Hillbilly Rock Star out of Control…

Very cool hardware from Supermicro that was released a few days ago….  They released a new chassis in the same form factor that supports 36! (up to 45 with a JOBD config).  I have a few of their 846TQ-R900B Chassis that run Openfiler… (24 spindles) per chassis,  So I would image you could build a beast with a few of these!  From what I’ve read / seen so far - I only have concerns with how well the drives at the back of the chassis are cooled…

SAN JOSE, Calif., December 1, 2009 - Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a leader in application-optimized, high-performance server and storage solutions, today launched the world’s first line of double-sided storage chassis, which enable extra high-density storage. With Platinum Level (94%+ efficiency) redundant power supply support, Supermicro’s new 847 series server chassis feature 36 hot-swap 3.5″ hard drive trays with 24 in the front and 12 in the rear. For JBOD configurations, the chassis can support 21 HDDs in the rear for a total of 45 hot-swap 3.5″ HDDs.

Introducing the SC847A-R1400LPB

I think only a geek would call this sexy

For more info Get the PR release and full Server specs here..

http://www.supermicro.com/newsroom/pressreleases/2009/press120109_sc847.cfm

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847A-R1400.cfm

Need a HBA status report? I found this online somewhere and tinkered with it a tad.. I dont recall where the heck I sourced this from… but if its yours… thanks and feel free to add your source to the script…

Here is a quick and dirty way to update your vmware tools on your Vm’s without a reboot… It’s a pretty dirty way, but it worked like a charm on all of my VM’s…. This will only work on VM’s that already have the tools installed… This will NOT install the tools to a VM that does NOT have them installed…   Im a PS Novice Fo’ Sho, I’ll work to clean up the script here soon..   This worked perfect in my vSphere/Vcenter 4.0 Environment… YMMV.

One thing to note, you can probably take out the “get-Cluster” statement.  I only wanted to update a particular Cluster in my environment, so hence the “get-cluster”….

Last month I rolled out a VDR Appliance to test out Vmware’s new “Data Recovery” Solution.  I should have been documenting the process here, but The last few months I’ve just been swamped studying for my VCP4 Certification.  Now that I have that out of my way Leaves some time to scope out VDR.

Installing VDR:
1. Download the VDR Appliance from VMWare’s Site
2. Unzip the ISO and simply Import the OVF using your VI Client
3. Fire up the VDR Appliance, once it is booted up, you can modify the Network Address and login parameters
4. Install the VDR Client Plugin on whatever machine you will be accessing the VDR appliance from.  The plugin will enable you to see the VDR application from within your VI Client.

5. Here is a Screen-Shot of VDR doing its “thang”…

Issues:

So far I’ve ran into a few issues that are quite annoying… Especially if this product were to be your Primary source of backups.. Just as a side note, all issues stated below were encountered while using Version 1.02.

1. Integrity Checks/Reclaiming Space: This process runs and could easily take 24+hrs to run.  (during these checks no backups could be ran).  [Version 1.02]
2. Per Vmware’s sizing guidelines, you should only present a total of 2 “destination” points, just as a demo, I only presented a single 500GB CIFS share to hold the dedupe data.  Each VDR appliance at minumum needs 2GB ram, and storage is minimal at around 6GB.
3. Strange “inconsistant” VDR Appliance disconnects, ie: I would be unable to connect to the appliance at all for a given about of time.  Sometimes even a reboot would not solve this issue…  So far so good on version 1.1

Well not really a ‘upgrade’ exam, but simply took the VCP-410 Exam Monday the 23rd.  I got lucky on a few questions, and somehow got a perfect score of 500.  I studied pretty hardcore for 3 months, and this time it paid off..

If any of you guys are planning on taking your VCP-410 Exam, be sure to sign up for the 2nd shot for free, just in case you bomb the exam…

I also read the other day that candidates that pass their VCP-4 Exam will also receive a free Vmware Workstation 7 License, Just like we got when you passed your VCP-3 Exam. I wonder if they will release a new VCP logo for version 4?

See this thread with Jon Hall regarding the Free Workstation Copy. (Vmare certification team) http://communities.vmware.com/thread/240154?tstart=0

So I was trying to figure out which ports some of my BladeServers were plugged into - and yep, i was too lazy to go into the datacenter to look note - this works if you have the integrated cisco switches or external switches.. in our case we use both. 2 internal nics and 2 pass through.

first you will need to enable CDP

>esxcfg-vswitch -B both vSwitch# (number or name of your vSwitch)

>esxcfg-vswitch -b vSwitch# (this will display CDP settings.)

to view the data… you can do it a number of ways from the ESX console - i find this to be the easiest..

>vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/net/query_networkhint

So this will spit out all kinds of good info, so now lets Grep only the stuff thats useful .. to me, i want to see the vmnic, switch name, switch port .. so.

