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Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category

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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For those of you (like me 🙂 ) who are dying to see… The first episode of Chad’s World is online! Check it out here: Chad’s World

The issue mentioned in one of my previous blogposts (see ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue) now has a workaround! The problem is that the host profiles of vSphere mix up the vmk0 and vmk1 interfaces, after which the CLARiiON tries to communicate through the wrong VMkernel interface with ESXi.

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This year the dutch VMUG event (see www.vmug.nl) is surely going to be a great success. Again! For the first time I’ll be there as a blogger. Even better, last week I had a nice discussion with someone at IBM. They welcomed me to deliver 20-30 minutes of their presentation at the VMUG2010 event!

So be sure to visit the VMUG 2010 event, and especially the 15:50 – 16:50 session “Van Virtualisatie tot Cloud Computing: portfolio en praktijk” because I’ll be presenting there, and it is going to be really interesting too! Read the rest of this entry »

If you are a real Wayne’s World fan… We now have: Chad’s World!

I just saw the “trailer” and I thought you should too:

Some people have asked me how to actually create the 3D graphs from the vcsiStats tool. I use a simple Excel sheet for this. Using the script I described in vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts! , you can import the files outputted into excel and see the Excel chart instantaneously.

The vscsiStats tool is a very powerfull vSphere utility. It allows you to see virtual disk performance (such as latency, IOPS block sizes etc). The script I used in part 1 and in part 2 of this series will shoot multiple samples of these values right after each other, which you can then import into Excel to produce surface charts, like this one:

How to create graphs like this is described in detail below. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it a new miss election?? Well, after doing more than a little testing I figured out I may be MISSing something… So unfortunately it is not about beautiful women, but yet another technical deepdive. This time into misalignment. Theoretically it is SO easy to point out what the problem is (see Throughput part 3: Data alignment. For this new blog entry I had my mind set on showing the differences between misalignment and alignment in the lab… However this proves to be much MUCH harder than anticipated…

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New and improved in vSphere: Datastore alarms. Very nice to have, but some of these alarms are so generic, that datastores are simply always in an alarmed state. Errors like “non-VI workload detected” on your ISO LUN, “Datastore usage on disk” and so on. Here’s how to loose these errors on certain stores while enforcing them on others.

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Amongst many of the optimizations for virtual desktops, it is always stated that the LSI Logic virtual disk controller is faster/more efficient than the BusLogic controller. So is this really true in vSphere 4.1 environments?

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Some time ago I posted Surviving total SAN failure which I had tested on ESX 3.5 at the time. A recent commenter had trouble getting this to work on a vSphere 4.0 environment. So I set out to test this once more on my trusty vSphere 4.1 environment.

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