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Some Pics from VMworld Day 3

September 1, 2010 By mike View Comments

The labs were packed and my sessions I wanted to hit weren’t until this afternoon so I decided to get out and try and get some pictures of VMworld before it was too late. All of the labs were in Moscone West building, the lines were pretty long already at 9am:

This is a shot of the registration area, I checked in on Sunday – the lines were pretty long but moved quickly.

This is a shot of the Roadside stop that had snacks and pop:

Note to my employer: I did not blow off VMworld to try and get into the Apple announcement today:

Everybody is trying to figure it out:

Xsigo was giving away a ride in your choice of 3 sports cars, here was the Bugatti:

That is it for now! Back to the labs for me.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, VMworld 2010 Tagged With: vmworld

VMworld 2010 Keynote

August 31, 2010 By mike View Comments

The keynote was Tuesday morning and started out with a video asking “what is cloud” highlighting the fact that there isn’t a real definition of a cloud. The video made a reference to a cloud being like a pizza place – if you don’t have a kitchen at home you can use a dumb device (in this case a phone) to order your pizza.

The first speaker VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer who gave some stats on VMworld. This year there was 17,021 attendees and of those 55 have been to every VMworld since the inaugural one back in 2004. This year instead of having all the equipment onsite they are using a private cloud: some of it is onsite, some is at Terremark and some with Verizon. They are deploying 4000 virtual machines per hour from this hybrid cloud.

Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware, spoke next and described the 3 phases of the IT journey. He said phase 1 is about IT production and focusing on hardware efficiency. Virtualizing things like file, print and web servers. Phase 2 was about the business resiliency core apps and finally phase 3 is having ITaaS agility and being able to enable the business. As we go through the phases, being able to migrate a workload from one virtual datacenter to another is important. With secure hybrid cloud computing you can migrate your workload from your virtual datacenter to a service provider cloud.

Finally Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, spoke about some of the new maximums in vSphere 4.1 which was released recently. He focused on increased vMotion performance and how this is important when we are migrating workloads. Some of the other new features to 4.1 are being able to place shares on storage and network resources and VAAI which I hope to blog on in more depth later.

One acquisition he mentioned was Integrien, which offers proactive analysis for VMware environments.

Another announcement was what was formally called Project Redwood is now VMware vCloud Director (also planning on blogging on this more later). He also mentioned the new vShield products which I had touched on in my previous post for a VMware View session I was in.

Finally Steve mentioned there is a new program called vCloud Datacenter Service which will have 5 partners at launch: Bluelock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark, and Verizon. More information about this is available by clicking here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, VMworld 2010 Tagged With: vmworld

VMworld 2010 Day 1 Recap

August 31, 2010 By mike View Comments

Sessions
The sessions were a little different this year as many have already noted. You didn’t need to register for a session, just show up and get in. After my first session I didn’t stand a chance on getting into my sessions I was hoping for and by that time it was too late to get to the others as well. Personally I would have preferred it like it has been other years – having to register before the event but knowing you will be able to get to the sessions you want. Having been to a VMworld before I wasn’t too disappointed by not getting into the sessions as I realized all the sessions will be available online and the true value of VMworld isn’t in the sessions (more on that later in this post).
Labs
The labs were great, albeit slow. I spent 43 minutes in the morning trying to get the installer to get to the license agreement step for the installer which was like step 2. I ended up leaving and coming back later to finish up. I did 2 labs today (was there 3 times, but had to finish the one I couldn’t my first time) and I think there is definitely value in doing the labs. Since the labs aren’t available post VMworld I think I will be spending more time in there and less time in sessions. These pictures don’t quite do justice to the size of the lab area but hopefully they can give a rough idea:

People
I can’t even begin to describe the people here, I have met some of the best VMware people that are out there and what really struck me is how friendly everyone is. There isn’t anywhere around Moscone you can go and not be able to strike up an impromptu virtualization discussion. I also thought it was funny how many of the MN VMUG people I have met for the first time while in San Francisco. I can’t say enough good things about the networking that is available at VMworld – worth the ticket price alone. As a side note, if you read this and I haven’t met you yet – shoot me an email, leave a comment on the post or preferably send me a tweet on Twitter.

