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http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/server-virtualization/limitations-vmware-vsphere-storage-appliance-141252 Remind me again why VSA costs ~5k and why people buy this?
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Jul 17, 2012 18:01
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I'm not sure who's actually buying VMware's VSA. It's a product, for sure, but that doesn't mean they're selling licenses.
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Jul 17, 2012 18:03
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Mierdaan posted:I'm not sure who's actually buying VMware's VSA. It's a product, for sure, but that doesn't mean they're selling licenses.
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Jul 17, 2012 22:37
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I just ordered 2 SSDs and 16gb of RAM (32 was out of my range), can't wait to have my home lab not suck!!
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Jul 18, 2012 12:56
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I'm running ESXI on a HP Microserver with another Microserver as a NAS/ISCSI host, NFS Datastores work great, I can max out the link easily. but iSCSI doesn't seem to work too well and I was hoping someone could tell me why? Even with MPIO set to round robin I get 70MB/s read off my raid array which does 300MB/s locally on the nas. Regardless of whether I'm using 2 paths or 1 to the iSCSI host the performance is terrible. If I connect the luns using the windows iscsi initiator the performance is great, it will max out the link easily and there are no issues. Is there something I need to be doing to get better performance out of iscsi targets on ESXI 5?
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Jul 19, 2012 10:45
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MTU?
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Jul 19, 2012 15:35
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Are your hosts on the same subnet, or is your iSCSI traffic being routed?
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Jul 19, 2012 18:58
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70 MB/sec isn't bad for a single gig link, but you should get something out of a second. With a software iscsi initiator in ESXi you need to do some special setup to make it actually use multiple links to get to one datastore. You should have a vmk interface for each of your physical NICs and then you have to bind them to the vmhba using "esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmkX -d vmhba33" Do you remember setting this up when you were trying two paths?
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Jul 19, 2012 20:10
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Does anyone here actively use SRM? Any gripes about it? So far it seems pretty amazing.
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Jul 19, 2012 20:27
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Corvettefisher posted:http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/server-virtualization/limitations-vmware-vsphere-storage-appliance-141252 Because despite its flaws, and there are many, there's not much else out there that will give you vendor supported clustered storage for $5k. I'm curious how many of those flaws are hard fast limits and how many are defaults put in place to stop SMB's doing retarded things, but that could be overridden.
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Jul 19, 2012 20:50
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Corvettefisher posted:Does anyone here actively use SRM? Any gripes about it? So far it seems pretty amazing.
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Jul 19, 2012 22:54
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Misogynist posted:Are your hosts on the same subnet, or is your iSCSI traffic being routed? Both machines are on the same subnet, with a switch for each path Path 1 is on 192.168.0.0/24 and Path 2 is on 10.1.1.0/24 KS posted:70 MB/sec isn't bad for a single gig link, but you should get something out of a second. Not 100% sure on that as I used the vSphere client to set it up, but it is showing that they're both bound to iSCSI.
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Jul 19, 2012 23:46
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Corvettefisher posted:Does anyone here actively use SRM? Any gripes about it? So far it seems pretty amazing. I've done a few deployments from <50 VMs to over a thousand. It has its high points but it also points out a lot of faults in your DR plan when you suddenly realize there are tools out there like SRM. I've also used it to help with larger datacenter moves. I wish the scripting capabilities were a little more advanced and it does not give a poo poo about if the applications inside the VMs came up or not but it generally works reliably.
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Jul 20, 2012 00:34
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theperminator posted:Both machines are on the same subnet, with a switch for each path
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Jul 20, 2012 01:06
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theperminator posted:I'm running ESXI on a HP Microserver with another Microserver as a NAS/ISCSI host, http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/vmware/supportmatrix/hpvmware.html Are those the towers with AMD boards in it(n40l), and if so are you using the onboard nic? Also are the disks thick eager 0 or thin, and what NAS OS are you using for those storage devices? Openfiler, Freenas, or what? I believe you can take it without the class however it doesn't mean anything to vmware if you pass without the class. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jul 20, 2012 |
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Jul 20, 2012 02:24
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edit: nevermind, i'm retarded, vmware-tools wasn't correctly installed. luminalflux fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Jul 20, 2012 |
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Jul 20, 2012 10:05
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I'm going to (attempt to) patch a stand-alone ESX 3.5 server this coming Sunday. (I know 3.5 is EOL, but we have to keep supporting it.) I've never done patching of an ESX host before and naturally I am skittish. I'm downloading all the patches from VMWare for 3.5, and I've been doing some research into methods. I believe the patches have to be applied in numerical order (date of release?), but one of them doesn't appear to have a numerical date assigned to it (ESX350Update05a.zip) so I don't know how to incorporate that into a patches.txt file to be iterated through. Furthermore I don't know which patches are already installed on this server so I want to avoid stomping on whatever's there. I am also trying to set up a patch depot according to VMWare's patch management guide but it's also very confusing. Additionally the esx-autopatcher.pl script is long gone from the Internet; all I can find are links to the perl script's page, not the script itself, and the Wayback Machine is no help as most of the site (vmprofessional.com) has been blocked off by robots.txt. Would I do better to give up now? I really, really don't want to accidentally FUBAR this thing, as there's no backup of the host itself, only the VMs. EDIT: Playing around with the CLI I have determined it's running ESX 3.5 Update 3(?) The output from vmware -v is VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 build-153875. The installed patches are listed here: http://pastebin.com/xkLbQY2R Doing a test depot scan I've also found that this doesn't have VMWare's secure key update included in Update 5 - I can tell esxupdate to ignore signatures though. EuphrosyneD fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Jul 20, 2012 |
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Jul 20, 2012 13:48
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http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1000761 I would take a backup of the configs first, the VM's shouldn't be effected from a failed host update other than not being able to start which you could pop in a esx 3.5 disk and reinstall and reimport the VM's. Youtube has some good tutorials on it as well if you want to see what the process entails.
