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Internet Explorer posted:If you have the extra storage space you could also do an online file sync using something like RichCopy, then just cut over at night one night and have minimal downtime. We do have the extra space, but I think the processing of 17mil files will take longer than a the storage migration/conversion (I think, in reality I have no idea). In the past when others have tried to do work on these files or restore them, it literally has taken days (unsure of what was used to copy in the past).
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Mar 20, 2012 00:22
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I used it for moving 7m files from one array to another (RDM hurf) and it worked very well, plus you can do multiple syncs. The first one takes the longest, then just the changes. Just a thought if downtime is a problem. You can tweak the number of threads used for discovery, transferring files, etc.
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Mar 20, 2012 00:25
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Internet Explorer posted:I used it for moving 7m files from one array to another (RDM hurf) and it worked very well, plus you can do multiple syncs. The first one takes the longest, then just the changes. Just a thought if downtime is a problem. You can tweak the number of threads used for discovery, transferring files, etc. Maybe I will give it a shot over the next few nights and see how it fares. Thanks for the info, never used RichCopy before, I normally stick with RoboCopy. My place is pretty generous when we request weekend/after hour outages, but along with doing this over the weekend, I get to pull a quad gb nic and install/configure a dual 10gb fiber card (lets hope that doesn't go horribly wrong). Moey fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Mar 20, 2012 |
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Mar 20, 2012 00:36
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Internet Explorer posted:You'll definitely want 2 servers, otherwise it is kind of silly to virtualize. I would highly suggest 1u or 2u servers over blades, especially since you're not really hurting for density with only 3 VMs. Unless you are planning on a ton of growth, I think anything NetApp would offer is probably way overkill. I would look at Equallogic, specifically the PS4100. I will admit I do not know much about NetApp, though. This thread will probably be more helpful for SAN-specific advice - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2943669&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 I figured that two servers was a must. Do the two servers just need to be on the same 10GB network or do they need to be physically linked in some way? I know that the VMs and SAN would optimally be run on a seperate network from our regular corporate traffic. As for storage, I contacted NetApp, because of the Enterprise Storage thread. From talking to them, their equipment does sound impressive and is likely overkill for what we're doing, but I'm at least familiar enough with their products now that I can use them as a baseline to compare other SANs to. I'll look into Equallogic PS4100 and see how it compares to the NetApp 2040. I was looking into Dell earlier, but most of their affordable SAN units were running with RAID5 and in this kind of setup I want to be able to withstand at least two drives failing without data loss. I can at least use those applications to figure out what requirements we'll need for the database server, though I'm talking to a VMware expert on Thursday to figure out what requirements I'll need for the other servers. At least I won't need to do all the VMware setup myself, but I'm trying to catch up on this as quickly as I can and I ordered the Mastering VMware vSphere 5 book from the OP. Aniki fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Mar 20, 2012 |
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Mar 20, 2012 00:38
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Is there some way to dd an RDM into a VMDK? I've got two SCCM servers with RDM, and at some point it sounds like I need to move these to VMDK.
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Mar 20, 2012 00:41
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FISHMANPET posted:Is there some way to dd an RDM into a VMDK? I've got two SCCM servers with RDM, and at some point it sounds like I need to move these to VMDK.
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Mar 20, 2012 00:44
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Is it an actual RDM or just the raw LUN itself being presented to a physical SCCM box? `vmkfstools -i <rdm>.vmdk output.vmdk` is something I'd use if you had an actual RDM on VMware storage. Then go ahead and delete the RDM mappings from the VM configuration and add the VMDKs you just created.
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Mar 20, 2012 02:26
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FISHMANPET posted:Is there some way to dd an RDM into a VMDK? I've got two SCCM servers with RDM, and at some point it sounds like I need to move these to VMDK.
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Mar 20, 2012 14:18
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Misogynist posted:You can Storage vMotion them to any datastore if you're using Virtual mode RDMs, which is probably a little bit simpler than Converter. Have you done this before, or an offline migration? Is the time about the same as just a normal Storage vMotion or offline migration?
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Mar 20, 2012 14:35
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Moey posted:Have you done this before, or an offline migration? Is the time about the same as just a normal Storage vMotion or offline migration?  ) and I can confirm for you that it works the same as any other Storage vMotion.
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Mar 20, 2012 15:44
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Anyone testing vCenter 5 Update 1? I just did an upgrade, and it says it updated everything, but the build number in the About screen does not match what's in the release notes. Even rebooted Windows to see if that helped, which it didn't. There were no errors at all during the install.
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Mar 20, 2012 17:59
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Anyone done a side-by-side comparison for Atlantis ILIO vs Nimble for VDI? Both seems to offer crazy IOPS.
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Mar 21, 2012 00:22
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I have set up a VMware test environment with a equallogic PS4000 and two dual 6 core HP DL380 hosts with 64gb of ram each. I have an additional PS4000 and HP DL380 that I would like to use as a failover off site. I have gotten HA and FT up and running on my two host cluster at the main site and tomorrow I am going to setup the offsite SAN for replication and work on setting up the second Vcenter Server. Is there a way to set things up so that if my primary SAN dies the secondary Vcenter Server kicks on and takes over automatically? What are the considerations to make this happen if possible? I like that I can "pull the plug" on a host and have constant uptime on important guests and would like that to exist between sites as well. We are going to be ordering SRM licenses shortly as I believe they are necessary. Is there a need to have both sites use the same subnet? This is likely doable after we setup a firewall at each end. What we envision is that our primary site can host a single server worth of guests comfortably and we will use FT to keep them up no matter what. If we have a total site failure we will use the single host as our backup until we get the main site up. We may eventually purchase a second host for the failover site. Demonachizer fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 22:36
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Oh boy, you probably want to talk to a consultant, but it sounds like vCenter Heartbeat could do what you're hoping. Though it shouldn't be necessary if you're using SRM to manage two sites, I think. SRM would handle the LUN remounting/resignaturing and VM registration for you. I also don't think both sites need the same subnet. Someone will have to confirm (but that kind of thing would be in SRM documentation anyway). But you probably can't realistically expect FT to be used for everything. There are limitations to it, like how many FT VMs you can run at any one time, and some applications simply won't work properly in FT pairs (vCPU requirements, hardware, etc). Not to mention stuff like snapshots won't work. Check into FT's caveats before you invest too heavily into it, IMO.
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Mar 22, 2012 08:47
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Maybe I'm old school or just used to playing with setups that aren't an unlimited budget, but automating something like that seems odd to me. The chances of an entire SAN failing is relatively low and automating the start of rolling over seems risky. I'd say use SRM to do it all for you, but still require someone to push a button to get it started.
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Mar 22, 2012 12:08
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Kachunkachunk posted:Oh boy, you probably want to talk to a consultant, but it sounds like vCenter Heartbeat could do what you're hoping. Though it shouldn't be necessary if you're using SRM to manage two sites, I think. Unfortunately, consultants are not an option  I have books, a lab environment and time...For FT pairs, I am looking at using it with the vCenter Server machine at a minimum as it seems like if the host that my vCenter Server instance is residing on goes down, I will have an annoying problem. I will look at the FT stuff again to make sure that there is nothing I missed. Internet Explorer posted:Maybe I'm old school or just used to playing with setups that aren't an unlimited budget, but automating something like that seems odd to me. The chances of an entire SAN failing is relatively low and automating the start of rolling over seems risky. I'd say use SRM to do it all for you, but still require someone to push a button to get it started. As I understand it, out of the box SRM requires a push of a button and is not automatic. I guess you could script it to be automatic but it turns out that would be a horrible folly. Demonachizer fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Mar 22, 2012 |
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Mar 22, 2012 12:21
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adorai posted:On previous generations of Intel processors (not sure about sandy bridge or whatever is newest) exceeding 48 or 64GB per populated socket caused a memory slowdown. You could mix DIMM sizes but there are guidelines to follow when doing so in regard to ranks, not sure of the specifics.  Unfortunately, the LRDIMMs that actually exist on the market seem to overwhelmingly be 32 GB modules. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Mar 22, 2012 |
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Mar 22, 2012 16:39
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Misogynist posted:IBM finally released their technical documentation on the x3550 M4 and this seems to be generally applicable to the Sandy Bridge platform: We just talked to a Dell sales guy yesterday, who admitted he wasn't 100% versed on the technical stuff because he's been selling ops stuff lately, but he said that if you filled 2 of 3 slots in each bank, your RAM would operate at native memory, but if you filled all 3, it would go down to 800MHz. According to that chart it drops down to 1066MHz. Though from my naive view it doesn't matter much since VMWare can't use all that memory license wise anyway.
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Mar 22, 2012 16:51
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FISHMANPET posted:We just talked to a Dell sales guy yesterday, who admitted he wasn't 100% versed on the technical stuff because he's been selling ops stuff lately, but he said that if you filled 2 of 3 slots in each bank, your RAM would operate at native memory, but if you filled all 3, it would go down to 800MHz. According to that chart it drops down to 1066MHz.
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Mar 22, 2012 17:06
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Also if your users are crazy scientists who need 128GB VMs it helps to imbalance the RAM across hosts.
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Mar 22, 2012 18:13
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evil_bunnY posted:Also if your users are crazy scientists who need 128GB VMs it helps to imbalance the RAM across hosts. We won't ever be able to get researches to use VMs (partly because of how much NSF sucks) so it's going to core infrastructure only for us, as well as a whole pile of storage (because somehow my boss has tricked everyone so that we can sell storage to researchers).
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Mar 22, 2012 18:27
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FISHMANPET posted:We won't ever be able to get researches to use VMs (partly because of how much NSF sucks) so it's going to core infrastructure only for us, as well as a whole pile of storage (because somehow my boss has tricked everyone so that we can sell storage to researchers).
