Archive

Archive for September, 2011

Your HP blades may be underperforming… Why? From http://myvirtualcloud.net

September 22nd, 2011 4 comments

Andre Leibovici, a fellow vExpert who works for EMC as a Sr. vSpecialist has blogged today about an issue with HP Blades and a power regulation setting where the default on HP Blades can cause performance issues.
http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=1212

This is one of those great finds as it can be so difficult to troubleshoot “My VM is running slow” and you can go through your virtualisation environment with a fine tooth comb and find nothing as the issue is actually related to hardware settings.

Interestingly the issue manifests itself when the system is not fully utilised and CPU use is not high as Power Regulation only kicks in when it sees there are idle CPU cycles which makes it even more confusing to troubleshoot as you would be getting high CPU READY figures when CPU wasn’t stretched.

HP has a document, Power Regulator for ProLiant servers which explains it all.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00300430/c00300430.pdf

The fix is to either disable Power Regulator on the hardware BIOS by setting it to Static High Performance mode which will disable any power savings or set it to a custom setting, OS Control mode and then configure ESX(i)’s Power Management Policy using the vSphere Client Host Configuration panel to High Performance to disable power management.

Thanks, Andre!

Categories: ESX, HP, VMware Tags: , , ,

SRM for free with PowerCLI & DataONTAP– Part 2: iSCSI

September 14th, 2011 2 comments

My updated previous NFS post talked about implementing part of the functionality of SRM in Powershell using PowerCLI and NetApp’s DataONTAP for NFS datastores.

This post is an update to my previous iSCSI post in which I had only looked at the VMware side of the automation and so it’s time for an update to include the important part of handling the underlying storage. I’m going to use NetApp storage as an example but any storage vendor that exposes their API to Powershell can be used if you can find the relevant commands.

You will obviously need both PowerCLI and Netapp’s DataONTAP installed. See my previous post: Pimping your Powershell Profile for getting everything installed.

For the storage automation, all you really have to do is connect to the filer and then quiesce and break the storage mirror so it is writeable at the BR site. After you’ve connected this is a single line:

Get-NaSnapmirror "FilerName" | Invoke-NaSnapmirrorQuiesce | Invoke-NaSnapmirrorBreak -Confirm:$false

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HP releases Virtual Connect firmware 3.30

September 7th, 2011 4 comments

Updated: 9 September 2011 with new documentation links.

HP’s major announcement at VMworld was the HP VirtualSystem but also announced was the latest firmware update for Virtual Connect to 3.30 which is now available for download today.

HP says that 5 million ports have been shipped although I’m not sure how this is calculated. Each Flex-10 switch for example has 8 ports although typically most customers only use 1-3 so adding up all available ports in a switch which is typically underused seems like good old marketing hyperbole!

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Categories: Flex-10, HP Tags: , , ,

HP joins the FlexPod and Vblock party with HP VirtualSystem

September 6th, 2011 1 comment

HP was out in force at VMworld last week. Their major announcement was the HP VirtualSystem for VMware which is HPs pre-configured, tested and optimised converged infrastructure offering built for vSphere 5.  This is HPs answer to FlexPod (Cisco, VMware, Netapp) and Vblock  (Cisco, VMware, EMC) although with the HP VirtualSystem all the components (storage, networking, compute) are unsuprisingly HP rather than incorporating any other vendor other than VMware for the hypervisor.

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