Disqus - Latest Comments for Virtualpro

Re: Hello World…

Virtualpro — Mon, 05 May 2014 07:56:19 -0000

Great to have you back Simon!

Re: Blending IaaS, Iaas+ and PaaS to deliver today’s IT

Virtualpro — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 16:10:07 -0000

Hi Rajesh, appreciate the feedback, makes it worthwhile knowing that it's helped you gain a little context on what the EMC federation and the industry is up to.

Re: EMC VSI Storage Viewer, Solution Enabler and Symmetrix arrays

Virtualpro — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:35:44 -0000

Are you looking to set this up as read only for Symmetrix arrays specifically? If it is then your looking at using SYMACLs to lock it down as far as I know. May be a blog post in that one, now I just need to get acces to a VMAX to do it
:-)

Re: EMC Navisphere Simulator Download

Virtualpro — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:12:30 -0000

If you follow the link in the update section in the article - the one for the EMC Information Storage Management Book that should take you where you need to go, you need to fill in a survey but then you can download it. Please bear in mind that this is a Navisphere simulator only

Re: Configuring VASA with EMC arrays – CLARiiON, VNX and VMAX

Virtualpro — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:15:47 -0000

Nice one Bas, good to know, thanks for posting a comment

Re: Configuring VASA with EMC arrays – CLARiiON, VNX and VMAX

Virtualpro — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:41:04 -0000

The VSI interrogates the information for specific components from the array directly. With VASA the ECOM server sits in the middle and interrogates the arrays it is connected to, based on the information it recieves around disk type and RAID configuration it assigns it a label, i.e. unprotected, capacity, performance, etc. There is a table at the top of the blog post that shows the V1.0 labels that will be assigned. Long answer but in short VASA does not provide any extra information over the VSI.

Re: Configuring VASA with EMC arrays – CLARiiON, VNX and VMAX

Virtualpro — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:18:42 -0000

That's a good shout, I will take a look at that and try get back to you with some answers on what to do.

Re: Configuring VASA with EMC arrays – CLARiiON, VNX and VMAX

Virtualpro — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:38:12 -0000

Great news, glad it was of some use to you

Re: Configuring VASA with EMC arrays – CLARiiON, VNX and VMAX

Virtualpro — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:34:44 -0000

Thanks Mario, indeed you can install the SMI-S directly onto the vCenter, that is what we did when writing the article so I don't see why not.

Re: Department for Work and Pensions pilots 1,000 open source desktops

Virtualpro — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:36:13 -0000

Take me hat off to DWP, a brave move to attempt to cut costs, will be interested to see how it pans out. My initial opinion is that this will not go according to plan and will be plagued by issues, however that has to be expected when you pilot something like this.

I fully understand the need to cut budget costs and Microsoft licensing is as good a place as any to start. That said there is a reason it's so widely used (and reassuringly expensive) and that is because it's good software that has been about for years with a huge user base and the relevant support backing.

I just hope that this move doesn't end up costing more than it saves! factor in things like staff retraining, potential productivity loss, incompatibilities and lack of manufacturer support when issues occur and that could become the case quite quickly.

I may be being too pessimistic on this one, as always happy to be proved wrong!

Re: 50 Must-Read IT Blogs from BizTech

Virtualpro — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:57:29 -0000

Great list, been meaning to do a little RSS refresh recently and this saved me searching all over the interweb for new sites to follow.

Re: EMC Navisphere Simulator Download

Virtualpro — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:16:12 -0000

Hi Jon, I'm afraid as far as I know there is no such thing at present. Primarily because it doesn't have a single interface in the same way as Navisphere / Unisphere. It's management via command line (SYMCLI) and Storage Management Console (SMC) among other interfaces means it's harder to recreate either virtually or as a simulator. There are training environments in the US that have physical VMAX arrays but these are part of paid courses and I'm not sure how you get access to them. I'll have a look see if I can find something for you though.

Re: How to find mail enabled public folders in Exchange 2003

Virtualpro — Thu, 05 May 2011 05:09:52 -0000

The immediate thing that springs to mind is that you may not have the exchange tools deployed on the machine you are running this from. If you don't have it installed when you go into AD tools you don't get the tabs relating to exchange settings. Try it out on a machine that does have the Exchange tools installed, see what happens.

Re: My VNXe adventure – Part One

Virtualpro — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:10:13 -0000

I've been reading your second post and playing about with my home lab this morning and realised what utter rubbish that last comment was regarding a second VMKernel network port. I'm away back to NFS school for the afternoon!

Hope you've managed to make some progress on the issue.

Re: My VNXe adventure – Part One

Virtualpro — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:43:28 -0000

I think you will need to have a secondary VMKernel with the SP B NFS server address. Try changing the one you have already to 10.5.1.3 and see if you can then ping the NFS server on SP B and the NFS server on SP A. What I think will happen is you will see the reverse of the current situation.

