EMC World 2013 – day 4

Posted by on August 27, 2013 No comments

A little late, but better late than never. This last EMC World post has been sitting in my drafts, knowing two of my coleagues already posted theirs about the exact same thing that I wanted to talk about. And since I don’t want to play copy cat, I’m going to refer to their posts. That seems the best thing to do.

EMC World 2013, day 4

Thursday is traditionally (half) a day to say goodbye to the many old and new friends, visit some last day sessions, leave the hotel and head back to the airport, but this year I planned ahead and I decided to stay a bit longer for some quality time with the EMC Elect: My plane wouldn’t leave until Saturday afternoon!! I had to switch hotels though from the fancy and luxurious Venetian to the hotel next door “Harrah’s”. It’s a huge step down, but Harrah’s does what it’s supposed to do and that’s offering me a bed to sleep.

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Live VMware datastore expansion with running VMs

Posted by on July 9, 2013 2 comments

How to enlarge datastore capacity in Virtual Center?

There are several ways to get more disk storage available for your VMs running on VMware ESX. Adding an extra datastore is an option, but having multiple datastores creates an extra administrative overhead since you now have multiple datastores to monitor.

Another option is to simply extend an existing datastore. Live!

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Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE

Posted by on July 1, 2013 No comments

Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE!

Many SAN administrators will face this challenge from time to time: certain hosts need to start using new storage ports. Reasons vary, but in the EMC Clariion/VNX world this might happen because it’s decided to dedicate the mirrorview ports to mirrorview only instead of allowing hosts to use these ports as well. Obviously having dedicated replication ports will improve replication performance and for synchronous replication this will also improve the production host performance since the write acknowledgement from the remote array will be quicker and the extra latency is limited to a minimum.
So you end up wanting to free the SPA1 and SPB1 ports (most Clarrions) or SPA0 and SPB0 (VNX). But disalowing hosts to use these ports means they will loose access to these paths. This just might be disruptive! Or not?

There’s a way to migrate nondisruptively!

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VMware: “adaptive queue depth” setting

Posted by on June 27, 2013 1 comment

What is the recommended LUN queue depth throttling in VMware ESX/ESXi?

According to EMC this “adaptive queue depth” setting is not yet supported (June 2013). The full article can be found on this link. It is known as Primus solution id emc279718.

My advice would be not to use this setting until EMC certifies this setting for use with their arrays.

The exact Article is as follows:

What is the recommended LUN queue depth throttling in VMware ESX/ESXi?
 
  • Need to know QFullThreshold,QFullSampleSize & Queue Fulls values for VMware.
  • Host Connectivity Guide does not include any standard values.
  • Performance issues.
 
OS: VMware ESX / ESXi
Product: CLARiiON / Symmetrix and I assume VNX as well
 
According to Engineering, enabling the adaptive queue depth algorithm is NOT documented in the Host Connectivity Guide or the EMC Support Matrix.
The recommendation is to use the default setting which is disable adaptive queue depth.
Additional checks with E-Lab VMware quality engineers, E-Lab testing is done with the default setting.
 
See emc274169 for additional information and or changes.  Also see these two documents on support pages support.emc.com or Powerlink.Using EMC VNX Storage with VMware VsphereUsing EMC Clariion Storage with Vmware Vsphere & VMware Infracture Version 4.0

ASP Announces Ten Winners for ‘Best Web Support Sites of 2013’

Posted by on June 24, 2013 No comments

The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) announced this year’s winners of its 16th annual “Ten Best Web Support Sites” competition, a prestigious award that showcases excellence in online service and support.

The 2013 winners include Check Point Software, Cisco Systems, EMC, Intel, Nokia, PTC, and Red Hat and three companies, Ancestry.com, TeamSupport and Tricentis. In addition, Check Point Software was named to the Web Support Hall of Fame, and another world-class support site, Cisco Systems, gained an additional Hall of Fame star.

Read the whole article here: http://bit.ly/17mMtsP

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