and sometimes, the connection might not work. This issue is reported on Broadcom bnx2x NICs, such as BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E, etc.” http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026129

After installing the patch on one of the ESX hosts we tested with a test VM on a patched and an unpatched ESX host and there was a clear difference in performance. The logon on the VM was much faster on the ESX host with the patch.

For us the patch fixed the problem and we are now deploying it on all the ESX hosts.

We got a happy customer again.

At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a remote session took about 20 minutes.

As I mentioned this only occurred when we moved a VM to the new cluster, but also VM’s that where newly installed would get the same problem when running on the new cluster. As we are using Altiris to install and configure new VM’s a colleague decided to install a new VM by going through the steps manually which normally would be done by Altiris and found out that after the activation of a security template the performance dropped significantly.

(more…)

We recently received an update about the new stuff that is coming from Dell EqualLogic. Because a lot the information was under NDA so I can’t go into details or give you release dates.

What’s here already?

Last year Dell released the 10GB connections for the PS series. This 10GB connection speeds are mostly done because the marketing asked for it, because the customers asked for it. There are rarely used cases where the 10GB connections make sense but in 95% of all cases it doesn’t give you extra performance.

The bottleneck is often not the connection speed but the spindle speeds limits of the disk themselves. Because of the adaptive load balancing of the PS series the 1GB connections are used very efficiently. When used with the MPIO drivers from Dell EqualLogic you can gain a lot extra performance from the network connections.

So what is coming this year:

(more…)

Well, it’s done, as far as we’re concerned. The migration to new hardware is a fact. You might see a significant speedup in the site (we do). We’re very happy with the results, allthough we had some issues, but then again, which migration hasn’t?

We made some pics during the swap. The quality is pretty poor but you can’t expect much from a mobile phone. Here they come! (more…)

Good news! Our brand new server is finally ready for production! Next Friday we will replace the old workhorse with a brand new one, with many thanks to our friends @ Dell (a big hurray and thank you to you all over there!) Our new infra will, of course, be fully virtual. Since we have more processing power AND more RAM, our site should benefit a lot in terms of speed and stability.

We hope that service will hardly be interrupted but as with all migrations, you never really know until it’s over

Work starts Friday at 10:00AM CET and ends when it’s ready

Update 15:41 CET+1 (AJ): Basic functionality of the site is up again. We’re still doing some tweaking during the next couple of days. If you get an 404 error, just try again.

Last week I have been struggling with  the installation of a vSphere 4 infrastructure on Dell hardware at a Belgium client site.

I have done many many many VMware installations and encountered my fair share of issues but apart from the HP USB sticks the hardware never gave me this much trouble.

It all started with a very difficult BIOS/firmware upgrade which, after various downloads and trials, ended with an old-school DOS boot USB and a DOS based BIOS update. Real 1980′s stuff.

With this fixed I installed all ESX hosts and left for the hotel, ready to start the configuration the next day. However, when I started with the first ESX host and wanted to configure the network, I noticed that I only had eight NICs when I should have had twelve. We use Dell PowerEdge R805 servers with two Intel quad port 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, the first card was already in the server, the second card we added just before the installation.

(more…)

The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

(more…)

When designing a virtual infrastructure an important bit in the design is the storage infrastructure also called the Storage Area Network (SAN). In a SAN based on iSCSI we often use Cisco 3750 switches, but when you are going to select the right Cisco 3750 for the job the fun starts. You will be dazzled by the amount of different product numbers and will be busy deciphering the product code.

The product code for a Cisco 3750 switch is build up like this:

WS-C3750a-xxbc-dee

WS stands for Switch
C stands for Catalyst series
3750 stands for the 3750 product line

a >> blank, G, E
blank = classic 3750 switch, 6.5 or 13.1 mpps forwarding rate
G = all ports are gigabit, 35 or 38 mpps forwarding rate
E = enterprise line, 65.5 or 101.2 mpps forwarding rate

xx >> 12, 16, 24, 48
12 = 12 Ethernet ports
16 = 16 Ethernet ports
24 = 24 Ethernet ports
48 = 48 Ethernet ports

b >> T, P, F, D, W
T = Ethernet ports
P = Power over Ethernet

(more…)

Are you having trouble consolidating servers?

