If you are in the Minneapolis, MN area – please come and join us on February 29th for our VDI Kung Fu event.  There will be free food, free training, and a great opportunity for networking.  We have a number of VDI rockstars that will be presenting including:

• Andre Leibovici, @andreleibovici author of MyVirtualCloud.net blog
• Jason Langone, @langonej author of ThinkVirt.com blog
• Jason Boche, @jasonboche author of Boche.net blog
• Jim Yanik, @JimYanik
• Jeff Whitman, @jjwhitman

Jim and Jeff will be doing a repeat of their VMworld session, if you missed it – it was one of the top rated sessions of all of VMworld 2011.  The event runs from 8:00am until 3:30pm and breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Nexus Information Systems VDI Showcase

We will also have tours of the Nexus VDI Showcase, we have a number of different VDI endpoints on display with various display configurations to allow you to see different solutions in action.  Click here to see more info on the showcase.

Click here for more info and to register for the event, hope to see you there!

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In my most recent post on this topic, I ran through the configuration I use to optimize usable space and getting necessary license keys installed.  I wanted to build on that for the 8.1 simulator, and specifically about getting multiple simulators to work with OnCommand.  If you install multiple copies of the simulator and then try to add them into the NetApp Management Console, you will get an error similar to this:

Even though they are separate virtual machines and have different IP addresses and hostnames, their simulator system id’s are identical so the NMC thinks it’s a duplicate host you are trying to add.  Luckily it is possible to change the serial number and system id so we can get multiple simulators added in and be able to utilize things like Protection Manager and Provisioning Manager.  The easiest way to do this is to change these values before you run the setup so you don’t have to reassign the disks.

To begin, I still utilize VMware converter to bring it into my vSphere environment.  There are other methods out there but this one has worked well for me.  I won’t screenshot the entire process as it’s mostly just taking the defaults and deciding what name you want to use etc, but here is the summary screen:

Summary screen for VMware Converter

I change the disk type to be thin provisioned instead of thick, I change the NICs to be the relevant networks for my lab, and finally I didn’t set it to power on just because I wanted to make sure I boot it into maintenance mode to change the serial number as soon as it boots up.  When it boots press a key other than enter to break the boot, then run the following commands to make this simulator unique (screenshot below):

set bootarg.nvram.sysid=1111111101
set SYS_SERIAL_NUM=1111111101
boot

Interrupt boot process to change serial number

These commands were documented in this post on the NetApp Communities, and I’ve followed the same pattern – 8 1′s with a unique two character string at the end that matches the hostname (e.g. STO-FAS1 is 01 STO-FAS2 is 02 etc)

After you hit enter to boot the simulator, you need to go into maintenance mode to wipe the config and setup the simulator, you need to hit control-C to bring up the boot menu and then option 4 for wiping the configuration:

Boot menu options

Once you run through the wizard, this is the config I apply (I usually use a text snippet to insert the following into  my SSH session):

options security.passwd.rules.enable off
snap reserve -A aggr0 0
snap sched -A aggr0 0
options autosupport.enable off
aggr options aggr0 raidsize 28
disk assign all
license add DZDACHD
license add PZKEAZL
yes
license add NAZOMKC
license add ANLEAZL
license add BSLRLTG
license add NQBYFJJ
license add ELNRLTG
license add MTVVGAF
license add BQOEAZL
license add RKBAFSN
license add HNGEAZL
license add BCJEAZL
license add DFVXFJJ
license add XJQIVFK
license add DNDCBQH
license add JQAACHD
license add ZYICXLC
license add PVOIVFK
license add PDXMQMI
license add RQAYBFE
license add ZOFNMID
license add ZOPRKAM
license add RIQTKCL
ndmpd on
options nfs.export.auto-update off

I turn off the password rules since this is just my lab and I typically use a very easy password (yep, you probably already guessed it) for most of the lab stuff that can only be accessed from inside.