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Jul 20, 2012 15:13
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Alright, I can definately dump out the directories mentioned in the VMWare KB article. I'm working on getting an ESX 3.5 disk in case things screw up. Corvettefisher: Should I apply the Update 5 rollup first before other patches? If not, do you suggest a particular patch order (ie: in release order, or otherwise)?
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Jul 20, 2012 16:22
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EuphrosyneD posted:I know 3.5 is EOL, but we have to keep supporting it. Out of curiosity, since it is a standalone host, why not just replace ESX 3.5 with ESXi 5.0? I would assume this is one of your clients servers or something?
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Jul 20, 2012 16:30
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Part of our backup strategy for this client is dependent on ESX being the "full" version - we use a backup vendor that takes snaps of the VMs nightly and then uploads those snaps to the vendor's datacenter, thus creating a cloud backup of the machine. Unfortunately this vendor's latest backup agent VM doesn't seem to work at this patch level of 3.5. Part of their troubleshooting is to patch 3.5 up as far as it can go and then retry. We are also trying to persuade this client to move to another virtualization platform, but they're very, very cheap.
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Jul 20, 2012 16:43
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yeah I would go in chronological order of any major updates prior to bugfixes. Also snapshots aren't really backups. Have you tried ESX 4.1 with the backup software, unless the 3.5 isn't using the free license, you might want to just build a test box and see what happens. Unless it is doing a 'snapshot' of the full datastore, grabbing everything and not nabbing deltas. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jul 22, 2012 |
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Jul 20, 2012 16:53
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I'm not entirely sure of the technical details of how Doyenz does ESX/vSphere backups, unfortunately.
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Jul 20, 2012 17:02
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KS posted:I will be ripping the SD card out of a diskless running host in an HA cluster tomorrow to see what happens, so stay tuned. Better late than never, right? I just did this and nothing happened -- host is up, VMs are up, no failover triggered. There are not even any warnings generated, which is a bit unfortunate. I don't have enough load to force swapping and see what happens, but it seems that under normal circumstances, losing an SD card is no big deal.
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Jul 20, 2012 21:29
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Corvettefisher posted:Also snapshots are really backups.
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Jul 21, 2012 23:41
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evil_bunnY posted:Hehehehehe Waiting for someone to catch that. Now the question is was that posted ironically or not.
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Jul 22, 2012 01:05
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skipdogg posted:Waiting for someone to catch that. Now the question is was that posted ironically or not. I meant aren't
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Jul 22, 2012 04:24
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The patching went off flawlessly. Thanks! Also, our "backup(?)" vendor's VM appears to be working with no problems after patching.
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Jul 22, 2012 17:03
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Which AMD CPU family will run ESXi 5 with 64bit guests. Its for my home test lab. I updated to 5 and now it refuses to run many of my test guests. I'd like to upgrade but have a limited budget so if can avoid purchasing something too expensive.
