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In a surprise announcement today Data Domain have revealed that they have an agreement in place to be acquired by Netapp. This deal will bring the market leaders in both the primary and archive storage together. In these uncertain times it’s bold but wise move by Netapp. As a consultant working with both companies I can only see this as a good thing for my clients. Both product sets really are market leading. More details here http://bit.ly/IIc9 Following the successful regional user groups Alan Renouf is setting up and Online VMware User Group. The first meeting is scheduled for 1st June 2009 so head on over to Alan’s blog to find out more information http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/05/13/unofficial-online-vmware-user-group/ Something that I get asked a lot is how to bind multiple ethernet links together between an ESX host and a Cisco switch using Cisco Etherchannel (802.3ad). In reality it’s actually quite simple but does have a small gotcha. Let’s look at both ends individually: This is an example config taken from a Cisco switch: port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip spanning-tree mode rapid-pvst interface Port-channel1 Continue reading VMware ESX ethernet link binding with Cisco switches More details are emerging on the upcoming NetApp System Manager or NSM for short. Information is still a little sketchy ahead of the official Beta release but there are some screenshots emerging.
The main idea for NSM is to create a slightly easier to use interface than the existing cli or FilerView which can be a little clunky. NSM will allow you to view all of your filers together and will reconise cluster pairs which is something FilerView doesn’t really do at the moment in terms of monitoring. Creation of Aggregates, Volumes and LUNS will be via a very intuitive GUI interface and will certainly make the process a lot quicker than using FilerView. Personally I find the cli quicker and easier but I guess that what coming from a Linux background does to you. The main use I can see going to be from a monitoring aspect. For those than haven’t invested in extra monitoring tools or NetApp Operations Manager this functionality will be a Godsend. So how does SRM licensing differ from regular VMWare licensing? Well for a start SRM is licensed per CPU not per 2 CPUs like ESX. It is also licensed only for the ‘Protected’ servers. The project I’m currently working on has 4 ESX hosts in the Primary or Protected site and 4 ESX hosts in the Secondary or Recovery site. Each of these hosts has 4 quad-core CPUS so I need 16 SRM CPU licenses and 1 SRM Server license on the Protected site and no additional licenses on the Recovery site. These licenses are of course in addition to your normal ESX vCenter licenses. This license model works for a typical uni-directional solution enabling Fail-over and Fail-back. If say you had a site in London and another in Cambridge where they were each going to be able to Fail-over to the other site then you would need CPU licenses for both ends to enable Bi-directional Fail-over. The next issue is now to install the licenses. All of the documentation tells you to just add them to your existing license server. Easy Peasy then! Well most of us will be running a license server with only one license file for our hosts as this is the default. So what do you do? The VMWare licensing web site won’t allow you to combine the licenses into one file. You can’t manually combine the files so you’re left with two license files. If you look on the ‘Config Services’ tab in your license server you’ll see that the license file path points to your existing license file. The trick is to change this to the directory where the license files reside. There is an inportant caveat to this though. Make sure you don’t put a trailing / on the end. If you’ve followed the default installation then you need the location to be ‘C:Program FilesVMWareVMWare License ServerLicenses’ Once this is done then you can save the service, restart the license server and the re-read the license files. So NetApp have announced the release of NetApp System Manager or NSM for short. This will bring full Microsoft MMC integration to the NetApp product range starting with the FAS2000 and 3000 series. Despite what others have reported NetApp are adament that this will not replace FilerView, rather it’s in addition to. NSM will apparently enable users to get a FAS system up and running in under 5 minutes through their Windows server. Now is this a good thing I wonder? Surely someone setting up a SAN such as this should have a througher understanding of the system and be more confident in setting it up through the cli? NSM will apparently come with Best Practice configurations built in along with a system tray monitoring utility which will certainly be a bonus. What will they be offering for us OSX or *nix users? I know myself and quite a few of my clients don’t use Windows as their primary OS so perhaps a cross platform tool would have been a better option. We’ll wait and see I guess. More info can be found here and details on the beta build when it is released can be found here. SRM or Site Recovery Manager is a new product in the VMWare range aimed at providing automatic fail-over capabilities between ESX clusters. I’m currently working on a large project involving SRM and it’s the first time I’ve used it in production so it’s quite a steep learning curve. There is very little information out there on SRM but Mike Laverick of RTFM Education has written an excellent book on the subject that I’m currently working my way through. I’d highly recomend obtaining a copy from http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147 if you’re looking at an SRM project. With so much happening in the world of Virtualisation currently I thought it would be a good idea to collate my thoughts and knowledge into one place so here I am. Currently I’m working as a consultant in London specialising in Virtualisation and Storage. Primarily my work centres around VMware and NetApp but I also have experience with XenServer and Hyper-V Virtualisation along with HP and EVA storage. |
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