Next step is to add some more disks in the simulator, this info was found on this thread over on the NetApp Communities.  Not all of the commands worked for me, in part 2 step 3 I wasn’t able to successfully enter those commands.  It mentions that was a glitch in the way the program was complied so I’m just guessing that it may now be resolved and not necessary now as without it I still was able to add disks without issue.

priv set advanced
useradmin diaguser unlock
useradmin diaguser password

Enter a password to use for the diaguser (again, it’s my lab so I use a relaxed password)

systemshell

Login with the user diag and the password you just created

setenv PATH "${PATH}:/sim/bin"
cd /sim/dev
sudo makedisks.main -n 14 -t 23 -a 2
sudo makedisks.main -n 14 -t 23 -a 3
exit
useradmin diaguser lock
priv set admin
reboot

After the system comes back up, login and we can assign the new disks

disk assign all

If you run into an error where you get a bad disk label, that can be easily fixed by:

aggr status -f

This output will give you the list of the failed disks, make note of the disk ids – they should be similar to v6.32

priv set advanced
disk unfail -s v6.32

At this point you should have a total of 56 disks on the simulator, with an aggregate raid group size of 28. I added 52 of the disks into my aggregate to leave 1 as a spare so I don’t constantly get errors about low spare count (you can disable the option to warn you about low spares but unfortunately that only works on systems with 16 disks or less).

aggr add aggr0 52

Now you should have the first simulator completed, I took a VM snapshot at this point to be able to revert to after I do my testing.  Next up is configuring the second simulator, obviously the VMware Converter steps are basically identical except for the VM name so I won’t repeat that part.  The only thing to be aware of is when you first power on the VM, press a key other than enter just like you did previously so we can set a different serial number:

Configuring unique serial number and system id on second simulator instance

Run through the rest of the configuration steps above and now you should be able to add both simulators into the NetApp Management Console:

Both simulators showing within the NetApp Management Console. Click for larger image.

Hopefully that helps you get started with the ONTAP 8.1 simulator, I’ll have some more posts coming up that will build off of this.

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TextExpander is a tool I’ve had installed on my Macbook Pro for awhile now, but never really utilized it all that often (other than the built-in spelling corrections I only had 1 or two custom expansions configured).  Recently I started using it more and I think it can be very helpful in home lab environments where you are constantly configuring things over and over with the same (or similar) settings.  I’ve configured a few NetApp simulators in my home lab and rather than remember what settings I apply each time to the simulator and configure them, I have it all configured within TextExpander so that when I type /ntapsim it will replace that line with everything I want set.  In my case it will then run the following:

options security.passwd.rules.enable off
snap reserve -A aggr0 0
snap sched -A aggr0 0
options autosupport.enable off
aggr options aggr0 raidsize 28
disk assign all
license add DZDACHD
license add PZKEAZL
yes
license add NAZOMKC
license add ANLEAZL
license add BSLRLTG
license add NQBYFJJ
license add ELNRLTG
license add MTVVGAF
license add BQOEAZL
license add RKBAFSN
license add HNGEAZL
license add BCJEAZL
license add DFVXFJJ
license add XJQIVFK
license add DNDCBQH
license add JQAACHD
license add ZYICXLC
license add PVOIVFK
license add PDXMQMI
license add RQAYBFE
license add ZOFNMID
license add ZOPRKAM
license add RIQTKCL
aggr add aggr0 24
ndmpd on
options nfs.export.auto-update off

You get the idea, but that will automatically disable AutoSupport, disable the aggregate snapshot reserve and increase the default RAID group size to squeeze a little extra usable space out of the sim, and apply all the simulator license keys for me.  I also have snippets set up for applying a default Cisco switch/router config for me which has been extremely helpful when initially configuring everything in a GNS lab.  I also have one for ESXi hosts that will tweak a couple of settings for my lab such as allowing ESXi to use less RAM.  In that case, the specific tweak was mentioned here and I just chose to insert it via the echo command instead of using vi manually.

That’s just some lab examples of what I use it for, but in reality there are tons of uses for this – almost every file on my machine is date stamped in the format yyyy-mm-dd and I have a quick two character snippet setup to automatically insert the current date in that format for when I’m creating a new folder/file.  Other examples that I use are for inserting my work phone number (I can never remember it), my address, an email signature, and a few for web addresses that I frequent.

If you aren’t willing to shell out the $35 for TextExpander (which, in my opinion, is a little high for a utility app – though it is incredibly useful), there are other ways to accomplish this.  Built in to OSX (and iOS 5 for that matter) is native text expansion, the downside is that it isn’t quite as easy to quickly add in new snippets, or modify old ones.  However, it’s free and as long as you are running OSX 10.6 or later – you already have it.  Just go to System Preferences –> Language & Text to create your snippets.

Anyone using TextExpander and have some other snippet examples?  I’d love to hear them.

