virtual insanity

HP Emulex CNA Firmware Problems on BL460G7

Brandon Riley — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:10:25 +0000

If you have HP BL 460 G7′s with the on-board 10GB CNA, you’re going to want to read this post regarding a problem with the latest firmware. This was first noticed this issue when updating firmware to troubleshoot an issue where the storage doesn’t come back up after rebooting an upstream Nexus switch. The symptoms [...]

Sign up for the VMware vNews Newsletter!

Scott Sauer — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:56:27 +0000

2012 ushers in some great new changes from the field technical team at VMware. I am merging the Ohio Valley Newsletter with the Wisconsin based field newsletter (aka vNews) in an effort to make it more all encompassing. This content is designed to inform our customers of important updates from VMware from a technical [...]

Infrastructure Deep Dive on EM4J with VMware vSphere

Scott Sauer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:35:50 +0000

Introduction Virtualizing and running Java workloads on vSphere is absolutely a reality, but when I talk to customers I emphasize the same best practices as virtualizing Tier 1 workloads. The rules are not the same as basic consolidation and containment and you need to understand, plan, and architect your virtualization platform if you want [...]

2011. . . An Epic Year

Brandon Riley — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:03:30 +0000

Over the past week, I have been reflecting on just how amazing 2011 was for me, with lots of help from the entire VMware community. I won’t bore all my readers with EVERY detail, but what good is a blog if you can’t boast once in a while? In 2011, after a couple of years [...]

Renumbering a VEM on the Cisco 1000V

Brandon Riley — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:54:16 +0000

For a while, I’ve been looking for a way to pick which “slots” our VEM’s go into on the 1000V VSM. It would make troubleshooting much easier, and it just makes more sense to the networking guys who are used to working with physical line cards and supervisors. A network escalation engineer over at VMware [...]

PowerPath VE Versus Round Robin on VMAX – Round 3 (TKO)

Brandon Riley — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:08:49 +0000

A few weeks ago, I did a couple rounds of testing with PowerPath VE to see how it would perform against VMware Round Robin. If you missed Round 1 or Round 2, you may want to click and read those now. Based on the comments, and the other posts that said there was no point [...]

FCoE Problem with Cisco Nexus 5548 and 5596

Brandon Riley — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:27:56 +0000

Since there is very little out there on this, and since it caused plenty of heartache for me, I thought I’d write this up for those having issues with FCoE on the bigger Nexus 5k’s. Apparently there is a bug feature in the 5548 / 5596 switch where they left out the default QoS policies. [...]

The layer between the layers

Aaron Sweemer — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:07:51 +0000

Back in June I was asked to build and captain the vFabric SQLFire lab at VMworld. Now, I’ve been a big champion of the vFabric technologies since the beginning, so I was certainly excited to be given the opportunity. But I don’t think I fully realized just how fortunate I was at the time. Because [...]

PowerPath VE Versus Round Robin on VMAX – Round 2

Brandon Riley — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:38:12 +0000

As promised in the first post, here is round 2 of my testing with PowerPath VE and vSphere 5 NMP Round Robin on VMAX. For this round of testing, I changed the Round Robin iooperationslimit to 1, from the default of 1000. I understand that this is not recommended, and I also understand that further [...]

PowerPath VE Versus Round Robin on VMAX – Round 1

Brandon Riley — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:00:19 +0000

This past year, I did an exhaustive analysis of potential candidates to replace an aging HP EVA infrastructure for storage. After narrowing the choices down, based on several factors, the one that had the best VMware integration, along with mainframe support was the EMC Symmetrix VMAX. One of the best things about choosing VMAX [...]