Tag Archives: vmware

FYI: Cisco UCS doesn’t work with VVOLs oob

by on January 25, 2018 in Cisco, Pure

FYI, ran into an issue tonight working with VVOLs.

I had just upgraded my PureStorage array to Purity 5 GA release and wanted to jump into VVOLs on my lab.

Customers will not be able to use vvols unless they manually install FNIC driver 1.6.0.33 or higher.

VVOLs are not supported on any VICs with the drivers installed from the current Cisco-branded v6.5 and 6.5U1 ESXi ISOs.

This is Cisco bug CSCux64473 Specific cause is because included driver did not support “Secondary LUN IDs”.

If a customer tries, their Protocol Endpoint will just never show up.

https://bst.cloudapps.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCux64473/?referring_site=bugquickviewredir

Symptom: UCS server with VIC adapter does not support VMware Virtual Volume feature
Conditions: When attempting to access Virtual Volume from UCS servers installed with VIC card.
Workaround: Virtual volume is not supported on any the VIC cards / FNIC drv ( Their but report isn’t totally true, I tested 1.6.0.36 driver and it worked great!)

  1. Latest driver release does work:
    https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX60-CISCO-FNIC-16036&productId=491

 

Now, after updating the driver and rebooting my servers, VVOLs is working awesome!

PureStorage does VVOLS right!

 

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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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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.

Click to continue reading “Snippet: #1 emailed file of 2013: VM Snapshot age w/ powershell”

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Riverbed Steelhead & Netapp Snapmirror – OMFG Happiness!

by on April 11, 2013 in Misc, NetApp, Riverbed

Riverbed Steelhead EX

Recently I did a deployment where a great and awesome longtime customer added a new site in Canada. I flew up to Canuckland to install new VMware servers, new Netapp 2240, and a Riverbed Steelhead. There was a partner Riverbed Steelhead here in PA at the customers office. This was a great deployment. Once I got everything worked out and configured, their WAN got a major injection of Honey BooBoos GoGoJuice.

How much faster? Optimization quickly jumped up to 97% WAN reduction and a 23.6X increase in throughput!!!!

743Mb/s LAN throughput, fitting into 55Mb/s WAN bandwidth!!

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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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