Welcome to Kraft Kennedy
Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.
0
Are you looking to build Windows Failover clusters on VMware vSphere with EqualLogic storage? If so, make sure to use the new EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for VMware vSphere (assuming you have at least Enterprise licensing). There are several reasons that make the MEM an obvious choice, but let’s first review what the MEM actually is.
In VMware vSphere, there are several native Path Selection Policies (PSP) that handle how the ESX or ESXi hosts connect to the storage infrastructure. For best performance, most use VMware’s native for Round Robin PSP for iSCSI MPIO. This allows you to better utilize all of your NICs rather than keeping the paths in an active/standby configuration. In addition to the native policies, VMware has also opened this up to storage vendors to write their own PSPs to take better advantage of their storage arrays.
Continue reading…
|
|
Quite a while back I saw that Eric Sloof had figured out how to add his Twitter feed directly into the VI Client. I thought it was clever but didn’t really give it much more thought than that.
Today I decided to take that concept and extend it to systems that you might manage alongside your VI3/vSphere environment. Storage management seemed like the obvious first choice.
Continue reading…
|
|
When VMware released vSphere 4 last year, one of the changes they made was a completely re-written software iSCSI initiator. This was done to optimize performance which is great considering how popular iSCSI SANs have become. They also gave the ability to use Round Robin MPIO (mutlipathing) in the software initiator in addition to Fixed Path and MRU which were previously available.
I’m working on a vSphere implementation using Dell EqualLogic SANs and wanted to configure Round Robin on all of my datastores. Dell has a great whitepaper on how to set this up, but unfortunately the document fails to mention one key thing: this doesn’t change the default path selection plugin (PSP) from Fixed to Round Robin. That means that you’ll have to set the multipathing policy to Round Robin on all of your existing datastores and will have to remember to do that on all future datastores. When you’ve got multiple ESX hosts with lots of datastores this can quickly become a pain.
|
|
Back to top