|
Anyone have any hard numbers on performance gains/losses using jumbo frames on iSCSI VMware storage and vMotion over GbE? I found some good numbers (like single percent increase in performance), but they were invalidated by the guy having a dodgy switch. The documentation for my HP P4000 says "likely not needed" but I'm curious about how slight the gains are.
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2012 01:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:38 |
|
|
I went to one a few months back when they held the first one in Stockholm. It boiled down to boring IT people caring a lot about very boring stuff (from my perspective as a dev/sysadmin working with web apps on linux). It's one of those events where the event itself was boring as gently caress but the network was really really interesting and useful. Then again, they've promised more specific meets geared towards different areas of virtualization so it might be useful. In this case, the event itself was free, dunno if all are. Walked out of there with a cool vMug, some good contacts, eval license for VEAAM. Also a free lunch and free beer 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2012 23:40
|
|
|
Whoever came up with the VMWare SDK needs to seriously reconsider their life choices. Such a huge pile of enterprise garbage. I'm really glad that someone at VMWare came to their senses and wrote a ruby wrapper around it (rbvmomi) to reduce most of the suck that is trying to automate deploying VMs.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2012 15:50
|
|
|
Yes, people that automate everything with unix tools (like Chef and Ruby in my case). The only windows machine I'm running is the vCenter server. Also someone wrote a pretty sweet plugin to Chef's knife client for automating vSphere (knife-vsphere) which I'm using as a starting point for my scripts.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2012 16:48
|
|
|
How much are the disks used on an ESXi host if all my datastore is over iSCSI? Should I be overly concerned with disk performance?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2012 12:29
|
|
|
Really? It doesn't swap to local disk at all?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2012 12:49
|
|
|
Is there seriously no way to set the iLO password of an ESXi 4.1 host on HP hardware via software? In Linux there's hponcfg that can do this, and a .vib is provided by HP for hponcfg for ESXi 5.0, but I can't find one for 4.1. Don't really want to upgrade to ESXi 5 either.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 17:01
|
|
|
DL-series 
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 17:13
|
|
|
Well yeah but I'm getting tired of all these trips to the colo facility on the other side of town, and one host is running vms that aren't on shared storage for performance reasons (but downtime for these is begrudgingly tolerated). Guess which host has an iLO password tat nobody remembers? 
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 17:52
|
|
|
Erwin posted:Are you licensed for storage vMotion? Also, what in the world shared storage do you have that under-performs local storage? Shared storage is iSCSI over 2x1 Gbe, local storage is SAS. The VMs that are on local storage are for our testing environment, we moved them there since their disk traffic was interfering with production disk bandwidth for the websites I run. I'm licensed for Storage vMotion, but to be honest moving 300+ GB to the SAN and then back takes longer than just rebooting and fixing the problems with the apps not restarting correctly.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 18:58
|
|
|
evil_bunnY posted:And yeah svMotion would have trivialized the whole thing. Doing that many hosts in one go (select all -> migrate storage) doesn't work that well, it needs to be micromanaged (at least on that combination of controller and SAN). Of course it's scriptable, but so is fixing the reboot problems so I just reboot instead.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 20:35
|
|
|
Why shouldn't I migrate from vSwitches to dvSwitch? What shouldn't be moved to vSwitch Currently I have 3 vSwitches per ESXi: one for management traffic and vMotion, one for VM "production" traffic and one for iSCSI (VMs don't see iSCSI, they only see datastores). Each vSwitch is teamed to 2 NICs. I've got 4 ESXis currently in the same cluster, all with Enterprise+ licenses connected to vCenter.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2012 09:23
|
|
|
Is there a way to extract performance metrics from vCenter to another graphing tool? I'd like to take the graphs I can see in vSphere Client under the "Performance" tab and get them into something like Graphite or Munin. I looked a bit at SNMP, but vCenter only has traps, no performance counters at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2012 17:23
|
|
|
Erwin posted:You can export to Excel, and from there go pretty much anywhere (you might be able to do CSV directly). Of course, it's a manual process. Also, you could probably query SQL directly. I was thinking more along the line of real-time information, so that's not really useful. Any ideas on where I could find the counters in SQL? Splunk seems to have a statistics forwarder for vCenter, so it's definitely doable somehow.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2012 17:45
