Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

I have come to the conclusion that SAN Booting VMWare ESX is just a bad idea in production. By production, I mean in an environment where you have at least two redundant paths to your storage, and the machines are intended for 24/7 up time.

I admit I am talking more about iSCSI than FC because I haven’t investigated FC as much. What do you think? I normally would post a bunch of links to support my theory and I will be happy to do so if there is interest (In other words, I can’t find them right now but I wanted to post this).

Why would you not want to SAN Boot ESX? Isn’t that the rage? Yes, yes it is.

If you SAN booted it, wouldn’t you be able to replicate the boot LUNs to another site and have all in one DR? Wouldn’t you get deduplication of the ESX LUN, snapshots, and all the other great things that make SANs the end all be all of storage? Yes, yes you would.

So, it you are gaining all these great advantages, why not do it? One simple reason, local fail over. From what I have seen and heard, ESX just really doesn’t have the multi-path code in place today to handle having the connection to the boot LUN ripped out from under it. I would think the FC is more robust but I haven’t tested it. If you are doing this and have tested it, please let me know!

Anybody get the Portal game reference?  If you are a gamer and you’ve been under a rock, look it up and go play Portal!  Best ending of a game ever.

So, I’m here but I have simply been too busy with work and some personal issues to post.  You probably won’t see anything until this weekend.  I have some really good information on the IBM 3850/3950 and the HP DL580 regarding back plane bandwidth constraints and recommendations from some customer research.  I have also been living in VMWare VDM (Virtual Desktop Manager) product for the last few weeks as well as some impressions about the VMWare Update Manager Product.  More to come…  But I’m still alive…

I’m in a linky kind of mood tonight.  Here are some articles I found interesting in the last week or so.

• vinf.net has a great set of articles here and here on how to run ESX 3.5 in the new Workstation 6.5 Beta.  I can’t wait to get my hands on it and try it out!
• VM /ETC has a very good article on upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5
• VMReference.com has updated their VMWare Reference Sheet.  If you haven’t seen it, check it out.
• I use WinSCP a lot so I was happy to come across this tip over at RTFM on how to solve the filepart issues that started with ESX 3.5.  Yes, this is old, I only now got around to actually doing something about it!
• Another RTFM Article with links to everything P2V.  In this case I needed the XP SCSI drivers to create an XP VM.  More on my adventures with VMWare VDM in a future article…

In my day to day activities I depend a lot on the hardware vendor forums for the products I support.  I wanted to take a second to share all the links I have acquired.  Some will be obvious to everyone, but a few of them are pretty obscure.  Enjoy!

• Q-Logic Adapter Forums
• BNT (Nortel) IBM BladeCenter switch Forum
• VMWare Communities
• NetApp Communties
• HP BladeSystem Forum
• HP Insight Manager Forum
• HP Proliant Server Forum
• HP iLO Forum
• IBM Blade Forum
• IBM System x Server Forum
• IBM Director Forum

This one is a little late but I promised my buddy Simon over at vinf.net a link.  If you have an interest in FC Virtual Connect, you owe it to yourself to check out his article.  It is exceptionally well written and has an amazing amount of detail.

Link to the article

I found this out while configuring some 10G Ethernet cards for a customer recently.  Be careful who makes your 10G cards.  It turns out the NetXen 10G card (OEMed to HP, IBM and Others) has a hard limitation of only being able to address 32GB of system memory in the box.  If the system has more than 32GB of memory, the card will start dropping packets.  My sources tell me there will not be a firmware fix for this at this time.

To say this was a surprise to me is an understatement!  I have never seen a card with a limitation based on memory before.  IBM has pulled support for the card on the 3850 M2 model even though it is still a valid configuration in the configuration tools.  I haven’t had a chance to check the DL580 but be careful if you are considering either of these boxes with the 10G card.  Right now you will have to go 3rd party and your level of support may vary.

Link to IBM Technical Tip

Link to HP Technical Tip

One more thing I forgot.  If you left a comment in the last few weeks and you don’t see it on the site, please contact me.  I have been invaded by comment spam and I think everything is all fixed this morning.  I should be caught up on both publishing and replying to comments.

