February 2010 Archives

Verify NetApp clusters with cf-config-check

February 22, 2010 By mike 3 Comments

A handy tool to use to verify the configuration of both NetApp controllers in a cluster is HA Configuration Checker. This tool will check licenses, network configuration and options on each system to make sure there isn’t a problem during a cluster takeover. Running the script is pretty simple, there is a .cgi and a .exe version.

By default it uses RSH to communicate to the NetApp controllers, personally I like to use SSH which just requires adding the -s into the command. Another thing to be aware of, if you don’t specify the user when using SSH it will use the username you are currently signed in with on the computer it is being run from. In my case that user doesn’t exist on the NetApp controllers so I used the root user.

Pretty helpful, and from this I can see I need to add a FlexClone license and fix my e0 interface or things depending on it may not work in a takeover situation.

NetApp System Manager can also do some basic alerting on issues like these as well, when I removed the FlexClone license from one of my filers you can see the on screen alert.

Bottom line: Make sure you don’t have mismatched configurations and when a cluster takeover happens you will be much happier.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, NetApp, ONTAP Tagged With: cluster, NetApp, ontap

Adding SSD to MacBook Pro – before and after

February 14, 2010 By mike 4 Comments

I have an older MacBook Pro (Model 2,2 or about 3 years old now, I had upgraded the hard drive awhile back from the stock 120gb drive to a Samsung 500gb drive. The drive was nice for being able to keep my iTunes library as well as my pictures (I have a SLR camera so lots and lots of RAW images) with me but I would get the “spinning beach ball” a lot and having VMware Fusion open would almost make the whole computer unusable.

I started looking at replacing the Samsung with a solid state drive, Chad Sakac had a really good blog post including some performance numbers on various SSD drives, I was originally leaning towards the 128gb Kingston SSDnow drive as it seemed to be one of the better price/gb SSD’s on the market.

I ended up going with an Intel one however, I really think Intel makes some of the best consumer SSD’s on the market right now. I picked up the 80gb X25-M G2 and had it installed in no time.

One thing to be aware of: My MBP is pretty old as I mentioned, and only supports SATA I.

I did a few before and after tests, one using Xbench for disk performance, and a few others simply documenting the boot up time as well as time to open Safari. Here were my results:

This is Xbench with my old hard drive, you can see random small block reads/writes were awful – both well below 1MB/sec

And now the Xbench results after installing the SSD

Pretty impressive improvement for the random reads/writes I would say but this was more impressive to me:

I ran 3 tests booting up my computer with my old hard drive, each time stopping it once the dock/system menu/desktop icons were loaded. During the 3 tests I recorded results of 58, 53 and 48 seconds for an average of about 53 seconds from pressing the power button to being fully booted.

I also ran a few tests with Safari, rebooting/clearing cache each time and seeing how long before it opened and was loaded on google. My results were 7, 17 and 12 seconds for an average of 12 seconds.

I ran the same tests after installing the SSD, for booting up I now was at 22, 21 and 21 seconds for an average of 21.3 seconds, almost 2.5 times faster!

The Safari test was quite a bit harder, basically I would say it started in 1 second each of the 3 times which would be 12 times faster then before.

And perhaps the most important thing, I can now easily run Fusion and all my Mac apps at the same time and still have a responsive system, just need to figure out how to store less junk on the drive now!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Filed Under: Mac OSX Tagged With: intel x25-m, osx, ssd

links for 2010-02-05

February 5, 2010 By mike Leave a Comment

Solution for “500 Internal Server Error” After Installing Some Plugins | MasterMind Blogger

500 Internal Server Error with Twitter Tools for WordPress

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed Under: Delicious Links

Maximum LUN resize limits on NetApp

February 4, 2010 By mike Leave a Comment

One thing to be aware of is there are limits to resizing a LUN, I’ve seen customers that will create a very small LUN thinking they can just grow that as big as they need to in the future. Due to the geometry of the LUN at the time it was created it can only be resized to a maximum of ~10 times the original size of the LUN.

One way to see this is at the command line, for the command to be available you need to run ‘priv set diag‘ and then you will have access to the ‘lun geometry‘ command. From there you can see the LUN size as well as the maximum LUN size that is available.

Here is a 10g LUN and I can see my maximum size available is 502gb, not exactly 10x but the reason for that is the lun geometry doesn’t change until you hit 50gb, so anything up to that point can be extended 10x the 50gb size.

Once I create a LUN of 51gb or larger the values for the SCSI geometry change and now my max resize is 1004gb, the 1004gb maximum is for lun sizes between 51g and 100g.