mike7645's Posts

Hello, I'm setting up a FreeNAS box on our network with iSCSI to store backups and other data. My question is about how to configure networking on ESXi. According to Freenas docs and forum dis... See more...
Hello, I'm setting up a FreeNAS box on our network with iSCSI to store backups and other data. My question is about how to configure networking on ESXi. According to Freenas docs and forum discussions, each Freenas interface needs to be on a separate subnet. The vmware iscsi mpio doc states "Enabling multipathing removes the ability to route to storage. The storage and the VMkernel port must have an IP address in the same network". Here's what I have for iSCSI interfaces on all my storage devices: FreeNAS storage - 4x1GB Intel NICs Cisco NAS storage - 2x1GB NICs IBM SAN storage - 2x1GB NICs Backup server - 4x1GB Intel NICs (Vmware 5.5 vm running Veeam) We have 2 Cisco 3560G switches, and all interfaces are divided up evenly between the 2 switches for redundancy. So if I understand this correctly, if I want to use MPIO and be able to access all 3 of my storage devices above, my backup server needs to have 8 NICs? I was hoping connections to the various storage devices would be able to share NICs, and route traffic between VLANs which reside on the same switch. But if I follow the Freenas best practice and each NIC is on a separate VLAN, then it's impossible to connect everything unless I add more NICs. Am I right in that assumption? Thanks much in advance!
TOTALLY agree! I cannot add anything more to this other than to say I wish I had known this back when I upgraded my VMs to version 10. I am downgrading as many as possible so I don't have to use ... See more...
TOTALLY agree! I cannot add anything more to this other than to say I wish I had known this back when I upgraded my VMs to version 10. I am downgrading as many as possible so I don't have to use this piece of garbage web client. I mean really? FLASH PLAYER? At least you could have made it a native HTML5 application. Flash player is the biggest resource hog. Plus, do we really want to be managing our companies' critical infrastructure with a piece of software that has new security vulnerabilities discovered at least every few weeks???
Nice, a little real-world step by step from others who have done this definitely increases my confidence level. Thanks for posting this advice.
Perfect, these articles are very helpful. Thanks!
Hi all- I'm getting ready to upgrade our vmware infrastructure from 4.0 to 5.0. This is my first VMware upgrade, so I'm looking to get advice in the way of any major gotchas or snags that I may c... See more...
Hi all- I'm getting ready to upgrade our vmware infrastructure from 4.0 to 5.0. This is my first VMware upgrade, so I'm looking to get advice in the way of any major gotchas or snags that I may come across. All our production server run in this environment so needless to say, I want to avoid an extended outage and even moreso, data loss of course! We have 2 IBM x3650 servers, running VMs from an IBM ds3300 iSCSI SAN. The SAN controller firmware & hdd firmwares will be upgraded before the vmware upgrade. I'm hoping it will be a pretty straightforward upgrade, but any advice appreciated...
Good to know- thanks. This is a data disk- D:\.
@Larry- thanks that sounds like it might work. I will have to try this next time we have a long maintenance window. @ETastic- the PVSCSI controller is the VMWare paravirtual scsi controller. I... See more...
@Larry- thanks that sounds like it might work. I will have to try this next time we have a long maintenance window. @ETastic- the PVSCSI controller is the VMWare paravirtual scsi controller. I have not been able to fully update, again this will have to wait for a maintenance window. @Marcj1- I think my VMDK files are all OK, although you do make a good point. I did have to juggle around the VMDK pairs while renaming the disks. They all show up in vsphere storage browser, and machine boots, so I think I got that part right. @bulletproof- thanks but this is not a cluster.
Hi- running ESXi 4.0 with vSphere. I am trying to add a PV SCSI controller to a VM to use for a SQL DB. If I add it while the VM is running, I get this error: "Hot-add of scsi1, scsi1:0 failed... See more...
