Just a little teaser of what we’re working on here at EMC. This is the next version of the EMC Celerra Plug-in for VMware which is v1.1 and offers great new VMware View integration. Below in the video you will see that it has a new wizard based interface for common tasks, as well as the ability to place clones (Full and Fast) of Virtual Machines into a VMware View pool which then can be entitled to users for access.

What does this mean?  Well, with Fast Clones you are now offloading the great ability to do Linked Clones back to the storage array. You can ultimately have hundreds of copies of a single virtual machine which only using minimal disk space, and now with the plug-in have those automatically provisioned into VMware View.

Fast, Easy and Efficient…just how we like it!

Download the high-rez versions here: WMV and MOV

Posted under Celerra, Storage, View

Doing some speed tests of IP based storage gave me some good results. First I enabled Jumbo frames on my dedicated IP storage Ethernet card, then I set the MTU on the vSwitch and the VMKnic to 9000 (Scott Lowe has a great write-up on doing this on his website). I then mounted a NFS volume as Datastore and did a copy of a VMDK file which currently resides on a 7200rpm SATA 3 drive to the mounted NFS volume.

I copied the 8GB file in under 2 minutes and my average MbTX/s was around 525Mb (65MBps) - keep in mind, this was a copy from a local SATA disk (low IOPS) and I was able to get around 65MBps — not bad!

The biggest thing to remember, VMDK access needs low latency…not high throughput — this is why NFS has become so popular for VMDK storage.

Posted under Networking, Storage

After seeing a mention on Scott Lowe’s blog (blog.scottlowe.org) and on Storage Monkeys Blog (blogs.storagemonkeys.com) I’ve decided to discuss the issue(s) that I’ve came across in regards to disabling NFS Locking with the NFS.LockDisable=1 function.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware, VMware HA

I’ve ran into some issues today trying to change the IP address of my NFS Datastore. Our filer has a nice 10GbE interface that I’m not using, so my thought was to put my hosts into Maintenance Mode one at a time, remove the old datastore and connect the new one…which is essentially the same exact mount but going over a different interface. Boy was I wrong…

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware

If your attending VMworld 2008 and your planning on Virtualizing SAP, I’d highly recommend checking out my Breakout Session.

EA1562 - Virtualizing SAP - An In Depth Look On How The City of San Diego Utilizes VMware ESX
Wednesday, 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Abstract: An advanced look on how the city of San Diego utilizes VMware Virtual Infrastructure and NetApp NFS storage for this mission critical application. We will discuss the basics of building a solid Virtual Infrastructure that meets your Business Continuity and Disaster Recover needs, along with some tips and tricks including; 5 Second Restores, Data Deduplication and Automated Disaster Recovery.

This will be the only customer ran SAP based breakout session at VMworld, I’m also going to cover some good reasons why everyone should be running on NFS datastores, specifically with NetApp appliances!

Even if your not interested in the session, be sure to stop by just to say hi!

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Posted under Conferences, VMware, VMworld