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Today NetApp is announcing two new controller models that are reminiscent of the FAS200 line.  They are the FAS2240-2 and the FAS2240-4, they are 2u and 4u in size respectively.  Early performance numbers indicate between a 2-3x performance improvement over the FAS2040 depending on workload type. The FAS2040 will stick around to complete the FAS2000 lineup.  This means all current controllers will be able to run the latest ONTAP software from NetApp (the FAS2020 and FAS2050 did not support ONTAP 8.x).  As I alluded to previously, the FAS2240 is a storage shelf with the controllers inserted into the back.  The 2240-2 is a 2u system and based on the current FAS2246 SAS shelf, while the 2240-4 is a 4u system and based on the current FAS4243 shelf.  The FAS2240-2 utilizes 2.5″ SAS drives and supports either 450 or 600GB drives as of today.  The FAS2240-4 utilizes 3.5″ SATA drives and supports 1, 2 or 3TB SATA drives as of today.  Both systems can be ordered with either 12 or 24 drives.

Some quick notes on the new models:

• Will require ONTAP 8.1+
• Supports a mezzanine card, which can be either a 2 port FC card or 2 port 10 GbE card
• If you put a FC card in the mezzanine slot, they can be either target or initiator ports much like onboard FC ports on other controllers today
• Will support cluster mode, but you have to use the 10 GbE mezzanine card for cluster communication so only iSCSI/CIFS/NFS will work and must be served out of the GbE ports
• Will come with ONTAP Essentials, which means all storage protocols are included (as well as things like Operations Manager, Protection & Provisioning Manager, DSM/MPIO)
• Ability to convert from a controller into a disk shelf (much like the FAS200 line)
• Will not have support for the FlashCache card or FCoE

Front view of the FAS2240-2 controller

Rear view of the FAS2240-2 controller

Front view of the FAS2240-4 controller

Rear view of the FAS2240-4 controller

Also, and in my opinion this is a big one, the maximum volume size is 54TB on the FAS2240 and the maximum volume size with dedupe and/or compression enabled is ALSO 54TB!  This is one of the best features of 8.1, 64 bit aggregates in 8.x allowed us to grow beyond a 16TB aggregate limit but we were still limited (at least in some environments) on the volume size to a maximum of 16 TB (depending on the controller model) when using compression and/or dedupe.  To reiterate, as of ONTAP 8.1 the maximum volume size for dedupe/compression is now equal to the maximum volume size for the controller – which means it could be anywhere from 30 TB on the (now) entry level FAS2040 to 100 TB on the highest end FAS6280.  To determine what the maximum volume size is for your controller, check the System Configuration Guide.

Anyone out there looking at these new controllers from NetApp?

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For me one of the big focus areas this year is to dig into ONTAP 8.1 cluster mode, which NetApp has said is going to be their future.  The traditional 7-mode will still be around, but (almost?) all R&D will be put into the cluster mode features.  The cluster mode product isn’t anything new to NetApp, they acquired Spinnaker around 2004 and have been offering ONTAP GX which allowed 24 nodes in a single namespace cluster.  The issue was that the commands were not similar between ONTAP 7G and ONTAP GX as well as differing feature sets.  The paths are starting to converge and 8.1 offers some features that weren’t found with ONTAP GX such as:

• Support for SAN (ONTAP GX only supported NAS protocols)
• SnapMirror for replication
• Deduplication

There are a few things that aren’t yet supported (as far as I know) in cluster mode (SnapVault is one that comes to mind) but it’s nice to see it coming closer to feature parity with the 7-mode offering.

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

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About a year ago at one of the local Tech OnTap events NetApp did a presentation about their new datacenter and I had been wanting to tour the facility since then.   I was out in the RTP area a few weeks ago for some NetApp training, and luckily I had an extra day where I could finally see the datacenter NetApp calls the Global Dynamic Lab.

The datacenter is impressive, not only in terms of its looks and attention to detail – but also with the amount of equipment they can support at just a fraction of the cost of a typical datacenter.  NetApp was able to reduce construction costs on this datacenter by more than 2/3 and also reduce operating costs by about 60%, and in doing so was still able to deliver more power and cooling per rack than the industry average.  My first thought after hearing this from our tour guide was that it really matches NetApp’s current tag line: Do more with less.

Once we walked into the datacenter floor one of the first screens you see gives some environmental info.

