vSphere 5.1: vmotion without shared storage only through web client

It looks like if you want to take advantage of the vSphere 5.1 feature of being able to do a vMotion without shared storage, you have to use the web client.

Of course, if you want to use Update Manager, the plug-in doesn't exist yet for the web client so you'll need to run the thick client.

Dell XPS 8500

I wasn't smart enough to just get the same machine for work that I got for home. dealnews.com informed my bank account that it would start seeing less money when it sent me a deal for a Dell XPS 8500.

The most useful documentation are the Owner's Manual and Specifications.

This box isn't bad but compared with the T3600, it has some drawbacks.  In particular:

• The disk drives aren't mounted via a tool-less design.
• Other than the single graphics card PCI Express 2.0 x16, all the other PCI Express 2.0 slots are x1.  If you want to expand, finding useful x1 cards seem fairly rare.
• With the nVidia GT 640 graphics card in the x16 slot, the fan sticks out too much so that you can't use the adjacent x1 slot so you effectively only have 2 more x1 slots.
• There is only a single 6G SATA port. The other three SATA ports are 3G.
• There is built in wireless and bluetooth as well as a mSATA slot that the T3600 does not have.  The mSATA port runs at 6G too. 

Rather than leaving good enough alone, I decided to do the following tweaks:

• Upgraded to 32GB using qty 2 Crucial CT2KIT102464BD160B  (4 8GB DIMMs). (Update: Crucial seems to have changed the part number to CT3740059.)
• Converted the two 3.5" disk bays into 4 2.5" disk bays using qty 2 Silverstone Tek 3.5-inch to 2 x 2.5-Inch Bay Converter (SDP08B). 
• Replaced the system disk with qty 1 SanDisk Extreme SSD 240 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SDSSDX-240G-G25.   
• Did a RAID1 using the onboard Intel RAID with the the ADATA XPG SX300 256GB. Note that the ADATA card is slightly larger so you end up wasting about 14GB.  I thought the Intel RAID would create the RAID1 and let me allocate the extra space for something else but it doesn't look like this version will allow that.
• The Apricorn Velocity Solo x1 (VEL-SOLO-X1) card lets me add another 2.5" disk and have an extra SATA head that I plugged the optical media into.
• 4 Seagate Hybrid Drives (ST750LX003) to fill in the storage. Three are attached to the Intel RAID on the motherboard and one is on the Apricorn card. This does mean that 3 of the disks are on 3G SATA and not 6G SATA.
• I also needed a power splitter for the disks.

On a side note, I ended up with the Apricorn card partially because of the AS Media ASM1061 controller.  This choice was based on an article from Tom's Hardware comparing the controllers.


Now to put Windows 8 on it. The installation was straightforward. I was able to configure the BIOS to UEFI boot and Windows 8 installed without a problem.  The system shipped with BIOS version A09 which seems to be compatible.  Windows 8 doesn't complain about not recognizing any the devices after a Windows update.  Also, as of Oct/22/2012, Dell's support site for the 8500 is also showing Windows 8 drivers

Doing a 'rescan disks' in Disk Manager caused the system to hang.  The ASM106x driver for Velocity  Solo seemed to be at fault.  Apricorn does not appear to have a public driver download but I was able to use the drivers provided by Syba PEX-40032 at http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=979.


The configuration I'm moving forward with is to have the two SSDs in a RAID1 using the motherboard Intel Rapid Storage and then using Windows 8 Storage Spaces to create a pool of the 4x750GB drives.  The storage pool then hosts two volumes - a parity volume and a mirrored volume.

More ramblings about Windows Storage Spaces in a later post.

Dell T3600 Workstation

Some additional tidbits about the Dell T3600 Workstation:

1) There are a number of SAS/SATA ports on the motherboard but they are currently not enabled so you can only use two of the SATA ports on the motherboard.

2) The Intel RAID manager is also currently not enabled.

3) To address the above two items, Dell has the PERC H310 RAID card. The SFF8087 cable that ships with the machine has two ports and goes to the standard disk bays.

4) The difference between the 3.5" and 2.5" disk configuration appears to be just with the disk caddy.  I had hoped that the 2.5" disk config would be better tailored for having 4 2.5" disks in the disk area but it does not appear to be the case (or perhaps you have to order more than 1 2.5" disk).

To add some more disks to the system, I'm using the Vantec EZ Swap F4 enclosure.  The SFF8087 cable that comes with the machine has power built in so you need another cable. I found a StarTech cable on Amazon that works fine and plugged it into the other port on the H310.

I went with four 750GB Seagate hybrid disks in a RAID5 config.  I was thinking of using the two onboard drive bays for a RAID 1 boot/OS set using the Sandisk 240GB SSDs but decided to wait for now.

Dell T3600, Windows 8, UEFI, and me

I ran across an issue with UEFI, Windows 8, and the Dell T3600 Workstation (BIOS version A04).

