The new VSI plugin from EMC allow VMware administrator to self service, manage and provide transparency and visibility about the back end SAN storage in the vSphere infrastructure. This had transformed the traditional way how the VMware administrator manage and operate the virtual infrastructure in the past. All of us may agreed that the SAN configuration details are not visible to us previously due to lack of visibility in the management console. If you would like to verify something on the SAN, you may require assistant from the SAN admin, due to restricted access to the SAN box. Now with the new VSI plug-in, it will able to provide the necessary configuration information to the VMware administrator without having to engage the SAN admin to verify some minor information. The VSI plugin support all platform for EMC product range include Clariion, Celerra and Symmetrix.
Here show the plug-in which integrated the the vi-client directly
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I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.
I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here. Read more »
Recently I had gone through a lot of posts from the internet as well as some discussion I had with the persons I met, some of them are concerns about the increasing number of virtual machines into a single physical host which generally putting too much eggs in 1 bucket. They could be right in certain extend, but I will not say they are absolutely correct. They are few missing items that they had forgotten how the IT suppose to run before the virtualization came in to the market with all the capabilities they demostrated VS traditional physical systems.
You may have 30 to 50 VMs into single host today due to high density server with more CPU core or more memory per single system. In the next second, you may face the hardware failure on 1 of the host, there will be around 50 VMs down at 1 time and require another 20 mins before all the virtual machine could be successful restarted on the surviving host. Some of them may consider this is high impact, therefore you decide to restrict the number of virtual machine in single host around 10 to 20 VM per ESX. What happen next, the TCO is high, and ROI is not efficient. Is a tough point for most administrators to choose in this scenario. I will urge you to backward a little bit and look at the scenerio again. Before Virtualization, all the business system that only invested with standalone server without physical clustering, they do not entitle any HA as the aware off. If they want a HA in physical system, they will had to invest extra CAPEX and OPEX to maintain a same set of hardware and operating system, just for failover purpose. Again, even the operating system clustering does not provide 100% uptime.
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Recently I had deployed quite a number of EMC SAN with MDS Switches and Cisco UCS, I found tha FC SAN zoning might be a key consideration we may need to take a look for every deployment. This post will more focus on the MDS and UCS 6120 FC Uplink.
Cisco UCS interconnect fabric switches are utilizing FC uplink to allow the Cisco Unified Computing System to get access to the SAN fabric environment.
Here is the architecture diagram you can refer to. In order to make this work, 1st requirement will be the NPIV.
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There are always challenges to match the Raw Device Mapping in VMware to the actual physical LUN from SAN storage. For current ESX 3.5 U3, what we had done to manage our RDM is all depend on the LUN name which presented at the management console from our EMC storage, and the LUN ID which publish at the vCenter management interface. In vCenter, there are numbers of LUNs presented to each ESX server which will be provided a unique LUN ID for each of the LUN. These LUN IDs should able to be match with the Host ID from the EMC navisphere web management GUI interface. At the same time, we had renamed the LUN to match with the virtual machine or ESX hosts which connecting to the LUNs for tracking and management purpose. These allow us to keep track every LUN been assigned to our Virtual Infrastructure.
In vSphere, the next version of ESX server, VMware had included the new features, which provide capability to rename the device’s name for each of the LUN been presented to the ESX hosts. This will provide alternative to keep track the physical LUNs which presented to ESX hosts and VMs too.
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