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Archive for the ‘VMware’ Category

Today I decided to update my home lab from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 4.1u1. Updating vCenter went smoothly. Once I tried to update the first ESX node in the cluster using VMware Update Manager (VUM), it failed with the error “vim.fault.noHost”.

Say what? Googling the error did not give away too much detail; all posts on this were way back in the ESX 3.5 times. I hate when this happens. So what to do? Yes I still run ESX in my homelab (I like boot from SAN way too much ;). So off to the logging.

It had been some time since I looked at ESX logs in detail; the amount of “verbose errors” are enormous…. Anyway, it seemed to have something to do with the way vCenter talks (or rather fails in talking) to the node…

First I tried rebooting the node, then run VUM again to remediate the node agian… But again it failed. Finally I just removed the node from the cluster (via a hard “disconnect” followed by a remove), then re-added the node. After this, the node remediated without issue.

As EMC² counts down into the final hours before their live record breaking event, posts are showing up around three products: Data Domain Archiver, the Data Domain 890 and GDA, and the EMC² VNX and VNXe series. I looked around and found some info here and there on these new products.

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In part 1 of this series, I looked at two solutions for making virtual backups: Veeam and PHDvirtual. In this part, I’ll be looking at installing, making backups, verifying backups and of course restoring items.

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For a long time I have been a fan of PHDvirtual (formerly esXpress) and their way of backing up virtual environments. Their lack of ESXi support has driven a lot of people towards other vendors, and the one that is really on technology’s edge nowadays is Veeam’s Backup and Replication. Now that PHDvirtual has released their version 5.1 with ESXi support, it is high time for a shootout between the two.

Some history on drawing virtual backups

In the old ESX 3.0 and ESX 3.5 days, there was hardly any integration with 3^rd party backup products. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I thought I had done a pretty complete tuneup on the storage path from Veeam backup to an Iomega IX2-200 NAS, two things came up I wanted to test. The first one (why didn’t I think of that) is to set compression to “low”, saving CPU cycles and hopefully getting more throughput. The second one was starting a second job on the same Veeam VM to the same target storage.

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In my quest to get the most out of my home lab setup when it comes to backup speeds to my IX2-200 (see Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds) today I will configure jumbo frames on my environment, and I will show how each of the possible connection options to the IX2-200 can be configured for jumbo frames.

A small history on network frames, and especially the Jumbo Ones

There are many stories going round about jumbo frames. Some say it is not worth while, others say it is the difference between day and night. But what are jumbo frames in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Veeam’s Happy Holidays gift, I now have a license for several Veeam products. The one I really wanted to try in my home lab was Veeam Backup and Replication.

In this blogpost, I will try various ways to connect the Veeam appliance to my Iomega IX2-200 NAS box. This setup is very tiny indeed, but it clearly shows the options you have and how they perform compared to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I had another one of those great little problems. A VM refused to have its snapshot removed. Not because the snapshot was too big, it just failed.

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Since I see “top 10” lists appear everywhere, I decided to follow in line and produce my own top 10 posts of the year 2010:

1. Performance impact when using VMware snapshots
2. Throughput part 2: RAID types and segment sizes
3. Throughput part 3: Data alignment
4. Throughput part 1: The Basics
5. vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts!
6. VMware HA, slotsizes and constraints
7. Breaking VMware Views sound barrier with Sun Open Storage (part 1)
8. Ye Olde Snapshot
9. VMware Infrastructure Resource Settings Sagas
10. Scaling VMware hot-backups (using esXpress)

My view on things

It is great to see what interests people the most. Read the rest of this entry »

The year 2010 certainly has been a very restless year for me. Lost some dear people, gained some new life around me too. The company I worked for, Dataman (www.dataman.nl) went bankrupt. I agreed to be part of a merger where employees from Dataman would merge with iTricity (www.itricity.nl).
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