I get a lot of questions around how the vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) primitives compare from a protocol perspective. For instance, a common question is to describe the differences between the primitives for NAS storage arrays (NFS protocol) and the primitives for block storage arrays (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocols). It is a valid question because, yes, there are significant differences and the purpose of this blog post is to detail them for you.
I was asked recently to provide some assistance with a VSA installation problem. The issue which this person experienced is described in the release notes for VSA 5.1.1 . VSA 5.1.1 installation fails with the Error 2896: Executing action failed message This problem might occur when the location of the temp drive is set to a drive other than C:, where VSA Manager is to be installed. Workaround: Make sure that the user and system TEMP and TMP variables point to a specified location on the C: drive.
In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues, Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.
There was an interesting question posted recently around how you could monitor Storage I/O Control activity. Basically, how would one know if SIOC had kicked in and was actively throttling I/O queues? Well, in vSphere 5.1, there are some new performance counters that can help you with that.
For those of you who have been following my new vSphere 5.1 storage features series of blog posts, in part 5 I called out that we have a new Boot from Software FCoE feature. The purpose of this post is to delve into a lot more detail about the Boot from Software FCoE mechanism. Most of the initial configuration is done in the Option ROM of the NIC. Suitable NICs contain what is called either a FCoE Firmware Boot Table (FBFT) or a FCoE Boot Parameter Table (FBPT). For the purposes of this post, we’ll refer to it as the…
vSphere 5.1 introduced a number of vCloud Director (vCD) interoperability features from a storage perspective, namely ability to take VM snapshots from within the vCD UI, interoperability with Storage Profiles and interoperability with Storage DRS. Admittedly, its been a while since I played with vCD and I am a little rusty, but I wanted to see how well these storage features worked with vCD 5.1. I’ll follow-up with some future posts on how this all integrates, but this first post is just to highlight an issue I ran into in my haste to get the environment up and running. The…
I had an interesting question the other day about whether Raw Device Mappings (aka RDMs) still had a reliance on the LUN ID, especially when it comes to the vMotion of Virtual Machines which have RDMs attached. I remember some time back that we introduced a concept called Dynamic Name Resolution for RDMs, which meant that we no longer relied on a consistent HBA number or even the path to identify the RDM, but do we still use the LUN ID in vSphere 5.1?