On the plus side, if you would like to know the site of a very persistent ring tone supplier, I’d be happy to pass along a site (with no guarantees of course!).

Aaron

So, after a small break, I am getting back into this again.  A small bit of advice for everyone, if you are at a customer site on their guest wireless and decide on a whim that you would like to update to your Wordpress to the latest version; check to make sure they don’t have FTP blocked BEFORE you delete files and try to FTP the latest version.  Doh!

The site was down for about 12 hours until I could get home and get everything back in shape.  I’ll be updating plug-ins and testing today.  More posts will follow shortly.  Thanks again for coming by!

Sorry I haven’t posted the last few weeks. What can I say; I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I made a switch from the Palm Treo 650 over to the HTC 6800 recently. This cool little geek toy has consumed my time for the last few weeks while I figure out everything about it. I have been loading programs and tweaking to my hearts content. My only advice to anyone considering this, the extended battery is a must!! Fun, Fun…

Anybody else have a Windows Smart Phone? I’d love to hear your tricks, tips, and must have applications that you are using.

Things should be returning to normal over the next few days.

I’ve been following all the press regarding IBM’s new Multi-Node 3950 M2. The machine looks great and the ability to scale from one 4 socket box to multiple boxes (2 at this time) is simply awesome. You simply can’t match that kind of raw horse power.

But then I got to thinking… At what point is it too much? Let’s just talk about ESX for a second, I know the box has other applications but I want to focus on ESX. A single 3950 M2 offers a maximum of 16 cores (4 socket x 4 cores) plus up to 128GB of memory (256 GB when the 8GB DIMMS are released). Double that in a two node configuration and you get 32 cores and 512 GB.

ESX 3.5 currently supports 32 cores (64 core is experimental) and 256GB max. I could see an extreme situation where 32 cores with 256 GB (using the cheaper 4GB DIMMs) might be feasible if your workload is CPU bound. Yes, I know if you compare the underlying chipsets the IBM X4 chipset screams compared to anything else. It will blow the doors off most blades (no matter who makes them) for pumping raw data through the pipes. The problem at the end of the day is money. It is getting increasingly more difficult to justify the high end servers on a price vs performance comparison. The 3950 M2 performs better, but at what cost? Also, with VMWare HA and DRS features, the scale “out” (using more, smaller boxes) has become more appealing than the scale “up” (using less, larger boxes) for distributing workloads across machines while maintaining overhead for a machine failure.

Increasingly in Information Technology, it is becoming a “Wal-mart” world. Often times, good enough will do. What do you think?

(Thanks to Scott Lowe and Matt Portnoy for keeping me honest on the max values for ESX!)

This article over at the Server Virtualization Blog got me thinking… Are Blades the next “Pizza Box” servers for ESX? By that I mean are Blades reaching the mainstream to the point that they are becoming a commodity? In my role as a pre-sales Engineer, I speak to many customers and you can predict what many of them want to talk about before we walk in the door, Blades and ESX.

Yes, we still move pizza boxes and many customers (usually the price sensitive ones) still love them. Now that the blade market has matured, we are seeing less and less of the pizza box attitude.

Let’s take that a step further, what are they buying? Some decide to go with the smaller form factor blades (IBM HS21 and HP BL460c) but a surprising number are going for the larger HP BL680c. The BL680c Blade is a four socket Intel Blade with a maximum of 128 GB of memory and plenty of expansion ports, especially using the quad port Ethernet expansion (remember to use the right model quad port card for ESX!!) For me, the small blade vs large blade decision always ends in the “it depends” answer.

You’ll notice I didn’t throw out an IBM 4 socket model. Not to throw IBM to far under the bus on this one but LS41 product just isn’t appealing to most customers right now. That is a discussion for another day.

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts?

vinternals has a great article on the current subtle differences between ESX 3i and full blown ESX. By “subtle”, I mean they will bite you in the butt as an Engineer if you believe the marketing people. This is the main reason I started the site. I want to get information out there to the technical masses that often leads to trouble if you haven’t run into it before (or somebody does and tells you!).

The Infiniband isn’t that big of a deal to me but the HA and Networking caveats are! I hope it helps!