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huwy
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Q's on setting up new ESX infrastructure and equallogic SAN

Hi All,

I've recently setup 3 new ESX v4 servers and an equallogic ps4000x SAN. These are connected via 2 dell powerconnect 4524 switches. If you want to critique my setup I have added attachments detailing the layout. I'd be interested if anyone has comments on my setup.

Anyway I'm at the stage where I can start virtualizing servers. What I'm unsure about is the best way to setup ESX/VMs to take advantage of Equallogic's snapshot technology. We are likely to buy the symantec backupexec agent in the future so it makes sense to set them up correctly now.

I can't seem to find any documents on how to set this up so I wondered if anyone had any suggestions? I will be virtualising exchange and SQL servers amongst others.

I anyone has any suggestions or can point me in the right direction I'd be very grateful.

Cheers,

Huwy

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TxTechLaw
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We are using the latest ASM VE, it's slick, more scheduling flexibility than the EQL GUI. I did some test restores of VMs and datastores to other datastores, over themselves, etc, ASM worked well. The previous version looked kinda clunky, but 2.0 allows you to selectively restore individual VMs, rather than an entire datastore, so a big advance over the old version.

Please let us know the BackupExec works out, we are looking at that also.

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weinstein5
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Are you referring to Auto Snapshot Manager for VMware edition? - http://www.equallogic.com/partnerships/default.aspx?id=6523

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couak
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take a look at this paper : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/poweredge_vsphere_virtualization.pdf

especially page 10, 11 and 12 : it's about iSCSI multi-pathing configuration and fail-over

Your current storage network configuration is not proof against a failure on your on-board network adapters (usually marked as from vmnic0 to vmnic4)

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huwy
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Thanks for your input couak.

I actually have 2 onboard NICs and a 4-port network card. For the 2 iSCSI adapters 1 is onboard and the other is from the 4-port network card - I assume this is ok.

I have teamed the adapters in vSwitch0 as shown in the attachment. I haven't teamed the iSCSI adaptors as I don't know if this is a good idea with the equallogic SAN. Does this seem ok to you?

Cheers,

H

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huwy
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Thanks weinstein.

I will checkout the ASM for vmware. However on the same site I found a document for setting up equallogic/backupexec which seems to cover what I'm looking for. Will do some reading...

-H

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couak
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ok I believed that you own the lastest generation of poweredge (R710, R510, etc.) which they come with 4 onboard NIC adapters

you can also take a look on this paper for equallogic configuration with VMware : http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=8453

As explained in the paper you should create more than 1 VMKernel port in order to let VMware able to create more than 1 path and iSCSI session as well

huwy
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Thanks couak. That link was exactly what I was looking for.

I've now setup jumbo frames on ESX, configured 2 vmkernal ports on my iSCSI vSwitch and setup Round Robin paths to the data stores.

All looking good!

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couak
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remember to setup jumbo frame on your network switches and on your equallogic storage as well

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huwy
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Cheers. I've setup jumbo frames on the switches (dell powerconnect 5424s).

I haven't explicitly setup jumbo frames on the equallogic but if you look at the attachment it says the NICs on the equallogic box are operating at MTU 9000.

So I guess all is good.

-H

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TxTechLaw
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We are using the latest ASM VE, it's slick, more scheduling flexibility than the EQL GUI. I did some test restores of VMs and datastores to other datastores, over themselves, etc, ASM worked well. The previous version looked kinda clunky, but 2.0 allows you to selectively restore individual VMs, rather than an entire datastore, so a big advance over the old version.

Please let us know the BackupExec works out, we are looking at that also.

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huwy
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Thanks for your input TxTechLaw. Are you using scheduled snapshots as part of your backup routine?

From what I can see with Backup Exec ADB option you need to setup the host VM to connect directly to the SAN - i.e. you need to configure the MS iSCSI initator in the VM. Therefore for example with an exchange server you will need to create a new LUN and set it up as an additional drive (e.g. d:). If you then move the exchange DB onto this LUN you should be able to back it up using the ADB (hardware VSS) option.

Once this is setup the backups are pretty straight forward but has the advantage of performing an off host backup of the exchange DB. Anyway thats my understanding - I hope this makes sense!

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TxTechLaw
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Yah, we are using scheduled snaps, though as part of our 'short-term' backup routine. We use ASM VE for all things ESX (VM snaps and datastore snaps) and then the EQL GUI we use for SQL LUN snaps.

For snaps that we want to keep more than a day, and thus offload to tape, we are looking at BackupExec, Veeam, and possibly CommVault. The big thing I want is granular file restore, which it appears BExec was first to offer, though from their web site, it appears that Veeam also now offers that. I suspect CommVault does too, but haven't gone into depth investigating them.

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