May 17, 2012

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More PS Fun : Fix vCenter Startup w/ PowerShell

March 2, 2011 By 3 Comments

More to come on this, but I am working more hands-on lately in my role as a vSpecialist. As part of this I am going to make an effort to post every *shortcut* I come up with along the way. And I love shortcuts…

So here is another PowerShell trick. As many of you have experienced. If you have a local SQL server installation (express or not) of vCenter you will sometimes have vCenter not start correctly on boot. This is do to a race condition between the SQL Server services and vCenter. If SQL doesn’t beat vCenter then vCenter will not start. The correct way to fix this is to setup the Dependencies with the vCenter VPXD service to wait till SQL has done its business first. There are actually several good articles out there on how to do this manually.

I don’t like to anything manually, so here is a PowerShell script to auto-detect and configure vCenter startup for local SQL installs. It is setup to work with SQL server or SQL server express. I think I got all bases covered but you can easily customize as you like (or use on other services). [Read more...]

Filed Under: EMC, Scripts, Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

PowerCLI and VAAI : Quick and dirty script

March 1, 2011 By 3 Comments

How can you enable or disable VAAI across all the ESX hosts in a cluster through a script? This question was tossed up on the vSpecialist email list this afternoon by our fearless leader.

Having just played with this I thought I would share my quick and dirty PowerCLI code. This basically asks for your vCenter URL and then asks whether you want to disable or enable across all ESX hosts within that vCenter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: EMC, Life/Work, Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,

Virtual Selection : Cloud Constructs for Rapid Prototyping/Testing

February 16, 2011 By 19 Comments

Check out that title. Pretty awesome way to sound smart, right? Well this blog post is another one of my long winded ones and concerns my recent 6 week side-project. So a little warning in advance: This is a long read and a minder-bender in spots. Have a hot or cool drink and some time before you start. I think you will enjoy the ending.

The Idea

I am a firm believer that virtualization and cloud computing are creating new paradigms to approach innovation, operation, and execution within information technology. I find myself inspired by ideas and concepts that would be impossible before the advent of virtualization as a common approach to logical abstraction of x86 compute, storage, and networking. In my feeble mind, I see endless possibilities not only in automation. I also see possibilities in creating intelligent systems; able to respond in way much more organic that we may have thought possible.

It is from this belief that this new idea came to me. The lifecycle of applications and infrastructure has been both very a manual and managed process. Creation, changes, and death (decommissioning) are all things that can be automated; but require prerequisite knowledge to orchestrate correctly. You would specifically know the quantity, scope, and configuration of physical or virtual servers prior to building for an application. Likewise, configured settings and metadata for the application would have been tested and discovered through intense integration and regression cycles by development/quality teams beforehand. All of this would be wrapped around processes and models (ITIL, COBIT) with the goal of ensuring control and accountability.

And I am not proposing that the model above is inherently wrong. Rather, I just think that it may be possible we are missing opportunities for the infrastructure to work for us.

virtselect [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Slider_Featured, Tools, VirtualAppliances Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The VCE Model : Yes, it is different

January 22, 2011 By 12 Comments

This post comes out of a slide deck I authored last week for a partner event. I decided I was going to try and illustrate why the VCE model really is such a different approach to other datacenter and private cloud models.

Normally my blog is light on vendor specific commentary. I see myself more as a virtualization geek who just happens to work for an awesome company (EMC) than a hardcore analysis/blogger. But I have seen so much messaging lately that distorts the VCE message, I really felt the need to offer my own perspective. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Commentary, EMC, Featured, Slider_Featured Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lights, Camera, Replication : UBER SRM Video Guide

October 7, 2010 By 25 Comments

3 weeks is a long time to work on something. I think that is longer than any Celerra VSA revision, tool, or project I have worked on since EMCWorld. It is funny really. Doing this video helped me find two different bugs with the Celerra UBER VSA (see here & here) and a discover a bug with the Celerra Replicator SRA (here). The results are though are worth it.

Below you will find a video on how to build a complete UBER VSA 3.2 / SRM 4.1 lab using VMware Workstation. This tutorial will walk you through the install of the VSA’s, SRM, plug-ins, networking, storage configuration, mounting to ESXi, configuring SRM with the Celerra Replicator SRA, and finally testing and running a live failover. This includes both NFS and iSCSI configurations and the final test shows you how to setup SRM to failover both NFS and iSCSI datastores within the same configuration.

I am not kidding when I say this was a lot of work. And I have taken a different approach to making a technical tutorial video than most. My goal was to make this somewhat interesting and as short as possible given the amount of config. Hopefully I will make you crack a smile. Even with cutting out loading screens and how fast I talk, this still weighs in at a pretty long length (1 hour 13+ min.). I am pretty sure I can build this in my sleep now and as great as both products are, I am going to do something else for a while to remember why I like being a geek :)

This is a video tutorial on how to configure a lab using the EMC Celerra UBER VSA (virtual storage appliance) and VMware’s SRM (Site Recovery Manager). This will show you how to configure all aspects including networking, ESX, VCenter, SRM, replication, NFS, iSCSI, and more.

Hopefully this guide helps those that would like to setup SRM in their own labs and will show them how to use the free Celerra UBER VSA to do this easily. Great tool for the VMware SRM-curious.

This is the first effort of this type I have attempted so feedback is appreciated. I am sure I made mistakes in my play-by-play so forgiveness is cool too :)

Comments = possible free beers later. And I will see some of you peeps next week at VMworld Europe!

Thanks,

.nick

Filed Under: Celerra VSA, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Smoothed Edges : Celerra UBER VSA Update v3.1

September 30, 2010 By 11 Comments

It came to my attention pretty quick that something was amiss with the last Celerra VSA UBER release. I heard strange stories of disks not adding and the OVA not deploying. Since this thing is drawing close on a couple thousand downloads some environmental, transfer, and operational bugs/errors will cause problems.

But I finally nailed this down myself when I was doing my iSCSI testing. I had run into a SRM bug (see post here) this week. And as I was parsing the logs I noticed a couple lines that confirmed it. There was definitely a bug as iSCSI objects were not pulling the new instantiated ID that is created with the wizard.

So after 8 hours or so of diving through and reversing engineering I finally found the culprit. It went all the way back to the original build I get from engineering. I wrote a patch, tested against my running VSA’s, and confirmed I had the fix. But while I was about rebuilding the VSA’s I decided to do a couple more things that didn’t make the last list. Here is the running list of changes:

bugs-dessin-011

  1. Bugfix: Passphrase for peer connections is will now save correctly. This is related to the ID bug. Before if you rebooted the VSA replications (NFS or iSCSI) would no longer work.
  2. Bugfix: iSCSI replication now creates LUN’s and Replication sessions with proper naming ID’s.
  3. Bugfix: NTP settings for Data Mover will update time during wizard immediately to correct large skew.
  4. Bugfix: Either SCSI or IDE disks will add correctly to automatic volumes now. This was a random error for some installs.
  5. VSA is now a fresh built VM (Hardware version 7). This cleans up the VMX considerably.
  6. OVA is now built from OVFTOOL 2.01. I tested deployments through Standalone Converter and VI Client deploy.
  7. Downloads now also have MD5 hashes available to verify no errors/changes in transit. I highly recommend checking the MD5 as several people have gotten bit errors from our FTP.
  8. Confirmed both the current Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plug-in and Celerra NFS plug-in works great with VSA. Videos soon with config.

 

 

Here are the new downloads for 3.1. I recommend replacing all previous versions of 3.0:

Now get to downloading… (***UPDATE links below are the updated 3.2 version fixing 3.1 bugs. ****) – LINK

Workstation Version
(MD5: a2136179d4d9544e4f8e3b43b7cc182e)

vSphere Version OVA
(MD5: c3d8abfb536aecca34c83d318c2c3e5f)

.nick

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.  ~Salvador Dali

Filed Under: Celerra VSA, VirtualAppliances Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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