How to create a volume on NetApp

From the Volumes list, click on the Create button.

The “Create Volume” dialog box will pop up, as shown below.

The name cannot include space or other special characters, except underscore.

You much choose the protocol type at this level. So this requires some planning.

Normally, I’d dedicate 20% of space for snapshot. I like this feature that the usable disk space is automatically reduced, as that means I don’t have to worry about the snapshot taking up space beyond the allocated volume.

 

 

The “Storage Efficiency” tab lets you do the dedupe and compression. Since my case is a demo lab, so I’ve turned on all features. Yes, the lab is live, but then that’s how we learn right J

 

 

How to delete a volume in NetApp

Here is the step to delete volume using the NetApp System Manager.

 

From the Volumes list, click the Volume you need to delete.

Click Delete.

 

In the above case, since the volume is offline, you will get a warning. So we need to bring the volume offline first. To do that, choose Status à Offline.

And once you bring it offline, you can delete it.

NetApp: enabling features with System Manager

How do you enable FC or iSCSI features in NetApp with System Manager?

 

I was trying to find out why I could not create a FC Volume on my newly setup NetApp. The only option was NFS. I checked the Protocols section in tree, and it was only showing NFS and CIFS.

To show the other protocols, do this:

1.       Go to the System Tools à Licenses section.

2.       Click on the FC/FCoE line.

3.       Click Enable link at the bar. Wait for a few seconds, and it will be enabled.

4.       Do the same for the iSCSI line.

As you can see from the picture below, I now have FC/FCoE and iSCSI under the Protocols section.

 

Can you storage vMotion the vCenter VM itself?

I got a question from customer on that. Interesting question, and my thought is it should be, as it’s transparent to it. The operation done by the storage vMotion, is independent of the operation used by vCenter to do its management (e.g. monitoring hosts). I don’t think vpxd and vpxa will be affected.

 

Anyway, since I needed to upgrade the lab (NetApp & EMC are upgrading their respective arrays. Thank you William, Ken, Scott!), I had to move a lot of VM. Below is the core infrastructure. The lab is called VMSG, stands for VMware Singapore.

So I did storage vMotion for all the VMs below. It took some time, as I’s migrating multiple VMs (I let them run in parallel, in queue).

 

The vCenter is called VMSG-VC-004, and I moved it from an NFS datastore to the ESXi local datastore.

 

 

Bootcamp pre-requisites

For the awesome geeks :-) attending the deep dive at Bali, please come prepared. You will get more if you're prepared. Here is the minimum requirements:

1. Go through the vCenter Operation Links at the front page of my blog.
2. Install & Configure VC Ops at your lab
3. Install & Configure Chargeback at your lab

See you all in Bali!

vCenter Operations 5: ideal screen resolution

The screenshots below is based on Full HD resolution. So hopefully this helps in justifying why you need a nice 24” screen monitor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

vCenter Operations and lots of VM

The screenshot belows show vCenter Operations 5 managing a large environment. It has >2000 powered on VM and >7000 powered off VM, total almost 9500 VM. It spans 4 vCenters, so each of them is averaging 2500 VM. vCenter Operations makes it easy for you to see the health, workload, faults etc at a glance across all these objects. Visually, you can tell which ESXi host is not healthy, or unable to cope, or having faults.

 

 

 

 

vSphere HA: isolation, partition and failure

I needed to internalise the above, so I made this diagram. The actual process is certainly more comprehensive than this. I need to keep the chart simpler so I can remember it.

The main lesson for me is Isolation is no longer a big deal in 5.0, because of datastore heartbeating.

 

Below is the process for a single Slave host. The process starts with the slave not getting the heartbeat from its master, which it should get every second.

 

Below is the process from the Master point of view. There are 2 processes here, as a master carries 2 roles. Besides being a master, it also runs VM just like any other Slave. A master receives heartbeat from all its slaves, so if any of the heartbeat is received, that means the master is not isolated. It might be partitioned, but definitely not isolated.

The bottom process above is for Failure of a slave. If a master does not receive heartbeat from a slave, it will check for datastore heartbeat file. It will also ping the host IP address. The ping and the heartbeat go through the same network. A situation where ping might work but no network heartbeat is the FDM agent failure itself.

If the datastore heartbeat file is not updated by the slave, then the slave is assumed dead.

Capacity Planning: Projecting for 1 year

As part of annual planning, you normally need to project for next year. vCenter Operations 5 lets you see next year projection.

 

To do that, you need to change the timeline in Configuration dialog box. The default setting is Weekly. In the screenshot below, I’ve changed the “Summary trend intervals” to Yearly.

In the report internal, you can also set it to Yearly, so the Report show next year too.

 

So in the above screenshot, I’ve set it to Yearly. As a result, the Summary page changed. Instead of seeing “Next Half Year” column, you will see “Next Year”. I’ve highlighted

 

The above screenshot shows from “Remaining” perspective. What if you want to see the other side, which is from deployed perspective? You can do that by selecting Deployed from the perspective field.

You will notice that the columns show “Last 2 years” instead. If I set the configuration to be Daily, then this column would be “Last 2 days” instead.

 

vCenter Operations 5

Links to the various posts on vCenter Operations 5:

• A technical introduction to management in the virtual world
• How to create a hard or static threshold
• Concept: Demand and Supply
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