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…)

A couple of weeks ago I had a problem where the connection between a snapshot and its parent disk was gone. The parent was a raw device mapping pointing to a LUN on a SAN. This all happened during a migration from one type of SAN to another. For the migration we had to remove the Raw Device Mappings from a virtual machine in order to move it with Storage VMotion. After the move the original RDM had to be re-added to the virtual machine. The final step was to copy the original data from the RDM to a new disk.

One of the steps in our migration plan was to make sure that there weren’t any snapshots on the virtual machine. This procedure was used during the whole migration. One of my colleagues and I were planned for the last batch of servers.

Everything went OK during the migration of this server. All steps were executed without errors. The server started like it always starts. Even the first check by the administrators looked good.

(more…)

Dell EqualLogic has a integration kit for integrating their storage solution with VMware and various Mirosoft products. In this Host Integration Kit you find AutoSnapshotManager/VMware Edition and the AutoSnapshotManager/Microsoft Edition.

While I was searching for information about when to use which edition of AutoSnapshotManager for EqualLogic I came across the website of Marc Malotke which I think is worth sharing.  If I did my googling right Marc Malotke works for Dell as a Enterprise Solution Specialist.

He had some very interesting posts and news items at his blog:

• EqualLogic: SCOM Management Pack Release
• Equallogic:  ASM editions
• Equallogic: Planning your IP addresses

Blog: http://www.marcmalotke.net

twitter: @MarcDELL

When it comes to storage, the EqualLogic PS-series amazes me every time.

Last Tuesday I was at a client site investigating performance issues but when I opened SANHQ and the web interface on the PS 6000E one thing stood out. The performance issues were not caused by the storage device. The PS 6000E is hosting 12 virtualized Citrix XenApp servers en 8 supporting VMs and during heavy load the average latency is 1,2ms with a read/write ratio of 28%/72% and a max of 1100 IOPS.

But yesterday we had to swap SANs, a PS 5000XV for a PS 6000E and the ease with which this can be done amazes me every time. The hardest part was the process of endless firmware updates on the PS 5000XV to get it to a respectable level to get it to join the PS 6000 in the same storage group.

We had to upgrade from firmware version 3.3.0 to 4.3.4 but this is no simple task because you cannot directly apply 4.3.4. First we had to upgrade to 4.0.7, then to 4.1.7, to 4.3.4. Every time uploading the firmware using FTP, updating both controllers, restarting. This took us almost 2 hours to complete.

When this was done, all that was left was to join the PS 6000 in the existing storage group and evict the PS 5000 and this is the process that amazes me every time.

(more…)

After ESX 3.5 update 3 there was the risk for I/O failure to your SAN.  It presents itself like:

• VMware ESX or ESXi host might get disconnected from VirtualCenter
• All paths to the LUNs are in standby state
• esxcfg-rescan might take a long time to complete or never completes
• Error messages in vmkernel log

Last Friday VMware published a patch for this problem.

(more…)

One of the feeds in my RSS reader is the VMware feed. One of the posts that caught my attention was the ‘High Throughput iSCSI with VMware’

(more…)

Dell is working very actively to train their partners in Dell EqualLogic SANs. The training consists of a large portion of the operator training, a bit of (pre-)sales training and also a large portion was what you could call a Q&A session.

I spent the last two days in Eindhoven at Core Education together with Froos to be one of the first in our company to follow this training.

(more…)