#>vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/net/query_networkhint | grep ‘portID*\|hardwarePlatform\|devId*\|vlan*’
vlanId = 0,
devId = “switchA.domain.com”,
portId = “GigabitEthernet1/0/11″,
hardwarePlatform = “cisco WS-CBS3130G-S-F”,
vlan = 401,
vlanId = 0,
devId = “switchB.domain.com”,
portId = “GigabitEthernet2/0/11″,
hardwarePlatform = “cisco WS-CBS3130G-S-F”,
vlan = 4401,
vlanId = 2501,
vlanId = 490,
vlanId = 520,
vlanId = 910,
vlanId = 9601,
vlanId = 9401,
vlanId = 039,
devId = “switchA1.domain.com”,
portId = “GigabitEthernet4/23″,
hardwarePlatform = “cisco WS-C6509″,
vlan = 4401,
vlanId = 2501,
vlanId = 490,
vlanId = 520,
vlanId = 910,
vlanId = 9601,
vlanId = 9401,
vlanId = 039,
devId = “switchB2.domain.com”,
portId = “GigabitEthernet4/23″,
hardwarePlatform = “cisco WS-C6509″,
vlan = 1,
neat…

Checkout this white paper on interpreting “esxtop” Statistics published earlier this year by Scott Drummond… Very Very Useful for anyone that likes to dig under the hood of vSphere http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279

Here are the topics Scott Covers in his doc…

Section 1. Introduction
Section 2. CPU
Section 2.1 Worlds and Groups
Section 2.2 Global Statistics
Section 2.3 World Statistics
Section 3. Memory
Section 3.1 Machine Memory and Guest Physical Memory
Section 3.2 Global Statistics
Section 3.3 Group Statistics
Section 4 Disk
Section 4.1 Adapter, Device, VM screens
Section 4.2 Disk Statistics
Section 4.2.1 I/O Throughput Statistics
Section 4.2.2 Latency Statistics
Section 4.2.3 Queue Statistics
Section 4.2.4 Error Statistics
Section 4.2.5 PAE Statistics
Section 4.2.6 Split Statistics
Section 4.3 Batch Mode Output
Section 5 Network
Section 5.1 Port
Section 5.2 Port Statistics
Section 6. Interrupt
Section 7. Batch Mode

Well it looks like about a week ago vmware released the first round of updates for vSphere 4.

16 Total, with 10 being listed as Critical.

———————————————————————————————-

ID: ESX400-200906401-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates VMX

ID: ESX400-200906402-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates ESX Scripts

ID: ESX400-200906403-BG Impact: HostGeneral
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates VMware Tools

ID: ESX400-200906404-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates CIM

ID: ESX400-200906405-SG Impact: HostSecurity
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates krb5 and pam_krb5

ID: ESX400-200906406-SG Impact: HostSecurity
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates sudo

ID: ESX400-200906407-SG Impact: HostSecurity
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates curl

ID: ESX400-200906408-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates SCSI Driver for QLogic FC

ID: ESX400-200906409-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates LSI storelib Library

ID: ESX400-200906410-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates hostd

ID: ESX400-200906411-SG Impact: HostSecurity
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates udev

ID: ESX400-200906412-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates esxupdate

ID: ESX400-200906413-BG Impact: Critical
Release date: 2009-07-09
Products: esx 4.0.0
Updates vmkernel iSCSI Driver

Okay, So I finally figured out how to get the VI4 Client working on my Windows 7 System.  The only part i was missing was the .dll file in a new folder /lib. Thanks to the guys over at the VMTN forum.. I

finally got this working

1. you will need to modify the “vpxClient.exe” config file located in > %system root%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\   To ->

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<configuration>
<system.net>
<connectionManagement>
<clear/>
<add address=”*” maxconnection=”8″ />
</connectionManagement>
</system.net>
<appSettings>
<add key = “protocolports” value = “https:443″/>
</appSettings>
<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation=”true”/>
</runtime>
</configuration>

Once you have that fixed up, you now need to create a new “System Environment Variable”

1. name the variable - “devpath”
2. Location = C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
3. Create a folder named “lib” under the \launcher folder, and copy the DLL file thats located in the zip file ive included on this post.

DLL and CONF file

Happy Trails!

So today I was going through the data that our recently deployed vFoglight server had been gathering…

I instantly noticed a bunch of ballooning issues… This was very strange as the cluster in question has 4 nodes with 32GB ram each (M600 Blades), each node was loaded at 35-45% (memory load)

After looking it appeared that someone had configured a vm template by accident to include a Memory Limit.. DOH! If you are not familiar with setting memory limits, and even if you are - you should check out this article over on VMGuru - [LINK to VmGuru]…  VERY Well explained.  So since that Limit had been set, the VM’s were swaping heavily. 

Once I logged into the esx nodes via ssh, looking at #>esxtop (then press m), i saw The %SWPWT (swap wait) was being hit pretty hard… and R/S  |  W/S. 

%SWPWT= The percentage of time the world is waiting for the ESX VMKernel swapping memory. The %SWPWT (swap wait) time is included in the %WAIT time.
R/S = the rate at which memory is swapped in from disk.
W/S = the rate at which memory is swapped out to disk.

Once I adjusted the memory limits - the swapping almost stopped immediately.  You can see from the chart below when the vm’s stopped swapping, and started using the sharing pool…  I did have to reboot a few VM’s to clear the memory “limit”

If you do have an entire mess of VM’s with memory limits set - fire up your PS console and run this

> Get-VM | Get-VMResourceConfiguration | where {$_.MemLimitMB -ne ‘-1′} `| Set-VMResourceConfiguration -MemLimitMB $nullthe ‘-1′ = unlimited in this case.. so this is what you want… ****Note*** this will change ALL VM’s to whatever node/VC environment that you are connected to - so run at your own risk!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/windows_toolkit  give this a look-see if you do not have the VI-Toolkit installed with PS…

Obviously there is a whole bunch more info that I could sit here and write.. but im off to read up on this topic a bit deeper… its all pretty cool once you dig deeper than the surface… geeze ive turned into a geek that sits at home at night and reads whitepapers

Feel free to add some comments -