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Mar 22, 2012 18:44
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So with just a pair of vSphere Standard hosts running 4.1 SP2, if/when we want to go to 5.0, is it worth upgrading or it just as simple to start over since other than the network and storage config there isn't that much to configure on each box? I know it's ridiculous to compare vSphere to Windows but as I'm predominantly a Windows admin I still have this "Upgrades = Bad" mentality which is difficult to shake. Also the boxes are HP and right now run the regular vSphere build from the VMware ISOs - if I do rebuild I'd use the HP ISO's available from the VMware site.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:38
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Doing an inplace upgrade from 4.1 to 5.0 is actually extremely simple. It's been a few months since I did it on 3 of our hosts, but it worked fine each time. I can't remember if you have to recreate your vm storage from scratch to upgrade it to vmfs5 though
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Mar 22, 2012 19:40
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Thanks and yeah I know the process is, but so is putting a Windows 7 disc in a Vista machine and hitting upgrade - what you end up with isn't your ideal though IYSWIM and I didn't know if there's any parallel with vSphere to have to think about?
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Mar 22, 2012 19:46
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Bitch Stewie posted:So with just a pair of vSphere Standard hosts running 4.1 SP2, if/when we want to go to 5.0, is it worth upgrading or it just as simple to start over since other than the network and storage config there isn't that much to configure on each box? If you don't have the stuff on box and everything via shared storage, you might just want to wipe them and load 5 fresh. Ofcourse it depends if you have scripts inplace to reset everything and how many you have. We did 4.1 ESX migrate to 5 and it worked fine other than a flaky HW controller but that was HW not a issue with 5
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Mar 22, 2012 19:50
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Granted I have a very simple environment (3 hosts, NAS providing shared storage over iSCSI), but I did an in-place upgrade from 4.1 to 5 and had no issues at all.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:52
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Bitch Stewie posted:Thanks and yeah I know the process is, but so is putting a Windows 7 disc in a Vista machine and hitting upgrade - what you end up with isn't your ideal though IYSWIM and I didn't know if there's any parallel with vSphere to have to think about? No, generally the only thing you have to worry about is upgrades that involve version changes to VMFS, but we haven't had a really nasty one of those in a while.
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Mar 22, 2012 20:33
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FISHMANPET posted:We won't ever be able to get researches to use VMs (partly because of how much NSF sucks) so it's going to core infrastructure only for us, as well as a whole pile of storage (because somehow my boss has tricked everyone so that we can sell storage to researchers). Drop in some Cisco UCS B230 M2 Blade Servers with 512Gb per host. Go hog wild with RAM density.
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Mar 22, 2012 20:55
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FISHMANPET posted:Though from my naive view it doesn't matter much since VMWare can't use all that memory license wise anyway.
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Mar 22, 2012 23:09
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adorai posted:Keep in mind VMware licensing entitlements are across your environment, so if you have a DR site that isn't used as heavily, you can leverage your leftover vRAM entitlements at your primary site. Maybe in 4-5 years when the hardware we're buying within a year will be out of warranty, and that can be our DR site. But really, we're too poor to ever do anything like that. Though we'd have to license each CPU in the DR site, wouldn't we? And then I guess at that point it depends on what DR means. It would have to be a second SAN mirroring the first, right? And probably still in the same cluster.
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Mar 23, 2012 02:58
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Misogynist posted:IBM finally released their technical documentation on the x3550 M4 and this seems to be generally applicable to the Sandy Bridge platform:
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Mar 23, 2012 11:05
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evil_bunnY posted:So either I'm blind or IBM doesn't sell these with 16GB 1.6GHz modules?
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Mar 23, 2012 15:18
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Misogynist posted:If you read between the lines, there are no 16GB dual-rank 1600 MHz parts on the market today that are rated to run at 1.35V.
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Mar 23, 2012 18:01
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Has anyone gotten USB passthrough to work in VirtualBox? I've been struggling with it all weekend and just can't get it to connect, and it sounds like it's a pretty common problem. Can VMware Player do this with less hassle?
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Mar 25, 2012 23:23
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stubblyhead posted:Has anyone gotten USB passthrough to work in VirtualBox? I've been struggling with it all weekend and just can't get it to connect, and it sounds like it's a pretty common problem. Can VMware Player do this with less hassle? What is the host OS that VirtualBox runs on?
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Mar 26, 2012 00:00
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For a while there I was running ESX 5.0 with the trial key then downgraded to ESXi 4.1. Now I see that ESXi 5.0 is out. I wish they'd done this earlier so I didn't put in the effort to recreate VMs to suit.  Looks like I'll have to install this new version and see if I can get USB 3.0 working.
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Mar 26, 2012 00:00
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Why did you downgrade instead of using a free key?
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Mar 26, 2012 00:06
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stubblyhead posted:Has anyone gotten USB passthrough to work in VirtualBox? I've been struggling with it all weekend and just can't get it to connect, and it sounds like it's a pretty common problem. Can VMware Player do this with less hassle? Works fine for me, VMware player does it with ease and will sometimes automatically connect the USB even if you don't want it to.
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Mar 26, 2012 00:46
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Devian666 posted:For a while there I was running ESX 5.0 with the trial key then downgraded to ESXi 4.1. Now I see that ESXi 5.0 is out. I wish they'd done this earlier so I didn't put in the effort to recreate VMs to suit. There is no such thing as ESX 5.0. 
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Mar 26, 2012 00:49
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