|
|
|
Mausi posted:I know I'm a little late here, but PowerCLI has the get-stat command, if you do a little googling there's some great posts by LucD on using it. I later found a post on how to get stats from PowerCLI into Graphite, which is exactly what I was looking for. I would have preferred VMware exposing that over SNMP or the Ruby interface having support for get-stat, instead of having to use yet another system to get stats in, but this works.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2012 00:05
|
|
|
Mausi posted:I'm glad you found a way to get it working, but that dude's script is massively inefficient. He shouldn't be running a get-stat for each host individually unless that's the only way to get realtime stats; much faster to run it for all hosts by feeding get-stat a list of entities, then running a group-object by entityId afterwards to process on. Looks like I can feed a collection, but as for extraction from the collection, no idea. I'm a total powershell newbie and I can't even program in it effeciently since for some reason typing $ and | through the RDP session from my mac gets mangled. I found LucDs posts though and probably should get a windows VM installed so I can play with this stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2012 00:12
|
|
|
evil_bunnY posted:Put the vSphere client on your bootcamp partition and put the vm on its own desktop, and pronto! I actually caved and did this. I feel sooo dirty. (Fusion has seamless windowing as well, which is still pretty cool even though it's been around for a long time)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2012 00:21
|
|
|
What magic rubber chicken do I need to wave to get vCenter to realize that yes, I do have redundant paths to my storage? I have 2 LeftHand boxes, each with 2 NICs connected to 2 different switches. Each ESXi has 2 interfaces in the iSCSI vSwitch, each going to a different switch. The iSCSI vSwitch was created according to HPs best practices doc: 2 vmknics, with one IF as active and the other as unused (shifted so vmk1 has nic2 active, nic3 unused & vmk2 has nic3 active, nic2 unused). Yet when I view the storage views tab, it says "Partial/No Redundancy". 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2012 10:29
|
|
|
It's 4.1. Dunno if this should be in the storage thread, but when I inspect the datastore paths, I have 2 IQNs to the same IP address, which feels wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2012 13:58
|
|
|
edit: nevermind, i'm retarded, vmware-tools wasn't correctly installed. luminalflux fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Jul 20, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2012 10:05
|
|
|
Moey posted:I can finally upgrade to 5! Same here. Also I now have a case for adding more memory cluster-wide. We had Enterprise Plus already, so the 96GB limit was a kick in the balls if I ever wanted to upgrade past the cheap 72GB on a DL360 (or slightly more expensive 96GB). vvvv If it was me I'd be kicking my sales rep instead vvvv luminalflux fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Aug 23, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2012 23:09
|
|
|
No more vRAM licensing, no move to per-core licensing
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2012 18:07
|
|
|
Honestly this means I can actually migrate to 5.1, or at least think about it. The vDS changes look sweet as well (LACP, mirroring), but I'm kinda waiting for the Nicira tech to be integrated.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2012 18:42
|
|
|
DevNull posted:Have you not used the console because it sucked, or because there was never a need to? Both: I'm on a mac so I need to RDP in to a windows machine to use the vCenter client, and once the machine is cloned we do everything over SSH. The key repeat sucks so bad over RDP and the client so even logging in is hard.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2012 22:22
|
|
|
I just love it when ESXi becomes catatonic, but still appears up to HA. I can ping the host, but can't do poo poo: VMs aren't responding and management requests from vCenter does nothing. Is there a way to tell vCenter to drop a host that is misbehaving like this, without having to do a 2am cab ride to reboot it?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 11:13
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:I'd check out your logs and see if you can figure out what's going on. If the host is talking to the HA master and it's writing to heartbeat datastores (if you're on 5) HA's not going to know any better. I don't think even VM HA is going to do anything if the VMs wouldn't respond to a restart request anyways. Nope, it's 4.1. As soon as I rebooted via iLO the VMs started up on other hosts. I don't have logs on the ESXi since I neglected to configure a persistent scratch storage and/or set up a syslog target. Spent part of my sunday doing exactly that. Is it worth even talking to support if I don't have logs from the hypervisor, or should I just upgrade to U3 that just came out and see if it happens again? This is the second time in a couple weeks this has happened (huge load spike, this specific machine goes catatonic and needs some iLO love).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 19:29