That covers it for Monday, hard to believe it’s only the first day.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, VMworld 2010 Tagged With: vmworld

VMworld Here I Come

August 29, 2010 By mike View Comments

Sitting in the MSP airport waiting for my flight out to SFO for VMworld. I think I have technology covered to be able to blog throughout the event – I packed the following:

@aarondelp

@toudin

@colinmcnamara

I land in SFO around 1pm and am planning on making it over to the Moscone to register and pick up my bag so I don’t have to do that tomorrow morning and then the VMworld Fun Run after that. Oh and hopefully there is some time in there to eat as well…

Now to sit and think about what I forgot to pack.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, VMware, VMworld 2010

Adding Native NetApp Storage to V-Series

July 23, 2010 By mike View Comments

One thing to be aware of if you are adding NetApp storage to the V-Series controller – you need to check the environment settings for fc-non-array-adapter. The value for this setting is the port name that connects to locally attached (eg NetApp disk) storage. If you don’t do this you risk panicking BOTH filers (if it isn’t set and you connect the loop into both controllers). Without this properly set the panic message you may receive is:

PANIC: sanown: received add for already known disk in process sanown_notify……

In order to check this setting you need to do a cf takeover and press ctrl-c on the other node to bring it to the loader prompt. From there run printenv and look for the value of fc-non-array-adapter. For this customer the value was 1a,2a,1b,2b because there was 2 multi path loops of NetApp FC disk. 1c and 2c were used for non-NetApp storage that was presented to the V-Series so those ports didn’t need to be listed. To add a loop of SATA I had to add 1d and 2d in there as well.

fc-non-array-adapter "1a,2a,1b,2b,1d,2d"

followed by

boot_ontap

I assume the reason this setting may seem “backwards” is because prior to 7.3 you weren’t able to connect NetApp shelves to a V-Series controller so by default it assumes the initiator ports are connecting to other vendors. It’d be nice if in the future you can hot add a NetApp shelf without needing to do a cluster failover to check/change the environment variable.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, V-Series Tagged With: NetApp, v-series

NetApp Flash Cache and 64 bit Aggregates

May 26, 2010 By mike View Comments

I was talking with a local NetApp SE the other day and the subject came up about the Flash Cache (formerly Performance Acceleration Module, or PAM) card and 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8.0 The issue, he told me, is that currently the Flash Cache cards are not compatible with 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 – however they do work with 32 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 and of course in ONTAP 7G.

I wasn’t able to find anything on the NOW site to confirm or deny this, he mentioned this only affected the newer PCIe based Flash Cache cards (256GB and 512GB) the older, original PAM card (16GB) does work with 64bit aggregates.

The only thing I can find on the NOW site that talks about 64bit aggregates with PAM is from TR-3786:

10.6 PERFORMANCE ACCELERATION MODULE

A Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) can optimize the performance of your random read intensive workloads such as file services and messaging. PAM works with 64-bit aggregates as well as 32-bit aggregates and caches data that is coming from volumes located in both types of aggregates. PAM caches data based on data access regardless of the aggregate type.

The data cached in PAM while the system is in operation depends on the workload, and it can be a combination of data from volumes contained in different aggregates. There is no way to let PAM cache data only from a particular aggregate type. As noted in other sections of this document, 64-bit aggregates have a bigger address space and also take more memory for their metadata than 32-bit aggregates. This might reduce the total amount of effective data that can be cached in PAM when used with 64-bit aggregates present in the system.

However since they are referring to it as PAM and not Flash Cache I’m not sure if they are talking about the 16GB card that the NetApp SE said would still work or if this document is saying the newer card will work too and just hasn’t been updated to reflect the new product name. Anyone out there able to shed some light on this? I would love to know the details.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, NetApp, ONTAP

How I’ve Used My iPad

May 9, 2010 By mike View Comments

I’ve had my iPad now since April 30th, and I have to say – I’m using it a lot more then I thought I would be. It’s hardly out of my hands when I’m at home. I had both a Kindle 2 and a Kindle DX but returned both as I wasn’t satisfied with the PDF support. When I saw iAnnotate PDF for iPad I knew I’d be buying one. I knew when I got it I’d be using it to read a lot (Instapaper, GoodReader etc, all things I do now with my iPhone) but I didn’t realize how much I’d use it for other things.