Hi- running ESXi 4.0 with vSphere. I am trying to add a PV SCSI controller to a VM to use for a SQL DB. If I add it while the VM is running, I get this error: "Hot-add of scsi1, scsi1:0 failed. Unable to open SCSI device '/vmfs/devices/genscsi/mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0' (scsi1:0): Failed to lock the file. Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.  VM failed to resume on destination during early power on.  Hotplug operation failed." I have also tried adding it while the VM is powered off, which works. But then I get this error when powering on the VM: 'Unable to open SCSI device '/vmfs/devices/genscsi/mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0' (scsi1:0): Failed to lock the file. Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.' I'm not sure where to go with this, if anyone can offer some advice I'd appreciate. It's possible I caused this problem, as I changed around some of the file names earlier today. I wanted to change the name of the VMX file, and all the disk files. So I powered off the VM, and changed the name of the VMX file. I edited the file offline and changed the name of the .nvram, .vmxf, and any other files that were listed in the .VMX file. I think that went fine, the VM powered on with no issues after I was done with my updates. But I can't add the scsi cntrlr, so I'm not sure if it's related but I'm putting it out there. Also I have a .VMSD, not sure what it is, but it was not listed in the .VMX file so I didn't rename it. Please help, implementation of an important server depends on this pvscsi device! thanks in advance!!!
Thanks for the reply... yeah I have the docs that IBM provides and have been going through them this week. Still I am not sure how to get the paths to show up. I suppose I can remove the iSCSI ta... See more...
Thanks for the reply... yeah I have the docs that IBM provides and have been going through them this week. Still I am not sure how to get the paths to show up. I suppose I can remove the iSCSI target from the storage adapter and re-add them. Is there a better way?
Have an IBM DS3300 SAN with dual controllers (4 total iSCSI interfaces on the SAN), 2 3560G switches, and (1) dual port QLogic iSCSI card in each of 2 clustered servers. I have (2) 1TB LUNs, each... See more...
Have an IBM DS3300 SAN with dual controllers (4 total iSCSI interfaces on the SAN), 2 3560G switches, and (1) dual port QLogic iSCSI card in each of 2 clustered servers. I have (2) 1TB LUNs, each accessible to both hosts. I was doing some failover testing by unplugging the switch. Now that everything is powered back on, the SAN in inaccessible from 1 host. At first, it showed that the paths were dead. Now they are not there at all. How can I get the paths to show up back on host that lost them? I've tried rescanning the HBAs to no avail. Also, I'm questioning if my config is good now. Is 1 dual port card in each server enough to acheive redundancy against one switch going down? Before I started testing, the Path Status indicated Partial/No Redundancy. Thanks much in advance for helping a noob...
Thanks Andre great article.
I'm setting up a new VMWare environment, and am seeking advice on how to configure the SAN storage. This is my first time setting up VMs to run in a SAN, but I have set VMWare ESX/Server in the p... See more...
I'm setting up a new VMWare environment, and am seeking advice on how to configure the SAN storage. This is my first time setting up VMs to run in a SAN, but I have set VMWare ESX/Server in the past so I'm pretty familiar with vmware. We are a small company, with about 100 users so none of our servers are working very hard to support the load. I was able to make the case for good equipment: 2 new IBM x3650M2 servers, with 26GB memory, dual E5520 procs, and QLogic iSCSI HBAs, connected to dual Cisco 3560G switches for redundancy. The SAN is an IBM DS3300 with dual controllers and (8) 450GB 15K SAS drives. We will be virtualizing quite a few servers over this year with vSphere 4 on ESXi 4 installable. To start, we will be running 4 VMs. Servers are: 1 SQL 2005 server, and 1 IIS6 server which serves pages to employees fed by the SQL server. Another server running vCenter and SQL 08. Last one is an XP box that does not generate a lot of proc/mem/disk use. Eventually, we will probably also convert our domain controllers, and development IIS/DB servers. So over the next 2 years, I can foresee, in total, 8-10 VMs running on these hosts, maybe up to 12 at most. Before I start conversions I wanted to get some input on my setup, specifically regarding if my storage config will be able to handle the load, or should I use a different setup. The OS images and databases will be stored in this SAN, and I'll probably set up a LUN to contain each OS and DB disk file. My initial plan is to set this up as all the drives in a RAID 6 array. My questions are: Is it a bad idea to set up all the disks in one RAID6 array or should I divide it up more? For example use 2 disks in a RAID1 array for the OS images, and the rest in a RAID 6 array for all my databases? Am I limited in the number of LUNs I can create? Looking at the ds3300 interface, seems that I can only create 31 LUNs. Any other advice/observations/etc appreciated. Thanks!
Hi Anatoly, thanks, you are correct. This is my first time setting up iSCSI HBAs. I went to the iSCSI bios, cleared everything and set the IPs from there. and it's showing up correctly now. Appre... See more...
