One of the new features of vSphere 5.1 was the SSD monitoring and I/O Device Management features which I discussed in this post. I was doing some further testing on this recently and noticed that a number of fields from my SSD were reported as N/A. For example, I ran the following command against a local SSD drive on my host and these were the statistics returned.
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.
Folks, This is currently not very clear in the release notes, but if you are already running vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) version 5.1, you do not need to update to VSA 5.1.1. This is not needed, nor is it supported.
Last week I published a blog article about new performance counters in vSphere 5.1 for monitoring Storage I/O Control (SIOC). Soon after publishing, I received a question about the siocActiveTimePercentage counter, which only ever showed 0% or 100% values.
My first introduction to Atlantis ILIO was at a User Group meeting in the UK last year. I had a chat with Jim Moyle who explained the Atlantis ILIO product to me. Their primary focus is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions. In a nutshell, the ILIO software appliance sits in the I/O path between your hypervisor and storage and does what is essentially I/O acceleration. Since the appliance sits in the I/O path, it presents an iSCSI or NFS datastore at the front-end to the hypervisor, and at the back-end, it is presented with NFS, iSCSI…