|
|
|
Misogynist posted:I'm noticing you're not following through with "set up a syslog server" as part of the action plan you're describing. Sorry if I was unclear - I set up both persistent scratch storage AND a syslog server, so I have logs in both places (verified that they're being written in both places as well). And I more or less only deal with Unix servers.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 19:53
|
|
|
quote:1) Were the VMs online and responsive (yet stuck on that box - try ping, ssh, rdp, vnc, etc - reach out to known services in the VMs)? As for console access, I don't have the relevant licenses for text-console (only serial port access).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 20:05
|
|
|
Storage is on iSCSI, and the other 3 ESXis could reach the datastores. Everything's on GbE with NIC teaming into 2 switches. So it could very well be the NIC - both iSCSI links are on the on-board NIC, whereas the management and production networks are split over the on-board Broadcom and an Intel in the PCI slot.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2012 09:41
|
|
|
Kachunkachunk posted:Alrighty, so perhaps a remote syslog server would successfully receive logs during a recurrence. Are you able to set up iSCSI so it uses different physical adapters? Yep, that's the plan. Someone else set up these NICs up, I have no idea why iSCSI isn't split over the different NICs like the other nets (each ESXi has an on-board 4-port Broadcom and a 4-port intel in the PCI slot)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2012 21:36
|
|
|
I just wish I could ditch vCenter's SQL Server for Postgres, since that's the only database I know how to run.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2012 15:16
|
|
|
At what point do I actually need to upgrade from SQL Server Express to SQL Server for vCenter? Currently we're running Express 2005 for 4 hosts and 150 VMs with about 2GB data. I'm looking at upgrading to 5.0, but i need to upgrade to 2008 first and the document says I shouldn't use Express after I exceed either 5 hosts, 4GB or 50 VMs 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2012 12:25
|
|
|
So no performance issues or anything like that? Do I need to upgrade to 2008 first, or will the installer take care of that upgrade as well?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2012 13:17
|
|
|
Corvettefisher posted:If you can't afford SQL then you might want to get 2008 r2, which has a DB max size of 10GB instead of 4 like 2005 has I need to get 2008 anyway as 2005 isn't supported for vCenter 5. 10GB should probably be fine. (It's not really an afford question, I just want to hold out as long as possible before shelling out more bucks to MS and hoping they'll make Postgresql a compatible database soon)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2012 14:17
|
|
|
From what I can tell, VUM is supported, it just needs to be run in a windows guest instead. So if the DB size becomes a problem I'll guess I'll just deploy the appliance and deal with that hassle instead of shelling out.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2012 14:32
|
|
|
three posted:It makes me super sad VUM requires Windows, but I guess VCSA isn't ready for primetime anyway. I've already paid for a Server 2008 license so I can manage that, but yeah it sucks big time. Almost makes me want to experiment a bit just to see if I can get this up and running in a lab environment.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2012 14:40
|
|
|
Corvettefisher posted:http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/FatTwin.cfm We used to like 5 years ago, and ran the gently caress away after waaaay too many random issues.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2012 14:32
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:How long should I spend troubleshooting terrible datastore latency when using Dell's R610 integrated broadcom NICs before I just replace them? Do these things work OK for anyone? I used to build network hardware at my previous gig. We bought Broadcom PHYs and implemented our own MAC in VHDL. No, of course they didn't work for us and we got little documentation and support despite paying boatloads for the PHYs. gently caress Broadcom. Corvettefisher posted:Fixing it, I did a straight copy and paste of the first paragraph guess I just never fixed it Should at least mention VirtualBox and Vagrant (get someone else to write about this). Maybe some stuff about Xen, KVM, Solaris/SmartOS Zones perhaps? edit: And then there's stuff like OpenVZ as well. luminalflux fucked around with this message at 12:47 on Sep 14, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2012 10:44
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:Anyone updated to vCenter or ESXi 5.1 yet? Any trip reports? I'm wondering as well. Might go ahead with it next week.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2012 10:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:38 |
|
|
Seriously, gently caress VMwares licensing department. I have one license can't be moved and another can't be upgrade, and support has a very lax interpretation of how long an hour is. Hi I've paid you a boatload, please fix this.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2012 18:36
|
|