Windows 8 will randomly blue screen when copying a large amount of data from a CIFS share to the local disk.  This occurs after copying about 8GB of data out of about a 100GB dataset, consisting of random user files.  I was able to reproduce this consistently. 

This appears to be a UEFI issue since after reinstalling with legacy BIOS boot, the blue screen has not re-occurred

Dell currently does support Windows 8 for this hardware yet so one would expect that future BIOS releases will address this issue.

Other than the blue screen, there was only one unrecognized device and installing the Windows 7 version of the "Unified AMT 7 WS Management Interface " from Dell's website fixed that.  So far things have been running fine for the past week or so.

Note that for the UEFI install, one needs a FAT32 formatted USB stick.  The current version of the Windows 7 USB boot tool creates an NTFS formatted stick which will not allow the UEFI boot to occur.

Update 3/31/2013: Dell BIOS A08 seems to cause daily blue screens with Windows 8. A07 seems to be stable.  I haven't tried UEFI with any newer BIOS.

locked Dell U2711 monitor

I received a Dell U2711 as part of a RMA. After hooking up the monitor and powering it on, I went to switch it to the input that was being used. Instead of getting the menu, I got a padlock icon appearing on the screen.

After doing some research, to unlock it you, hold down the button directly above the power button for about 15 seconds.  Unfortunately, it looks like you need to have a video signal on the current input.  Otherwise, the 'no signal' notification seems to interrupt the 15 second hold.   This also seems to interfere with other menu operations.
 
A nice feature for any future monitors would be to ignore the no signal  when the menus are up or if you really need a signal, try to auto-detect a signal and switch to that first.

ESX datastore in use but nothing is there!

I was moving data off a datastore to reformat it as a VMFS 5 filesystem (ok, I'm probably a little paranoid about upgrading).  After moving everything off, I still could not delete it as I was getting a 'resource in use' error.  Browsing the datastore didn't show anything. I made sure that HA wasn't using it.  After poking around more, I used the 'maps' feature in vCenter to see what it thought was connected and 'lo there was a VM mapped to that datastore.  I proceeded to verify that there wasn't a reference via the CD or floppy device, all the disks were referenced, etc.

What took me too long to figure out was that the VM had a couple of snapshots and those snapshots had references to the datastore.  Delete the snapshots and the reference is gone and the datastore can be deleted normally.

EMC VNXe

The EMC VNXe 3300 is targeted to be a low-end / SMB / branch office type array.

These two documents would definitely have been useful to read before we bought the array

• http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8276-emc-vnxe-high-availability.pdf
• http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8178-vnxe-storage-systems-wp.pdf

Some things that are rather surprising (even in a low end system) in the current build (2.1.0.14097):

• NL-SAS disks can only be configured in a (4+2) RAID6 configuration
• By default, hot spares are not configured when you create a RAID6 storage pool.  In fact, when you manually create a Hot Spare Pool, the wizard tries to talk you out of it.
• When the failed drive is replaced, the rebuilt data on the hot spare is copied back to the replaced disk.  I guess this isn't surprising for people more familiar with EMC.
• While VMware is one of the target audiences, there is no support for VAAI.
• You can't grow or otherwise resize a LUN.
• You can't remap a LUN to a different 'Storage Server' (e.g. move the primary SP of a LUN to the other SP).
• Maximum LUN size is 1.999TB
• The only performance information you get via the GUI is for the SP and that is CPU load, network activity and disk activity.

Are 100 Drobos 98 too many?

Drobo is running a promotion to give away 100 Drobos at http://www.drobo.com/100drobos.  The winner will be chosen based on a presentation on how to best use those 100 Drobos.

At first blush, this is kinda interesting. Who wouldn't want 100 of any gizmo?

Well, in this case, winning may actually be losing.

The Drobos being given away are the 4 bay, USB/Firewire model instead of the rack mount 12 bay or even the 5 bay desktop units.  

Disks aren't being provided.  So let's say you take advantage of the Drobo and only buy 2 of the cheapest disks.  As a random point of reference, Amazon has a Western Digital 250GB drive for $40 (http://amzn.com/B000Q84G5Q).  So that means you'll need to spend $8,000 just to put the enclosures to use.  Taxes in the US are also likely to be at least that amount, if not more.

The "BeyondRAID" technology that they have sounds neat and seems like something that would be useful but what's kept me from buying a Drobo (for home or for work) is that my view of the value of this technology is drastically different than their view.

Specifically, a 4 bay USB2 enclosure with the technology is simply not compelling at $400.  It should be at half the price. If I wanted the eSATA/USB 3.0 version, that's a whopping $800. Twice the price for a faster interface?  The NAS version is even cheaper than the eSATA version.

From a performance point of view, I'd want eSATA or even the BeyondRAID technology packaged into a PCIe card that I could put into my own enclosure that would be interesting too.

From a server/rack-mount, again the price is not compelling and what I am looking for in "enterprise" storage is greater manageability, at least 16 drive slots, and, if you want to be cheap storage, actually be cheap.