At a glance you can see todays PUE, as well as the months average among other things.  It also shows the outside air info, being from Minnesota my first thought when I landed in Raleigh was how amazing the weather is – and this datacenter takes advantage of it.  Since approximately 60% of the time the weather is 70 degrees or cooler, it has the ability to automatically pull in outside air as much as possible to help in cooling the datacenter.  The average PUE for this datacenter is around 1.2 – one of the lowest in the industry, having a PUE of 1.2 gives an estimated savings of $7 million in operating expenses annually versus a PUE of 2.0.

After reviewing the screen I was ready to head in and see the rest of the place, looking down the main aisle gives you this view:

There are 36 cold rooms, and each cold room is based on a max of 720 kW, each rack can go up to 42kW as long as the total cooling load per cold room does not exceed 720 kW.  There were rows and rows of various NetApp controllers and storage (both demo and a subset of production are run from this location), all different kinds of server vendors and primarily Cisco for the switching (if there were other vendors, I didn’t seem them in the aisles I walked through).  This was definitely a more easy-going tour than the SwitchNAP datacenter tour I had gone on just a month ago at VMworld, I kept expecting security guards to be following our every step.  Joking aside, I’d have to say these are without a doubt two of the most impressive data centers I’ve seen.

There is also a video tour on Youtube as well that gives a little more detail:

All in all it was a great tour and I’d like to thank @chrisgeb and @that1guynick and other (gasp) non-Twitter users for helping to facilitate.  The only downside was I wasn’t able to take a spare FAS3210 home for my own lab, at one point I did hear “if you can get it on the plane you can take it home” though I didn’t take the challenge.

There is a really good whitepaper that NetApp as published on the GDL called: Breaking Down the Glass House: NetApp Global Dynamic Lab Delivers Higher Power Density, Greater Efficiency, and Lower Capital and Operating Costs which may also set a record for the longest name for a whitepaper.  If you are interested in more info on it I’d highly recommend checking it out.

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VMworld 2011 Sessions in iTunes

Stupid title aside, one of the things I’ve done in the past is downloaded all of the VMworld sessions and convert them so I can play them on my iPad/Apple TV devices. Based on some Twitter conversations last year it seemed like a number of people do the same thing – rather than everything spending their time going through the process of downloading, converting and tagging each video file, I thought why not consolidate efforts. I’ve started this process again this year and have created a share on my Dropbox folder with the finished videos. If you attended VMworld and would like access let me know and I can add you. Hopefully it can save others some work.  Message me on Twitter or send me an email via the contact me page at the top and I can add you to the share.

Also, and hopefully this goes without saying, if you didn’t go to VMworld and are looking for the sessions – I believe you can buy a pass on the VMworld.com site to access the sessions.  The point is, if you don’t have a way to show that you already have access to the sessions, I’m not going to be able to give you access to the Dropbox folder if you request access.  Not interested in the VMworld police chasing me down

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Just having a big keyboard and trackpad probably doesn’t look like much of a feature, but what you don’t see is that it’s connected to an external display via the iPad display adapter so you get your full View desktop display on the external monitor and a large keyboard and large trackpad above the keyboard on the iPad screen.  I know Apple won’t allow this, but I’d love it if I could pair a bluetooth mouse with the iPad, as well as my bluetooth keyboard (which I already can pair) and then when I’m in the office I could have a very functional and portable thin client device.

My afternoon was a tour of the SwitchNAP datacenter.  SwitchNAP was one of the locations for housing the servers used by the VMware Labs team.  There have been a lot of blog posts about SwitchNAP so I don’t want to duplicate too much of the work that is already out there, but their datacenter sits in the old Enron Broadband building.  Around the early 2000′s Enron was planning on arbitraging bandwidth much like they were doing with power.  Right before they were set to open they declared bankruptcy.  SwitchNAP was across the street at this point and spent the next 9 months pulling that facility out of Enron’s bankruptcy.  As you would imagine I jumped at the chance to tour the facility – especially after finding out it was completely free.  I knew this place was secure, and unlike any other datacenter – when we pulled up this was the view by the security door.