Having troubles achieving the consolidation ratios you wanted?

Maybe Intel has got the solution! Yesterday, Intel has presented a 48 core CPU!!

Let’s do the math, 4 virtual machines per core, 48 cores that’s 192 virtual machines per CPU. Take a dual socket server, add two of these CPUs and you have 384 virtual machines per host. That was the good news, the bad news is that this 48 core CPU is only available to research institutes.

The CPU which is developed and produced in Europe has 48 cores which are grouped in pairs of 24 all with their own L2 cache. The 45nm CPU contains 1.3 billion transistors on area of 567 square millimeter. Communications between the core pairs is handled by a message buffer and router and a 256GB/s mesh network. Six pairs share one memory controller and can maximally address 32GB of memory. Energy consumption is between 25 and 125W.

As mentioned before this 48 core CPU is only available to research institutes but some of the techniques used will eventually be used in CPU we use for our virtualization magic. Let’s wait and see.

On a regular basis we have info sessions with our most important vendors.  Last week we had a session with HP to tell us more about virtualization in their hardware products. The session was especially targeted at Flex-10. Flex-10 is the way how HP breaks s a 2 x 10Gb Ethernet pipe into a flexible, easy to change, smaller Ethernet ports.

Why is this so important for us virtual friends? Of course it is a huge cost saver not only in hardware but also in management of the environment but the most important thing is that it opens up a lot of new virtual design opportunities.

.

One of the coolest things is that we now can make a design for up to 4 blade chassis with each physical 16 server blades and let’s say 320 virtual servers where all the traffic between the servers never leaves the blade chassis. It is all handled with the blade chassis. Also all of the vSphere traffic like VMotion and service console can be handled within the chassis at 10Gb speeds.

(more…)

Today Emulex announced the general availability of their new OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) Product Family, specifically the OCe10102-I 10Gb/s Ethernet iSCSI Adapter and OCe10102-N 10Gb/s Ethernet Adapter are very interesting.

The Emulex OneConnect UCNA is a single-chip, high performance 10Gb/s Ethernet adapter that provides connectivity for network and storage traffic over one multi-function server adapter. Unlike first generation CNAs that only provide FCoE convergence, the Emulex OneConnect UCNA technology provides optimized performance for TCP/IP, FCoE and iSCSI protocols.

The OneConnect UCNA comes in three different versions (N, I and F):

• OCe10102-N: 10Gb Ethernet Adapter;
• OCe10102-I: 10Gb iSCSI Adapter;
• OCe10102-F: 10Gb FCoE  Adapter.

(more…)

Now that the new version of VMware View is coming shortly I was investigating the new possibilities with our thin client providers. Wyse Technology which has a nice solution already for the View 3.1 platform now has a new Zero Client which is specially made for View 4.0.

What makes this Zero Client so special? This model support PCoIP. PCoIP is the answer from VMware to make a great user experience possible with VMware View. VMware partnered with Teradici to introduce the PCoIP technology into View.  The P20 not only uses the software implementation but the P20 also contains the hardware chip that Teradici uses in the PCI Card solution. Tested by Brain Madden a couple of month ago.  Also see this article at BrianMadden . Imagine the possibilities this solution can offer in your VDI environment.

When the Wyse P20 comes to EMEA is not yet clear, but I hope to find out more next month. We at VMGuru.nl will also try to get our hands on a P20 model so we can blog our experiences.

More info on:  http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/zeroclients/P20/index.asp

It is becoming a sequel, the datacenter VMware has build for this weeks VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

In addition to our two previous articles (art1, art2), today we found two very nice videos loaded with tons of techno porno!

The first video shows the VMware team building the complete datacenter on-site at the Moscone Center. During the video footage the awesome numbers representing this huge infrastructure run by.

In short? 28 racks containing 776 ESX servers which provide the infrastructure with 37TB of memory, 6.208 CPU cores and 348TB storage which uses 528KW electricity and is servicing 37.248 virtual machines. You will probably never find such an infrastructure anywhere in the world, at least I know I won’t.

(more…)