VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmfs’

Move over Lefthand Networks VSA, xtravirt.com has provided a free alternative for creating a virtual iSCSI SAN. Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) is a virtual machine appliance that runs on two of your ESX hosts’ local VMFS datastores to create a single, synchronized iSCSI SAN. XVS allows the creation of ESX clusters for VI3 Enterprise features without purchasing a physical shared storage solution.

“The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure.”

XVS is the perfectly priced storage solution for the home ESX test lab, small and mediium businesses, or the small remote branch office.

To download a copy of the virtual appliance and for more about XVS go to xtravirt.com.

updated 5.24.08

Currently XVS is only configurable as a single LUN across paired ESX hosts. A third ESX hosts can use the virtual ip address for it’s SAN, but the additional host(s) would not be using their local storage as part of the synchronized SAN. Future editions will hopefully expand the storage across more than 2 ESX hosts.

I was helping a customer P2V a large development SQL server this week and ran into a VMFS configuration issue that failed the conversion. We were using the Converter Enterprise for VirtualCenter 2.5 plugin. Almost as soon as we kicked off the job it failed with an error starting with “file size is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore”. The VMFS LUN we were using as the target was an empty 1.5 TB volume, and the new VM consisted of 2 virtual disks that totaled roughly 450 GB. We had plenty of room, but the problem was not the available storage space. Instead, the issue was that we exceeded the maximum possible .vmdk size for the default VMFS 1MB block setting.

When you add new storage to an ESX host and you format the LUN with the VMFS file system you have to choose what block size setting you want to use. See the screenshot for the dropdown box used to make this choice. Notice the Maximum file size description supposedly provided to help you understand this setting. It’s hardly intuitive in my opinion, so let me try to translate – Choosing the block size determines what maximum possible .vmdk size can be created on this LUN.

If you do not change the default setting when you format a VMFS LUN
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VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

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Installing ESX is fast and simple. By default you could click through the installer GUI changing only your local time zone and end up with a stable, dependable host. However, there are some recommended partitioning best practices that should be followed in order to make sure you minimize possible future headaches and create a repeatable and scalable environment.

This post uses content from documents found in the VI Plan and Design Toolkit available to VMware partners. Logging on to Partner Central and accessing > Info Center > VAC > Services is how you find the various toolkits. It also should be pointed out that the partitioning information in this post is for ESX 3.x only, and is not applicable to ESX 3i, 2.x or previous versions.

When installing ESX you quickly reach the Partitioning Options screen. Select the “Recommended” radio button initially. You can then make changes from Read the rest of this entry »

Another “ton of bricks” moment happened to me when I was talking about SAN replication with NetApp yesterday in the Solutions Exchange. Using your WAN, NetApp’s products can replicate block level data between each other, or they can replicate the data from your existing SAN.

So, this means that I can buy a single NetApp product and put it at my DR site and start replicating my VI for fail-over. I don’t even need to worry about building the ESX infrastructure right away. Although, the ability to test my DR fail-over requires I have ESX servers at my secondary site.

I asked for general pricing for a small office SAN. I guestimated about 3TB of data would be needed. Although they wouldn’t give me a firm quote I was told pricing should be somewhere in the $10k – $15K range.