Posted by Brian on Mar 9, 2010 in VMware | 0 comments
For newer admins or those without a storage background, this is a common question that I hear often. What type of RAID should I use for my data stores to host Virtual Machines. This is not meant to be a high level storage best practice document. I’m just covering some basic details that should help new admins and SMB customers.
First thing you need to do is do some research on what type of servers you will be Virtualizing and what their IO needs might be. The main reasons for choosing different RAID levels will be performance and redundancy. Most people tend to lean towards RAID 5 which provides good performance with a high level of redundancy. See the chart below for some more details. You can also review some details from VMware here.
Summary of the different RAID types
| Type |
RAID 0 |
RAID 1 |
RAID 1+0 |
RAID 5 |
| Method |
Striping |
Mirroring |
Mirror and striping |
Stripe with Parity |
| Description |
The data is striped across all the disks in the set. Not true RAID because it is not redundant. |
Exact copies of the data are kept across paired disks or disk sets. |
A striped array whose segments are a mirror set. Not to be confused with 0+1 |
The data is striped across all the disks in the RAID set, along with the parity information needed to reconstruct the data in case of disk failure. |
| Performance |
Good. All IO is spread and no parity overhead |
Twice the read rate but writes occur twice |
Combines speed efficiency of the RAID 0 (stripe set) with a fault tolerance of RAID 1 (mirror). |
High read and medium write performance. A good balance of performance and availability. |
| Typical use |
Data you can afford to loose, such a pre-production, image/video editing. |
Data requiring high availability, such as accounting or payroll. |
Transactional type data such as database logs. |
File and application servers. Typically everything that does not have a specific requirement. |
| Parity Calculation |
None |
None |
None |
Yes |
| Redundancy |
None |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Minimum Disks |
2 |
2 |
4 |
3 |
| Storage Overhead |
0% |
100% |
100% |
Capacity of one disk in the set. 33% for a 3 disk set. |
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Posted by mike on Mar 7, 2010 in VMware | 0 comments
Welp I finished up the two books I set out to read initially today. I’m moving on to the last VI3 book I’ve got, then it’s on to the Vsphere books. I’ve also got a copy of the Train Signal Vsphere dvds to peruse, which sounds like they are quite good. I’m going to, for good luck, eat a burger at Boston Blackie’s on the Monday evening I get in to Chicago. It’s on the walk from the train station to the la quinta where I am staying. I hear great things about such tasty bovine delicacies.
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Posted by mike on Mar 3, 2010 in VMware | 1 comment
I’m scheduled for my class at the Microtek facility in Chicago for a March 23rd – 26th class. I’m taking the train down as parking is 36 bucks a day, ouch! I’ve been working on preparing for the class by reading 4 books (mostly because I had them already). The first two are these (oldies but goodies):
Now, I know, I am taking the Vsphere class, but I’ve got the quick start guide that I’ll be devouring shortly. In these posts, I’ll also talk about the lab environment I have built in the spare room in my apartment (which warms up a cozy 8 degrees when the servers are on). Plus I’ll be sure to document my experience with the class and my (fingers crossed) eventual success at the certification test. Then I need to get a job with a larger VM implementation 
- Mike
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Posted by Brian on Mar 1, 2010 in VMware, vSphere | 0 comments
Well today I finally got to break the seal on our new HP MSA 2312sa Storage. Its a lower end SAN configuration that uses SAS drives and controllers. It is supported in vSphere and ESX 3.5 Update 3 and up. The MSA line of storage is the lower end offering from HP and cost was a big reason why the client choose this configuration.
The MSA 2312sa was configured with 4 chassis’s and has redundant controllers. We also have dual port SAS HBA’s in the ESX hosts. Each of the chassis can hold 20 disks, which are available in 450 gb up to 1 tb each at the moment. The 2 tb disks are expect by summer of 2010. The MSA offers a variety of RAID options and the ability to tie a hot spare disk to a specific vDisk or operate as a global spare for all vDisks.
The setup and management of the MSA series is done from a web based console. The console looks a lot like the server iLo screens but on steriods. You can create you vDisks and then cut them into LUN/Volumes that you can then present to your hosts. The console offers both list views and picture options. The picture option shows you what the front or back of the configuration would look like including which lights would be lit at the time.
So far I am pretty impressed on the ease of use for a lower end piece of storage gear. I will write a new blog post on how well it performs once I start loading on some VM’s.
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Posted by Brian on Feb 24, 2010 in Citrix, XenDesktop | 0 comments
I found a new white paper released from Citrix today that talks about steps you can take to really optimize your XP images. Sure everyone thinks about things like turning off a few unused services, screen savers and power saving features. But this paper takes a deep dive into a list of settings that you can manually change and explains others that are available in the XenConvert optimizer tool from Citrix. Head on over to Citrix and grab the doc here.
- Offers a better alternative than replacing the default user profile (which isn’t supported and doesn’t help for users that already have profiles)
- Makes a distinction between private mode (1:1) and standard mode (1:many) desktops
- Provides the actual registry keys/values for all optimizations (to ensure that all settings can be set by Group Policy or login scripts)
- Gives best practices for optimizing the user profiles (like installing UPHclean)
- Excludes configurations and steps that don’t help (like defragmenting a disk before performing a volume copy)
- Details what registry changes are included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool (so you know what all those checkboxes are doing)
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in Lab Manager, VMware | 0 comments
I had never really had much time to delve into Lab Manager that deeply in the past. But since version 4 was released and a recent push to implement an environment for a client I have been getting a heavy dose lately. We are running a PoC with Lab Manager to house the Development servers for a large corporation.
The setup and design challenges with Lab Manager make ESX look easy. Sure it sits on top of ESX but the possibilities are endless for the number of configurations that you can establish within the environment. You can configure physical/virtual networks, templates, pools, workspaces and countless other items. All this and the ability to offer a self service option to users with different levels of permissions to restart VM’s and deploy or destroy VM’s.
I will be writing more blog posts on Lab Manager in the weeks to come that will go into more depth on specific features.
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Posted by Brian on Feb 23, 2010 in VDI, VMware, View | 0 comments
VMware working with RTO is nothing new. The two companies entered into a partnership last fall during VMworld 2009 to integrate the Virtual Profile technology into VMware View. With this purchase VMware can build this layering technology into the View product directly. This allows for the Operating sytems, user profile and applications to all be seperated out into individual layers.
While VMware is getting several of RTO’s products in this purchase the Virtual Profiles product that is a profile management solution is surely to be the gem in this deal.
You can view the press release here and for more questions see the FAQ’s document here.
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