If that is how it turns out I think what to do to resolve the issue is create a second VMKernel port pointing at 10.5.1.3 and add it to the same NIC as the existing VMKernel port that is pointing at 10.5.1.2. The fact they are on the same subnet won't matter as the VMkernel port configuration is a direct connection to the NFS server.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Re: My VNXe adventure – Part One

Virtualpro — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 01:39:40 -0000

Sorry my bad, multipathing and NFS don't really go together, I'm an FC / ISCSI / Block kinda guy, lol!

You mention that you have an nfs server on both SP's is it safe to assume that you have 2 different IP's for each? So Again if that's true I am assuming you then have two vmkernel ports setup for your NFS connection, each one is bound to a different nfs server address, i.e. SPA and SPB.

Regarding the switch setup, yes the interconnects should allow the data to get through. Again I was thinking fibre switches without ISL's setup. It's still a single point of failure though, links between switches aren't much use when one switch dies. If you remove the aggregation you would indeed split the SP connections among the switches to increase resilience.

Let me know what the ESX networking setup is, sure we can sort this out for you, love these kinda problems.

Re: My VNXe adventure – Part One

Virtualpro — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:43:14 -0000

Hey, one immediate thing I picked up on was you have both ports from SP A going to switch 1 and both ports from SP B going to switch 2. If you loose a switch you'll have no redundancy for the LUNs owned by the corresponding SP. i.e loose switch 1 and lose connectivity to the NFS server on SPA. I would always put one port to switch 1 and one port to switch 2 from each SP to create full end to end redundancy.

Just out of interest what is the multi pathing policy in use? It could be that both ESX servers are using the NIC attached to switch 1 as the active I/O path. Because Switch 1 has no access to SPB then your ESX servers can't see SPB. I'd suggest sketching it out, try trace the I/O path see if the above could be the case.

Re: EMC Navisphere Simulator Download

Virtualpro — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:09:58 -0000

Hi Guys, if you follow the instructions in the Update section of the post and go to the EMC ISM book page, click on the learning aids link and fill in your information you can still download the Navisphere Simulator.

Hope that helps

Re: How to find mail enabled public folders in Exchange 2003

Virtualpro — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 13:43:51 -0000

You are most welcome, glad it was of some help

Regards

Craig

Re: Windows Virtual Desktop Access Licensing – What is it?

Virtualpro — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:41:17 -0000

Hi Peter, My understanding is that if you have Software Assurance for your windows desktop licences then yes you only need to purchase a $100 licence to use the thin client device. You must have purchased your Win 7 Enterprise licence and you must have purchased that licence with software assurance, the $100 fee is simply to utilise the thin client device, if you were using a PC then technically there would be no additional cost. Please note that this is simply my understanding of it, I strongly advise speaking to a licensing specialist or contacting Microsoft directly to get the right advice.

Re: EMC PowerPath/VE – MpxEsxPathClaim failure – LUNz

Virtualpro — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:59:04 -0000

Glad it was of use

Re: Storage I/O control – SIOC – VMware DRS for Storage

Virtualpro — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:05:11 -0000

Hi Chris, not sure why the video is not available in Germany. You should be able to find it on YouTube by searching for "Storage IO Control - SIOC". There is indeed music within the video, not sure who made this I think it was VMware but I'm not sure.

Re: Gestalt IT – Tech Field Day

Virtualpro — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:44:29 -0000

Congratulations! The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events are brilliant to be involved in, I was lucky enough to participate in Seattle earlier this year. Great experience, hope you enjoy it!

Re: HP Server DDR3 Memory Configuration Tool

Virtualpro — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:07:45 -0000

Hi Martijn

Thanks for your response, sounds like you did get lucky. It amazes me resellers aren't more aware of this important configuration element.

Regarding your server crashes, that's quite concerning! Have you got something open with VMware and HP on this? Is it an HP issue causing ESX 4.1to crash or a VMware issue causing ESX 4.1 to crash? Interested as I have 3 of these going into production for a set of VM's that I do not want crashing.

Thanks again for your comments

Re: Exchange – Public Folder Journaling of a fashion

Virtualpro — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:59:58 -0000

Hi, thanks for reading, nice to see someone getting use out of the article.

Basically any incoming emails are immediately auto forwarded on to the pfcapture mailbox completely intact. This leaves them intact with sender and recipient information. Due to them being delivered to a mailbox they are automatically journaled if Exchange journaling is switched on. During my testing I found that outbound email from a public folder was being sent by the user on behalf of the public folder as a result it is therefore captured by journaling automatically as it passes through a mailbox.

Hope this helps.