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Inspired by Chris Wahls blog post “Building a New Network Design for the Lab”, I want to describe how my lab network designs looks like.

The requirements

My lab is separated from my home network, and it’s focused on the needs of a lab. A detailed overview about my lab can be found here. My lab is a lab and therefore I divided it into a lab, and an infrastructure part. The infrastructure part of my lab consists of devices that are needed to provide basic infrastructure and management. The other part is my playground.

Some days ago I wrote two blog posts (part I and part II) about VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. Because I wrote about it in the first of the two blog posts, allow me to take a short description, what Peer Persistence is and what it does, from that blog post:

As part of a project, old server hardware was replaced with shiny new hardware. Beside the server hardware, storage hardware and infrastructure was also replaced. The new hardware was installed beside the old hardware and because the customer has a high virtualization ratio, nearly all servers were VMs and the migration of the VMs was was done without downtime. The customer uses a Windows 2008 R2 failover cluster for file services and MS SQL Server. The MS SQL Server is the database for the ERP software. This cluster used in-guest iSCSI and because of this, we were able to move it online to the new server hardware and migrate the cluster disks later. At a certain point we had the cluster nodes on the new hardware and were able to do a direct comparison in terms of the performance of the new hardware. The runtime of batch jobs and the experience of user showed us, that the hardware was slower. We were puzzled…

While I was onsite at a customer to decommission an old storage system, one of my very first tasks was to unmount and detach some old datastores. No big deal, until I saw that one after one ESXi hosts went to “not responding”. Time for a heart attack but hey: Why should a host ran into a PDL/ APD, while I was dismounting datastores on the vSphere layer? The LUNs were still there and accessible. The hosts came back quickly and from that point, I watched the hosts flapping between “connected” and “not responding”. Time for an investigation. My first thought was that it must have something to do with the network. But the network was okay, no problems with interfaces, (M/R)STP or similar. Then I checked the logs and found this

The first part of this (short) blog series covered the basics of VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. This, the second, part will cover the basic tasks to configure Peer Persistence. Please note that this blog post relies on the features and supported configurations of 3PAR OS 3.1.3! This is essential to know, because 3.1.3 got some important enhancements in respect of 3PAR Remote Copy.

Fibre-Channel zoning

On of the very first tasks is to create zones with between the Remote Copy Fibre Channel (RCFC) ports. I used two ports from a quad-port FC Adapter for Remote Copy. This matrix shows the zone members in each Fibre Channel fabric. 3PAR OS 3.1.3 supports up to four RCFC ports per node. Earlier versions of 3PAR OS only support one RCFC port per node.

A customer contacted me, because he had trouble to move a VM between two clusters. The hosts in the source cluster used vNetwork Standard Switches (vSS), the hosts in the destination cluster vNetwork Distributed Switch (dVS). Because of this, a host in the destionation cluster had an additional vSS with the same port groups, that were used in the source cluster. This configuration allowed the customer to do vMotion without shared storage between the two clusters. The setup worked fine, until the customer moved a specific VM to the new cluster and switched the port group of the VM from the vSS to the vDS: The VM lost the connect to the network. A switch back to the vSS restored network connectivity for the VM. While troubleshooting this issue I noticed that the port was blocked due to a L2 security violation.

Sometimes the easy jobs seems to be the hardest. Especially if you have to deal with high-quality software… As part of a project I had to install and configure a HP StoreOnce 4500 appliance in combination with HP Data Protector 8.12 and a StoreEver MSL2024 G3 tape-library. No big deal - until I hit the part, when I had to install HP StoreOnce Enterprise Manager v1.3 (SEM) on the new backup server. The installation failed with this error:

The title of this blog post mentions two terms that have to be explained. First, a VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (or VMware vMSC) is a configuration of a VMware vSphere cluster, that is based on a a stretched storage cluster. Secondly, HP 3PAR Peer Persistence adds functionalities to HP 3PAR Remote Copy software and HP 3PAR OS, that two 3PAR storage systems form a nearly continuous storage system. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence allows you, to create a VMware vMSC configuration and to achieve a new quality of availability and reliability.

The recovery of an Exchange mailbox using a recovery database is usually no big deal. Simply restore the database, create a recovery database and recover the mailbox or items from the mailbox. Sometimes you have the luck that the customer has licensed the Data Protector Exchange 2010 Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE). This was unfortunately not true in my case. Okay, so let’s do it the old way. The needed tape was available in the library and luckily it was a full backup. So I quickly added a disk to the VM and started the recovery of the database to a temporary location. At this point, the disaster took its course…

The whole story began with a tweet and a picture:

Spotted Marvin on VMware campus during a break this morning "first hyperconverged infrastructure appliance " pic.twitter.com/1iIPocjREX

— Fletcher Cocquyt (@Cocquyt) June 7, 2014

This picture  in combination with rumors about Project Mystic have motivated Christian Mohn to publish an interesting blog post. Today, two and a half months later, “Marvin” or project Mystic got its final name: EVO:RAIL.

What is EVO:RAIL?

Firstly, we have to learn a new acronym: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA). EVO:RAIL will be exactly this: A HCIA. IMHO EVO:RAIL is VMwares try to jump on the fast moving hyper-converged train. EVO:RAIL combines different VMware products (vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCenter Server, Virtual SAN and vCenter Log Insight) along with EVO:RAIL deployment, configuration and management to a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Appliance? Yes, an appliance. A single stock keeping unit (SKU) including hardware, software and support. To be honest: VMware will no try to sell hardware. The hardware will be provided by partners (currently Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro).