More success with vSphere

Over the last couple of days I have been putting in another vSphere solution and yet again another saticfied customer. This was a good one as they had ESXi 3 with local storage, so I have upgrade them to vSphere enterprise with almost no downtime.

Exchange 2007 ahhhhh

Microsoft seem to have broken there email server product, I have been doing an upgrade over the last week or so from 2003 to 2007 SP1 and I have to say the new version is a real bag of spanners everything is so difficult on this version. I had to do something today that on 2003 was so easy (publish OWA with ISA) and good why is everyhing so different and difficult.


-- Posted from my iPhone

So older versions of ESX will not mix

So this week we have discovered that vSphere is not compatable with the older versions of ESX. It only supports version 2.5.5 and we need it to run with 2.5.2, I guess it will run but not supported in my opinion we need to get off the 2.5 platform all together and get to version 3.0.3 at the latest.


-- Posted from my iPhone

So Apple don't get it right every time.

So last week along with many other people upgradeded my iPhone to the new OS version 3.1 as well as iTunes 9. But what I found after the upgrade was that after syncing the iPhone all my music and podcasts all vanished but still taking 5.9 Gb of the storage. What I didn't realise was that at the point of upgrading iTunes I also installed something called the iPhone configuration utility and that seems to be the cause of the issue, well all I can say is that I removed the thing and then the phone seems to be working again.


-- Posted from my iPhone

More on the LeftHand VSA

So today went back to look at the issues I was having with the VSA's and I think that I have found the issue that took down the ESX cluster.
The issues seems to have been caused by the network card used for the management network getting swamped by the iSCSI traffic, so to fix that I Logged onto the console on the ESXi using the support secret way then setting the correct vmk links to use iSCSI protocol. So even though the VSA did not need MPIO setting up the ESX did to allocate the network links correctly.
I still have an issue with the procesor on the VSA's as they will only run with a single vCpu and one of the VSA's with a fast smart controller is running out of gas when cloning a server.

-- Posted from my iPhone

LeftHand VSA's and iSCSI

Well this week I have had the pleasure to be working with both the LeftHand VSA and iSCSI NOT. If there was the correct documentation with respect to installation on vSphere then that would help, but as it turns out iSCSI is not as easy as you would think so.

LeftHand P4000 VSA

Well today I have been implementing a solution with the HP Lefthand VSA and I have to say very impressed. Although I first saw the product over 3 years ago and liked it back then this is the first time I have used it in production.
Will be back there on Monday as I need to test the performance with IO Meter the solution involves 2 VSA's replicating on local storage but being an iSCSI San (very cleaver), so will keep you informed on the performance.

Spence....

What, a difference 6 Months makes.

So from all I can see there has not really been that much of a change in the last 6 months in the VMware camp. I was in Canne in Febuary and they seem to be showing many of the same technologies that we saw then at vmworld at the moment.
Yes they do have some new technology but this seems to all have been bought from elsewhere like the virtual profile software from RPO, I do understand that given the speed at which the industry is moving then partnerships are important but can they not do more themselves.

Spence....

I'm glade I saved my money on a plane flight.

Well VMworld has got under way today and I have to say that I'm glade I didn't make the effort to go. From the blogs I have seen there has been very little to take much not of, as I had thought all about the vClould and a lot of valour ware.

There has been some stuff on PCoIP but not really in any deepth, and nothing so far on the client hypervisor (they need to get a move on with this as Citrix will have there's out before Christmas).

Spence.....