Posts

Some days ago a colleague and I implemented a small 3-node VMware vSphere Essentials Plus cluster with a HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c. Costs are always a sore point in SMB environments, so it should not surprise that we used iSCSI in this design. I had some doubt about using iSCSI with a HP 3PAR StoreServ, mostly because of the performance and complexity. IMHO iSCSI is more complex to implement then Fibre Channel (FC). But in this case I had to deal with it.

Sometimes you have to update the OS of your DataCore Storage Server, or the server is crashed and you have to reinstall it. In both cases, a configuration backup is the starting point. The procedure remains the same, regardless if it’s an update or a reinstall after a server crash:

• Install Windows Server OS
• Copy configuration backup file to C:\Program Files\DataCore\SANsymphony\Recovery
• Install DataCore SANsymphony-V

Take a backup

You can take the configuration backup on different ways:

On February 25, 2015 PernixData released the latest version of PernixData FVP. Even if it’s only a .5 release, FVP 2.5 adds some really cool features and improvements. New features are:

• Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z)
• Intelligent I/O profiling
• Role-based access control (RBAC), and
• Network acceleration for NFS datastores

Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z)

FVP 2.0 introduced support for server side memory as an acceleration resources. With this it was possible to use server side memroy to accelerate VM I/O operations. Server side memory is faster then flash, but also more expensive. With FVP 2.5, the support for adaptive memory compression. was added. DFTM-Z provides a more efficient use of the expensive resource “server side memory”.  Some of you may think “Oh no, compression! This will only cost performance!”. I don’t think that this is fair. ;) The PernixData engineers are focused on performance and I think that they haven’t during the development of DFTM-Z. DFTM-Z is enabled on hosts that use at least 20 GB memory for FVP. With increasing memory used for FVP, the area used for compression in the memory is also increased. So not the whole memory area used for acceleration is compressed, it’s only a part of it. With 20 GB contributing the FVP cluster, the compressed memory region is 4 GB. With more than 160 GB, the region is increased to 32 GB.

A customer of mine had within 6 months twice a full database partition on a VMware vCenter Server Appliance. After the first outage, the customer increased the size of the partition which is mounted to /storage/db. Some months later, some days ago, the vCSA became unresponsive again. Again because of a filled up database partition. The customer increased the size of the database partition again  (~ 200 GB!!) and today I had time to take a look at this nasty vCSA.

If you are a frequent reader of virtualization blogs, then you may have heard about the vLaunchPad. It lists hundreds of VMware & virtualization blogs, as well as links to resources and other material. The vLaunchPad is managed by Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert, vsphere-land.com) and he organizes year for year the annual Top vBlog voting contest. This year the Top vBlog contest is sponsored by Infinio.

In the 2014 voting my “old” blog was voted on place 292 of 320. I should mention that blazilla.de had only german-language content. In a community, where english is the predominating content language, this result may not surprise. If you are interested in last year’s results, you can find them here. In 2014 I have started vcloudnine.de, but I didn’t nominated it for the 2014 voting. Instead, I nominated blazilla.de for the Top vBlog 2014 contest. This year the tables turned and I have nominated vcloudnine.de for the categories:

The VMware vExpert is a given title from VMware to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community and have spread the message of VMware to customers and partners worldwide. This is nothing you get by passing an exam. It’s given to you by VMware in respect of your work. The vExpert title is something which differates you inside the commnity. Individuals who participate in the program, have access to betas, free licenses, early access briefings, free access to VMworld conference materials online, access to a private community, use of logos etc.

Yesterday I’ve updated a CentOS 6.6 VM with a simple yum update. A couple of packages were updated and to be honest: I haven’t checked which packages were updated. Today I noticed that an application, that uses a secure tunnel to connect to another application, doesn’t work. While browsing through the log files, I found this message from Stunnel.

LOG3[1145:140388919940864]: SSL_accept: 14076129: error:14076129:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:only tls allowed in fips mode

I rised the debug level and restarted Stunnel. Right after the restart, I found this in the logs.

Disk space is rare. I only have about 1 TB of SSD storage in my lab and I don’t like to waste too much of it. My hosts use NFS to connect to my Synology NAS, and even if I use the VAAI-NAS plugin, I use thin-provisioned disks only. Thin-provisioned disks tend to grow over time. If you copy a 1 GB file into a VM and you delete this file immediately, you will find that the VMDK is increased by 1 GB. This is caused by the guest filesystem. It marks the blocks of deleted files as free, even if it only deletes metadata and not the data itself. Later, the data is overwritten with new data, since the blocks are marked as free and the new data is written in there. VMware ESXi doesn’t know that the guest has marked blocks as free. So ESXi can’t shrink the thin-provisioned VMDK.

I’m a bit late, but better late than never. Some days ago I installed PernixData FVP 2.0 in my lab and I’m impressed! Until this installation, solutions such as PernixData FVP or VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) weren’t interesting for me or most of my customers. Some of my customers played around with vFRC, but most of them decieded to add flash devices to their primary storage system and use techniques like tiering or flash cache. Especially SMB customers had no chance to use flash or RAM to accelerate their workloads because of tight budgets. With decreasing costs for flash storage, solutions like PernixData FVP and VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) getting more interesting for my customers. Another reason was my lab. I simply hadn’t the equipment to play around with that fancy stuff. But things have changed and now I’m ready to give it a try.

Microsoft has introduced the Web Application Proxy (WAP) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and has it positioned as a replacement for Microsoft User Access Gateway (UAG), Thread Management Gateway (TMG) and IIS Application Request Routung (ARR). WAP ist tightly bound to the Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) role. WAP can be used

• pre-authenticate access to published web applications, and
• it can function as an AD FS proxy

The AD FS proxy role was removed in Windows Server 2012 R2 and it’s replaced by the WAP role. Because WAP stores its configuration in the AD FS, you must deploy AD FS in your organization. The server, that hosts the WAP, has no local configuration. This allows you to deploy additional WAP servers to create a cluster deployment. The additional servers get their configuration from the AD FS.