There are a lot of choices to be made for networking in VMware vSphere 5. We’ve got the good ol’ vSwith, vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) and finally the Nexus 1000V from Cisco. But what is the best one?

vSwitch (vSphere standard switch)

A vSphere standard switch is a virtual switch that can be created on a single host. Port groups defined on this vSwitch will be local to the host on which the port group is created. In other words: If you have multiple hosts you have make sure that the port groups are identical across all hosts, especially when you want to use vmotion. For VMotion the port group names on the source and target host have to be the same.

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As one of the largest Cisco Partners in the Netherlands we do a lot of Cisco UCS implementations and as the first company in the Netherlands with the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, where the place in the Netherlands for Cisco UCS troubleshooting. Last week a colleague was called to a troubleshoot a customer problem.

The customer was unable to create a 14th Virtual Network Interfaces on their Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card and 13 interfaces is far from the maximum of 128 or 256 possible virtual interfaces per Cisco UCS VIC. Fortunately the solution appeared to be simple.

In a Cisco UCS environment all centralized intelligent occurs in the Fabric Interconnect. When using Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) you can create Virtual Network Interfaces (VIFs) which can be presented to individual virtual machines. All of these virtual interfaces that are created show up in the Fabric Interconnects. They are called VIFs (Virtual Interfaces) and use VN-Tags.

The number of VIFs per blade is limited by the most restrictive item in the following list:

• the network connectivity from chassis I/O Module (IOM) to Fabric Interconnect;
• the Adapter VN-Tag namespace;
• the OS/BIOS version.

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During the last month I have been very busy building a new infrastructure at a client site. I’m responsible for the overall technical solution and the basis, a VMware vSphere infrastructure build on five Dell PowerEdge R805′s, Dell EqualLogic PS5000 and 6000 storage and Cisco switches for LAN, DMZ and IP storage networking.

Just before the customer initiated their functional test period we discovered that the overall Windows network  performance was slow. We did several test like copying an 8 GB file from local vmdk to local vmdk and VM to VM and found that the storage performance was no issue but the network performance was very slow.

In the last few years that I have been working with virtualization I have always been a fan of a static network configuration. Meaning, when I configure ESX networking I like my network interfaces and physical switch ports to be configured at 1000MB full duplex if the switch/network interface combination allows it. The idea is that if you purchase gigabit network interfaces and switches you know the maximum speeds. So you configure it to run at it’s maximum capacity, eliminating overhead and using as much bandwidth as possible purely for data transfer.

So when we experienced slow network performance I had a colleague check the Cisco LAN switches for errors, drops, packet loss or any other flaw which might indicate a speed or duplex mismatch. None were found so I assumed that the network configuration was not the issue. But as we know by now, ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups!‘.

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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

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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.

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When I am troubleshooting I like to have a list of items I can check for either in my head or on paper. Amongst the knowledge base articles of VMware, I found an article about troubleshooting VMs that are having network connection issues.

The article is provides items you can check for when a VM is having connection issues. And with each item they are giving a link to other helpful articles.

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The last few months I have been busy designing, building and testing a new VMware View solution for our own Support Center. In this Support Center we do support and system administration for some of our biggest clients. One of the challenges is the use of desktop hardware and the limited space of a call agent’s or administrator’s desk. Many of my colleagues support  multiple client sites and need different PCs for each client. So in 2008 one of my respected colleagues thought of a great solution and advised to implement a VMware VDI solution.

The idea was to create a pool of virtual desktops for each client site and supply the call agents and system administrators with a standard physical desktop with which they can access one or more virtual desktops and do the standard office work (Word, Outlook, etc) at the same time. Saving space needed for all those desktops and minimizing heat, power, etc and improving the working conditions in the process.

We bought four DELL PowerEdge 2950 II’s with two quad core CPUs and 64GB of memory each and a DELL EqualLogic 5000E iSCSI SAN to build this all virtual VDI solution.

One of the biggest challenges was to separate all client networks, so we assigned VLANs to all of them. But this raised a new challenge as I discovered during the implementation. Because we assigned all client their own VLAN and there was no routing between them, how can we connect to the virtual desktops.

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Most of the time when I’m frustrated it helps to play some squash, ride my bike or vent my frustration on this blog. As all walls in the area have been smashed to bits due to frustrations in the past and it is too cold to ride my bike, I will try the last one.

Yesterday I attended a seminar from work together with Edwin, Anne Jan and Alex. The subject was virtualization with Citrix and we were invited to keep a good balance between Citrix and VMware but we could not give a presentation due to time constraints. The people who organized this event know us pretty well and know (and share) our love for VMware so we were asked not to mess up the presentation and bash the Citrix guy. And so we did………

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We just enjoyed the General Session for Partner day 2009 and the message is ‘the virtualization business is still growing’, ‘2009 is all about client virtualization’ and ‘get up, register opportunities, close deal, dig deap’.

The keynote was presented to us by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware. He stated that we can achieve change by two means, evolution and revolution and that evolution is the best as it tends to stay longer. VMware is the platform to achieve this evolution. He revealed a few public secrets, VMware vSphere, vShield zones and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. VMware vSphere is the new name for ESX but we knew, and blogged on that, already. VMware vShield zones a security initiative based on VMware Safe.  VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is VMware’s new feature to create a high available vCenter Server, mostly for implementations where vCenter is still on a physical server.

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The solution to that problem isn’t hard, just built virtualized workspaces. Last few weeks I have had several dreams how such a place could look like. Imagine a small 1 person office completely surrounded in glass with lots of plants in it like a green house. You would feel lonely in such a place ? Just project your team members in the glass surrounding you, so you can build your surrounding like you have arranged and rearranged your desk for the last couple of years. Just want video without audio no problem mute your colleagues when you have to make a phone call, so you don’t bother them and they don’t bother you at that moment.

This way you can work, with several colleagues, in mixed composition, in a small office, interacting with each other when needed. We don’t want our coffee to be virtual or do we? One machine that can give out any juice you need at that time? Sounds lovely to me.

Most of the techniques needed to build a virtual office is already at hand, so why don’t combine them?

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I must  be a workaholic. I was browsing my laptop for some movie and I came across a folder with all kinds of plugins for VirtualCenter. Things like addPortgroup and other stuff.

Although it’s very handy to use those plugins I like to be able to these kind of things from the commandline, so I started some PowerShell script (here is where the workaholic starts) to create portgroups on all your VMware hosts that are known by VirtualCenter.

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Last few weeks I have been very busy solving HA issues at a client site. As you may have read I solved the problems by swapping out the USB sticks and troubleshooting BIOS settings. Now my collegues asked me if I could write down all checks I performed (together with VMware support) to target these HA issues.

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Last night I was reading some virtualization blogs (vblogs ) and an article on boche.net caught my eye.
This article stated that a VMware employee, Richard Garsthagen,  revealed that after a very long period of waiting VMware decided that it’s going to support Distributed Power Management (DPM) in the next release.

[Crowd is going wild]

It’s not clear what this means exactly. The next release? Is this Update 4 or VI4?

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Looking for information about iSCSI, Cisco and VMware I stumbled onto a document which I want to share with all of you. Want to know about vswitches, portgroups, security, ether channels, scalability, security, performance, VLAN tagging, N-port ID virtualization, iSCSI implementations?

In ‘VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment‘ all ins and out of VMware networking are described. 90 pages of pure networking wisdom.

Another valueable document I found is the VMware iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide. When you are designing and /or implementing an iSCSI solution this is a document you should read.