vSphere

As with anything in VMware there is the right way to do something and the wrong way to do it... or rather, there is the I slapped this together and it works way (the wrong way) or the best practice wont give you any trouble way (the correct way). So I am going to focus on right way to setup the Software iSCSI initiator setup in vSphere 4 with this post; yes it is true that you can simply right click the SWiSCSI device in vCenter (or the VIC) and click enable and give it a target to discover, and that may work for a while... but in reality there is a more complex and correct way to set the SWiSCSI up. read more

Meditech Magic originally written in the 1990's is one of those things that you would never think to virtualize. Why would you? It runs well on a Dell 2U server with a direct attached Power Vault and a direct attached tape drive. Sure that is early 1990's technology and it is probably time to replace your old servers with something made in the modern era to run this program from the 90's; but this is healthcare and margins are tight. So here is a rough how to guide on doing this... read more

In the past we have covered performance tweaks for the Initiator side, Linux OS tweaks, and networking speed tweaks; we have not covered the Target side though, and that is what we will do now. So read on for the details on how to optimize the IET.conf file to optimal performance. read more

After a lot of feedback on the first posting about the improved iSCSI performance in vSphere 4, I decided that I should re-test the values and see what performance I can get. So here it goes... read more

vSphere 4 introduced a new feature called Fault Tolerance this feature allows administrators to selectively choose a machine to protect against downtime and data loss. Even though HA will power up a machine after an ESX host failure, you can and will loose data since it is a hard crash and reboot of the guest machine. With FT you get zero data loss. read more

Today I should be finalizing my blog entries for:
-FT and how to enable it (posted)
-Cisco Nexus 1000v - What does it get me?
-vSphere Performance Tweaking
-Networking - The hard to find answers
and more...

We all got up early this morning to make it to the breakfast bar and to the Keynote on time... Hopefully the rumored ECM, Cisco, and VMware announcement. More to come soon... read more

Well tonight's update was supposed to be a nice long post about the Vendor booths and a smaller report on what I learned about the VCP test today... but I have sat here fighting with my MacBook for the last 2 hours; and I have an early session tomorrow morning, so the bigger update will be delayed until sometime tomorrow. Stay tuned for information from the KeyNote tomorrow morning. Night all.

In order to get the best performance from CentOS and the iSCSI deployment we recommend the following tweaks. These tweaks will give you the best performance for your iSCSI deployments. The network configuration can be used with NFS as is. Click to read more... read more

Recently I was asked to check the performance changes in the Software iSCSI initiator on vSphere 4, more specifically I was asked to check the differences between Jumbo Frames and non-Jumbo Frames. The results may actually shock you... read more