Hi Anatoly, thanks, you are correct. This is my first time setting up iSCSI HBAs. I went to the iSCSI bios, cleared everything and set the IPs from there. and it's showing up correctly now. Appreciate your response!
hi wlentz, did you ever resolve this issue? I'm having the exact same problem with my 4062c HBAs.
I have 2 x3650M2 servers with qLogic QLE 4062c iscsi hba (1 adapter per server). I'm performing initial setup on them. When I use the ESXi interface to set the IPs, it sets the IP, and 'Recent Ta... See more...
I have 2 x3650M2 servers with qLogic QLE 4062c iscsi hba (1 adapter per server). I'm performing initial setup on them. When I use the ESXi interface to set the IPs, it sets the IP, and 'Recent Tasks' shows that it's completed successfully. However a few moments later, the IP address on each interface will change back to 0.0.0.0, although the iscsi alias I have remains. I cannot ping these IPs, but my storage unit IPs do respond to pings, so I'm pretty sure the switch is OK. When I reboot the server and go into the iscsi bios, the IPs are set to the IPs I chose. For each HBA, I have each interface connected to 2 separate Cisco 3560G switches for fault tolerance. This seems very strange to me, any ideas? P.S. This seems like the exact same problem as another person saw but there's no resolution posted: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1474593
This is a nice addition to the toolbag. Worked great.
Thanks for the reply, this was helpful. This is the process that I followed and the P2V conversion went well. I used VMWare Player 'cause I don't have a license for Workstation. After convertin... See more...
Thanks for the reply, this was helpful. This is the process that I followed and the P2V conversion went well. I used VMWare Player 'cause I don't have a license for Workstation. After converting to vmware player I booted the VM and had to remove all the HP server software from the OS. Once this was done, and I configured the new NIC with the proper IP address, everything worked perfectly. It also helped that I had a well equipped server to work on. It has 3 hard drives, 2 mirrored and 1 hot spare. So I took out the 2 mirrored drives and put the 1 hot space in its place, and installed ESXi on that disk. Once I was convinced that the new VM was working OK, I added one of the disks to the new mirror set. If anything does go horribly wrong, I still have one of the disks from the original mirror set that I can boot from. I doubt this will be necassary but it's good insurance to have. Also having some type of disk image based backup of the original server config would have been nice but I didn't have any software capable of doing this.
Hi all- I have a project I'm working on this weekend and was hoping for some input before I begin. I have an recently purchased dual core Xeon HP server that is currently running Windows Server 2... See more...
Hi all- I have a project I'm working on this weekend and was hoping for some input before I begin. I have an recently purchased dual core Xeon HP server that is currently running Windows Server 2003 installed directly on the hardware (no virtualization yet). I want to convert the server to VMWare running ESXi 4.0 and run the same OS on this hardware. Here's the tricky part. I want to run ESXi on the same hardware that Windows Server is running on right now. I understand that VMWare convertor exists for this, and it would be no problem if I had a 2nd server running ESXi that I could use as the destination for the new VM. But I only have 1 server. And the converter interface looks like it requires an ESXi host to connect to, when converting a physical machine to a VM. (please correct me if I am wrong) My plan to accomplish this is: 1. Temporarily install ESXi on a separate computer 2. Use VMWare converter workstation to convert the physical OS to a VM running on the temp ESXi host 3. Thoroughly test new VM!!! 4. Download the VM files from the temp host to the converter workstation with vSphere client 5. Wipe hard drives on HP server, install ESXi 6. Upload VM files to HP server with vSphere client 7. Hopefully boot up new shiny VM with no issue 8. Go home and get some sleep! If anyone has any input on this, known gotchas to avoid, or ways to make it go faster, please let me know!
Thanks all for the replies.
Thanks for the reference to that guide, I think that answers my question. Here's the most important paragraph. Basically without a license, you cannot power on VMs after the eval period expires. ... See more...
Thanks for the reference to that guide, I think that answers my question. Here's the most important paragraph. Basically without a license, you cannot power on VMs after the eval period expires. So from what I can tell, it's free, but only for 60 days. "Without a license, you are able to perform some operations, but you cannot power on or reset your virtual machines. All hosts are disconnected from the vCenter Server system if the evaluation period expires before you assign a license to the vCenter Server system. Any single ESX/ESXi host is disconnected from the vCenter Server system if the ESX/ESXi evaluation period expires before you assign a license to the host."