Apps I Use

Evernote: synchronize notes/recordings/screenshots with iPad/iPhone/Mac
iSSH: Allows me to SSH into my home lab, I like iSSH because it’s for both iPhone and iPad. This is one app where not having arrow keys is a PITA. I haven’t tried connecting an external keyboard yet (I have the older Apple Bluetooth keyboard which apparently is not supported) to see if the arrow keys work then.
Instapaper: LOVE this app, install a bookmarklet in your browser and it will convert it to a nice and easy to read version. Also works on both iPhone/iPad
Wyse PocketCloud: Lets me connect to VMware View environments (as well as RDP). Works much better then a lot of the other RDP apps I had tried, but it still takes 10x longer to do things then just using an actual computer
iAnnotate PDF: This was one of the apps I was most looking forward to, being able to highlight and make notes in PDF and them send them back to myself. Unfortunately the interface isn’t really the best and I find myself just using GoodReader instead
GoodReader: Great PDF reader and supports connecting to Dropbox
NewsRack: RSS Reader that syncs with Google Reader. I use Reeder on my iPhone which I love but unfortunately they don’t have an iPad version. NewsRack is a good alternative (and has an iPhone version as well).
1Password: Great for securely storing logins (work, personal, home lab), WIFI connection info, etc. iPhone and iPad versions
Wolfram Alpha: I end up using this a lot as a calculator but it’s also nice to be able to do quick conversions with – downside of course is it requires internet access to use. I wouldn’t consider this a must have but it’s a nice app.
SharePlus: I’m only using the free version but it works really nice for connecting to our corporate SharePoint site, I can view MS Office docs with it (although it was a little tricky to figure out how to do this!). v2 Should have editing support as well. Viewing SharePoint calendars does not work well at all, it just displays them in a large list and seems to be sorted by when the event was added to SharePoint, not when it actually occurs.
PaperDesk: I looked at quite a few note taking apps and kind of settled on this one, I wanted one that can do more then just write (eg Penultimate) and the latest update has the ability to use the VGA adapter and display the whiteboard on a projector. I don’t like that you can’t just make text boxes wherever you want, you are stuck in a word processing mode (Sundry Notes can do this) which can be a pain if you use text notes and diagrams together. Note: I just started using Notetaker HD which deals with handwriting a little better in my opinion (there is an entry box at the bottom instead of writing directly on the page).
Videos: This is just the default app that comes with the iPad but I love that I can have all of my TrainSignal, VMworld, NetApp Insight etc videos on here. I tried this with my iPhone but the screen is just too small for a lot of the presentations.

Apps I’d Like

Tweetie: Love this app on my iPhone but I personally don’t like any of the current native iPad Twitter clients.
Delicious: I use delicious.com quite a bit for my bookmarking and it’d be nice to see a native app for this too, for now I’ve just been using the web interface which can get the job done.
Skype: I use the iPhone version of it now but I’d love a native Skype (especially one that supports push notifications). The microphone on the iPhone headphones works with the iPad (and it obviously has Bluetooth) which could make for a great VoIP solution – and just think if iPad v2 has a front facing camera
OmniOutliner: This app is on its way from what I read on their blog but I still can’t wait. I use this app all the time on my MBP.
OmniFocus: Currently using the iPhone version of it but I’d love to get a more desktop like iPad version, I use OF pretty heavily with my GTD setup

Features I’d Like

Better support for getting data between apps, example: GoodReader can tie into mail so I can open attachments in GoodReader which is great, however I wish I could then save it to Dropbox without needing to use my laptop. I’d love to be able to save from iAnnotate PDF directly to my Dropbox account (and really this could be solved if Dropbox had an email address associated with your account similar to Evernote).

Accessories I Use

I had a hard time finding a case I liked, I purchased the Apple case but I personally am not a fan. The edges are a little “odd” and I wanted something that could hold a few business cards, business receipts etc. I finally found this case on Amazon and though I haven’t received it yet I think it will be what I’m looking for:

Zippered case so I don’t lose anything
Pockets for receipts and business cards
Spot to keep a Pogo Stylus

I didn’t go for any type of iPad specific dock or stand, instead I went with a study stand which seems to work just fine and cost around $5.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Filed Under: Apple, Featured, iPad Tagged With: Apple, iPad

Verify NetApp clusters with cf-config-check

February 22, 2010 By mike View 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.