This process was done on VMWare ESX 4 servers using iscli 1.2.00.21, updating QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs. It is assumed that iscli is not installed, and that your firmware is not downloaded.
Download iscli from http://driverdownloads.qlogic.com. I picked my adapter, and Linux Red Hat, since the SanSurfer iscli download is not available if you pick VMWare as the OS.
» Read more: QLogic SanSurfer iscli – QLE4062C Update Firmware
Since I’ve begun a trend of posting my bonehead moves on my blog for all to see, I figured I’d share this one as well. I’ve been a Maysoft SpamSentinel customer since 2005 and I’ve always been vocal with my praise when the topic of spam comes up. I especially love the focus on continued improvement. Backscatter? No problem, they just added that functionality to the product. They even snuck in a new feature recently that made a bonehead move on my part less spectacular. Here’s how that went…
Yesterday I noticed that there were zero messages in our B/C quarantines. I immediately sent a screenshot of the dashboard page to Chris Rich (who is so good at support that I’ve often considered referring to him as ‘Yoda’) to see if any recent update might be the cause of this change. He responded quickly, asking if the quarantines were also empty for the days shown by the dashboard page. I confirmed that this was the case and then started back-tracking everything I’d done this week, as I have a tendency to be the cause of many of my issues. » Read more: SpamSentinel, whitelists, and paying attention.
I used our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN for well over a year without any effective way to monitor the array’s performance. We have virtualized over 30 servers, including some fairly high-I/O servers like Lotus Domino, and while the virtual platform usually performs very well it was difficult to see what was going on when a slowdown occured. Enter EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters.
SAN HeadQuarters installs on an application server and logs information received via SNMP from the EqualLogic Group. Firmware 3.3.3 or newer is required to use this software, and 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 are supported. For monitoring from your workstation, a client-only installation allows you to view the logged information without accessing the console of the server where you have installed SAN HeadQuarters. » Read more: Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters
Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re already familiar with virtualization and more specifically, VMWare’s latest offering; vSphere (ESX 4.0). As the nitty gritty details are readily available on the VMWare website, I’ll skip the fluff and give my personal impressions of the features I’ve used so far.
The Upgrade
I started using ESX in 3.0, so this wasn’t my first time movin’ on up to the upper east side, or in this case a newer and better version of VMWare ESX. The upgrade of vCenter server went poorly, having plugin issues and database issues that at the time did not have widely known fixes or workarounds. I don’t care about performance history all that much so I did a full uninstall/reinstall of vCenter, including the database, and all was well. Upgrading the ESX hosts was so easy, I won’t waste much time talking about it. Using upgrade baselines in vCenter I plugged the ESX4 iso in, ran a scan, then individually remediated each of our four hosts in the same manner that I would when installing patches. It was that easy. » Read more: vSphere First Impressions
I can think of plenty of scenarios where limits would come in handy, and none of them apply to my implementation (yet) so I’ll spare you my speculative wisdom. I have only one piece of advice regarding this setting, and it’s: DON’T make the mistake of assuming that zero and unlimited mean the same thing, because they don’t.
In summary: zero = the end of the world as you know it, so don’t do it, and especially don’t do it to all of your VMs at once. Trust me on this.
The economy is in the toilet, and everyone from the gardener to corporate CEOs are feeling it. With that, many businesses are facing reduced IT budgets in 2009, forcing us to come up with new and creative ways to utilize our existing infrastructure. From workforce layoffs to spending cuts, the world of working in IT is changing shape right before our eyes.
I had big plans for 2009, with additional SAN storage, a new backup platform, and a better core switch for our network, all on our list of needs rather than our list of wants. Now I have to address those needs without buying new stuff, which will present new challenges in creativity and patience, I am sure. Although I’m a little disappointed, I welcome the challenge and plan to make the best of it.
I ran into an issue this past week, where VirtualCenter wouldn’t start. I was swamped with some other issues so in my haste made a few bad decisions that made everything worse and eventually discovered the root of the issue: the SQL logfile was full. I changed it to unrestricted growth and voila we were back in business.
Wait, no we weren’t! None of the cluster hosts would enable HA, they errored out, all of them. I tried several things that were suggested at The VMWare Communities without success, from removing the hosts from the cluster and re-adding them, to just disabling HA and enabling it again. Was this the result of updates I may have installed recently? Did something else change? » Read more: VMWare HA – the wrong way.
My whole career has been about having things thrown at me and learning on the fly. This works out pretty well most of the time, especially when it’s a new-to-us technology that’s been around for a while already like Active Directory (which we didn’t start using until Server 2003 was out). With all of the published best-practices and configuration guides that were available by the time we implemented AD, it was practically a walk in the park.
There are times, however, when you’re actually keeping up with the trends in technology and have to deploy something that’s fairly new. I first deployed VMWare ESX Server a few years ago and there weren’t so many configuration options as there are now. It was a standalone server with a lot of local storage, and then all I had to do was manage the resources. Easy! So easy that we got another one to run some automation systems for the Engineering Department. Another success! After successfully reducing our hardware inventory without lowering our availability or system performance index, I convinced the powers-that-be that a full-blown virtualization platform was clearly the next step in our technological evolution. » Read more: Virtualization: best practices for real life.
These days it seems like everyone’s got a BlackBerry, iPhone or other data-enabled mobile device. The whole internet in your pocket! For those of us in IT these devices can provide real business value, enabling us to communicate via email, IM, text, and phone no matter where we are. The actual value though, is all relative to how you use it or as in many cases, don’t use it.
In a blog I posted yesterday, I wrote about how easy it is to fall behind in IT if you don’t put forth some effort to keep up. With the whole internet available on your phone, you now have the opportunity to ‘keep up’ even if you’re not at your computer. But how could I possibly manage navigating so many tech sites on my slow little phone? It’s tedious enough to check 10 news sites a day on my giant monitor at work, nevermind a 2″ phone LCD, so to be honest I don’t think I’d use my phone all that much for reading tech news. » Read more: Is that the news in your pocket?
About a year ago I was faced with the reality that we’ll keep needing more servers, and that after 3 years we have to start paying to renew the warranties. Combined with the fact that our resource utilization on most of our servers was lllllooooowwwww, it became pretty obvious that we needed to make a change (we can believe in! lol). The answer to our problems: Virtualization. Duh.
We already had two standalone VMWare ESX servers running production servers and I couldn’t be happier, so the decision to use VMWare as the platform for a large-scale (ok it’s just large-scale to us) virtualization initiative was a no-brainer. We ordered 4 Dell rack servers with ESX 3 Enterprise, and a 7TB EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, to be connected using Procurve 2810-48 switches on both the network and iSCSI side with separate switches for each. I set it all up and started migrating physical servers into the virtual environment. Abso-freaking-lutely awesome! » Read more: VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?
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