Unfortunately that was the only picture I was able to get, we were informed that pictures of any kind are not allowed once inside the doors and considering we always had a minimum of two security guards with us with arms bigger than my thigh – I didn’t try and sneak any pics…  They did mention we can use the pictures from their website however, this picture is of the main entrance:

And this picture is a close up of the gate we had to go through to get out of the lobby and into the building:

Once through the gate, we walked down a hallway and about halfway down you could see into their NOC(gotta say, the cubes are a little nicer than mine…):

Inside the datacenter there were a number of these(of note is the enclosed hot aisles, our tour guide also mentioned that they currently have the lowest PUE of any datacenter):

And the last picture showing the 3 different feeds, none of which are ever over 66% utilization:

A few stats on the campus:

• 2,200,000 sq ft of space
• 500 MVA power capacity
• 567 MVA of generator capacity
• 294 MVA UPS suply
• 202,000 tons of cooling
• Armed 24/7/365 by military trained security staff

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One of the demos that was shown was for ThinApp Factory, the idea here is that we can automate the extraction of the app out of our Windows OS.  While there have been comments recently about VMware’s enhancements to View (or lack thereof), this was the first item among many mentioned today that really showed some of the amazing features VMware will have to solidify their post PC era solutions.

Horizon mobile touches on what I covered yesterday in my post about the Day 1 keynote from Paul Maritz, the idea is the user gives their phone number to IT and they can push out a “work phone” down to the users phone and have separation between their personal phone and their work phone.  They mentioned LG and Samsung will soon be coming out with compatible Android based phones in the near future.

AppBlast screenshot courtesy of VMware

I touched on this briefly towards the end of our VDI Kung Fu session on VMware Community TV, but I’m a heavy tablet user – and more specifically, a heavy iPad user.  Going from meeting to meeting all day I’ve stopped bringing my heavy laptop with me all the time and only bring my iPad and a case to hold a stylus, business cards, and VGA Adapter.  I use it for presentations, whiteboarding, light Office work etc.  One of the challenges in using it to work on a Word or Excel file is that you have multiple steps to first get the data into the application but then to get the data back to the original location after you edit it.  It’s far from a simple, seamless process.  The demo today of AppBlast showed an iPad user who was able to access Excel 2010 via the native Safari web browser and edit their spreadsheet.  AppBlast is a service that can deliver any application to any device supporting HTML 5.  Windows vSphere Client?  Microsoft Office?  Putty? Absolutely.  I can’t wait to get my hands on this and I think delivering it via HTML 5 is perfect, with an App you need to worry about the politics of the App Store you are living in – but with HTML 5 any device that supports it can be off and running.  Below was the screenshot VMware used that displays a list of applications the user is entitled to that they can then launch via the Safari browser on their iPad.

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Image courtesy of Tony Dunn from Flickr

Day 1 is is just about in the books for VMworld 2011, with events all day yesterday and a non stop flow of information today, my body was trying to convince myself it’s Friday rather than only Monday.  My day started out with one of my most anticipated sessions, VSP1682: VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A with @DuncanYB @FrankDenneman and @ccolotti.  I was a little worried about making this session due to some Sunday night activities but luckily I made it and I always have the weekend to catch up on sleep…

One session I really enjoyed was ESXi Quiz Show, this was without a doubt the most entertaining session I have ever attended.  It was a game show setup with @johntroyer as the host.  I really hope future VMworld’s will have similar sessions and I’d love it if they could include audience participation via Twitter.

The keynote this year was on the afternoon of Day 1, and a few of the highlights from it were:

• Labs were 100% public cloud this year (last year it was a hybrid cloud model)
• Over 200,000 VMs are expected to be deployed in the labs
• There are over 60,000 VMUG members
• There are more VMs created every second than “physical babies” born per second (as opposed to virtual babies?)
• There are more vMotions per second than planes taking off per second globally
• Touched briefly on View 5 features: Bandwidth improvements, client ubiquity, and improvements around VoIP/Unified Communications.  Personally I can’t wait for View 5 to get released now that there is better bandwidth controls for PCoIP.

A session I didn’t get into today was VSP3205: Tech Preview for vStorage APIs.  This was a futures session with the general idea of being able to store a VMDK as its own entity on a storage array natively.  I’d highly recommend checking out this post by @scott_lowe for his recap on the session.

The solutions exchange/lounge area is very cool this year, with a park theme and games like volleyball, basketball etc.  Check out this pool on Flickr from HP to get an idea.

Tonight isn’t quite over yet, there is still the #CXIparty with my employer, @NexusMN being one of the sponsors.  I will likely have some camera phone pictures of the event to post tomorrow.

If you aren’t out here, follow me on Twitter and catch some of my updates throughout the conference.

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