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Jul 22, 2012 17:25
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wibble posted:Which AMD CPU family will run ESXi 5 with 64bit guests. Its for my home test lab. Most any that have AMD-V which all but the FM1's/semprons have I have a T1055 supports AMD-V and IOMMU support http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103871 if you are on a budget that is a 99 quad core, performs well, I had one prior to my x6 upgrade Wow Citrix is great, I love their 'fixes' for bugs try re-installing! If that doesn't work try re-installing. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jul 23, 2012 |
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Jul 22, 2012 17:36
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adorai posted:If you did it in the gui it's not setup correctly. Ah, that would be why then I'll give the commands a go when I have some free time, thanks for the help. Corvettefisher posted:Might want to try downloading the esxi verison of the server you have Mines an N36l Microserver, which isn't on the list unfortunately. My NAS OS is Debian with the SCST daemon backed by a 4x2TB raid array using mdadm. If the multipathing commands don't help, I'll give openfiler and freenas a shot. Thanks for your help
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Jul 23, 2012 11:45
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I'm sure this is possible, but I'm just at a loss to figure out how. I need to take a restored server OS (with data etc) and make it a VM (VMware). The server the data belonged to is dead, so I can't just restore to the server. It's a perfect 1:1 copy of the entire OS and data volumes, all on an external USB drive for right now.
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Jul 23, 2012 19:45
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Daddyo posted:I'm sure this is possible, but I'm just at a loss to figure out how. I need to take a restored server OS (with data etc) and make it a VM (VMware). The server the data belonged to is dead, so I can't just restore to the server. It's a perfect 1:1 copy of the entire OS and data volumes, all on an external USB drive for right now. Tools like Acronis imagining software should be able to take the device to a VHD or vmdk
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Jul 23, 2012 19:59
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Ran into an issue at a client and I wanted to see if anyone else had experience with this. It's pretty esoteric. VMFS Datastore (call it VMFSDS) that is spanned across 4x 500GB LUNs (call these LUNs 1-4) via extents. LUNs 1 and 2 are iSCSI, LUNs 3 and 4 are FC. This is all on ESXi 4.1u1 I believe. LUN 2 was mistakenly presented to a Windows server (running DPM) via iSCSI. I think since VMWare was using it, Windows either didn't see it or couldn't touch it. Fast-forward to a power outage where Windows seized the LUN first and then changed the partition type from VMFS to SFS. Windows changing the partition type of a VMFS volume is fairly common and well-documented by both VMWare and 3rd parties (Yellow Bricks has a great guide). However, even after recreating the partition as VMFS, we still had issues with the datastore VMFSDS saying that there was missing data. The files all appeared to be intact (because the file table is stored on LUN 1, right?) but when trying to access them, we had problems. Rebooting the hosts did not fix the issue. Ended up on the phone with VMWare all weekend working on the problem, sent them the first 1.2GB of each LUN, etc. At the end of the day, it looks like metadata table on LUN 2 was too badly damaged to repair. Has anyone run into an issue like this? I see lots of issues with single VMFS volumes getting swapped to SFS, but none in the situation where the LUN is just an extent of an existing datastore. We have already assumed all data is lost, but I wanted to see if anyone else had ever heard of this. Some notes: Using extents on different LUNs is like putting your data on a RAID 0 -- if either LUN fails, all your data is gone VMWare snapshots are NOT BACKUPS
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Jul 23, 2012 22:07
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madsushi posted:Using extents on different LUNs is like putting your data on a RAID 0 -- if either LUN fails, all your data is gone Don't mean to derail your question, but what advantage do you gain by spanning a VMFS datastore across multiple LUNs (my storage experience is pretty limited to a few devices)?
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Jul 23, 2012 22:19
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Moey posted:Don't mean to derail your question, but what advantage do you gain by spanning a VMFS datastore across multiple LUNs (my storage experience is pretty limited to a few devices)? That was the only way to have large (>2TB) VMFS volumes prior to ESXi 5.0.
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Jul 23, 2012 22:21
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Mierdaan posted:That was the only way to have large (>2TB) VMFS volumes prior to ESXi 5.0. Interesting. Since VMDK cannot do > 2TB disks, I never really been concerned about having a datastore larger than that.
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Jul 23, 2012 22:26
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madsushi posted:Some notes: Actually, only the first node failing will bring the whole datastore down. I wouldn't say using extents is the same as RAID 0, it would be more similar to RAID 10 or [n]0 really. It seems what happened to you is a result of poor administration (improperly presenting a LUN to the wrong system), although it doesn't sound like it's your fault. three fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jul 23, 2012 |
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Jul 23, 2012 22:30
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three posted:It seems what happened to you is a result of poor administration (improperly presenting a LUN to the wrong system), although it doesn't sound like it's your fault. That is absolutely the cause, and it wasn't my fault because I was brought in to consult after the issue had already occurred. 
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Jul 23, 2012 22:52
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madsushi posted:
Yeah this is a known problem with windows hosts and ISCSI luns which is why VMware's best practices are to have a complete separate network from storage to any other host other than vmware. It isn't an issue it is a known "feature" of windows that is very jumpy to nab 'free' storage, I don't know how many times we wen't over this in my VCP class but the point was driven home that windows is known for grabbing loose storage and loving it Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Jul 23, 2012 |
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Jul 23, 2012 23:10
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