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An idea for File Integrity Monitoring a powered off View Gold Template

by on May 28, 2015 in Misc, NetApp, VMWare

Today I had an interesting question posed to me by a customer.

“What’s a way we can verify file integrity compliance of our VMware View gold image, at regular intervals, WITHOUT powering it on? Because powering it on would force us to recompose all VMs once it’s powered down again”

In order to verity file integrity of a VM, there will need to be a file integrity check at some point in time. [PCI DSS 11.5] This is not a point in doubt. The question arose regarding regular scheduled checks on file integrity, at a pre-set interval. That’s the key. They need to ensure it weekly or monthly.

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VMware NFS Datastore creation failure w/ OnTap 8.3 (aka NIS needs to die!)

by on January 19, 2015 in NetApp, VMWare

You’ve created datastores in VMware a thousand times before. This time is different. This time it failed to make it. You had just upgraded or installed a fresh shiny new Netapp OnTap clustered mode 8.3 system!

It doesn’t matter if you did it manually, or did it with VSC (Netapp’s Virtual Storage Console). It still failed to create.
NIS domain services could be messing you up!

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Quick Tip: Tuning many VMhosts for All Flash Arrays!

by on August 26, 2014 in NetApp, TIPS, VMWare

I needed a simple way to push some base tuning configurations to a large number of hosts in my lab.

Make this into a script called tune.sh. Update the naa.999 with the numbers your AFA SAN makes inside your vmware. (naa360 and others are common).

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Quick Tip: Powercli to switch all VMware LUNs to Round Robin

by on August 26, 2014 in Misc, Powershell, TIPS, VMWare

Just for my own notes and quick copy and paste in the future… how to single line switch all luns to round robin on their paths.

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Snippet: #1 emailed file of 2013: VM Snapshot age w/ powershell

by on January 6, 2014 in Code Snippets, VMWare

Of all the thousands of emails I sent to customers in 2013, I sent this code to most. I think I sent it to over 150 people last year.

People do a really crappy job of monitoring their backup applications, and if they have old snapshots in VMware. It doesn’t matter if you use Veeam, NetBackup, BEX, SMVI/VSC, manual scripts, or what. Anything that automatically makes snapshots and then deletes them has the chance to totally screw that crap up!

Biggest issues happen when snapshots aren’t cleaned up if they are left around.

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Filesystem Misalignment for dummies

by on August 27, 2013 in Misc, NetApp, VMWare, Words of Wisdom

OMFG BBQ SAUCE!

Me: “How many SAN IO Calls would you need to make to get File 1 for the Misaligned storage?”
Customer: 5
Me: “What about aligned?”
Customer: 2
Me: “What about File 2?”
Customer: 7
Me: “What about aligned?”
Customer: 2
Me: “How many tiny files, and fragments do you have on your fileservers?”
Customer: “Millions…”
Me: “Wouldn’t you like to save 2-4x or more IO calls and cache?”
Customer: “We love you, have our babies!”

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Tip #8: Set your damn host timeouts!

by on January 23, 2013 in Code Snippets, NetApp, TIPS, VMWare

I saw a question on LinkedIn on the Netapp group today.

“what is the downtime (in seconds) for a FAS2240 high-availability machine in case one controller fails and the other takes over? ”

My pre-first cup of coffee answer was less on the question, and more on proper upkeep of a system running on a SAN/NAS. Any SAN/NAS. Set your damn timeouts on your hosts!

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Tip #3: Adding additional networks to VMware Fusion 4/5

by on January 18, 2012 in Cisco, OSX, TIPS, VMWare

So, you are studying for a networking certification. Maybe CCNA or CCNP, maybe F5 or Juniper. You need multiple interfaces to run GNS3/Dynamips or your favorite networking tool. Alas, the default configuration of VMWare Fusion just has the basic VMnet1 and VMnet8. Here is how to fix that!

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