IT Virtual Shocks

10 septiembre 2013

Sizing Storage

Once you get a clear idea who-are-who on the complicated I/O latency world (review other two post here and here).....you need to think about the general rules and best practices to sizing storage for your IOPS needs.

GAVG (Guest Average Latency) total latency as seen from vSphere
KAVG (Kernel Average Latency) time an I/O request spent waiting inside the vSphere storage stack.
QAVG (Queue Average latency) time spent waiting in a queue inside the vSphere Storage Stack.

DAVG (Device Average Latency) latency coming from the physical hardware, HBA and Storage device.

Bad performance if:

High Device Latency: Device Average Latency (DAVG) consistently greater than 20 to 30 ms may cause a performance problem for your typical application.
High Kernel Latency: Kernel Average Latency (KAVG) should usually be 0 in an ideal environment, but anything greater than 2 ms may be a performance problem.

And now, what about the storage?

The typical workload show on this picture, is for the most of the virtual machines, but, othre types like DDBB are so different and will need special configuration like dedicated raidgroups, ssd cache pools, etc.

It´s so important when planning and sizing a infrastructure to bear in mind not only the storage, it´s a mix with the raid conf, diskt typs (ssd, sas, sata), the storage protocol (FC, FCoE, iSCSI or NFS), networking and conf (cabling, switch, vlans conf), vmware conf (storage adapters, datastores conf (vmfs, rdm, advanced parameters) and so on.

09 septiembre 2013

The HP Power Advisor utility (free)

HP has created the HP Power Advisor utility that provides accurate and meaningful estimates of the power needs for HP ProLiant and Integrity servers. ´

The HP Power Advisor utility is a tool for calculating power use of the major components within a rack to determine power distribution, power redundancy, and battery backup requirements for computer facilities. Power Advisor allows you to configure each individual server or node. You can then duplicate the server configuration as often as necessary to populate an enclosure, and then duplicate it to populate a rack. The result is that you can build a complete data center quickly by duplicating a rack.

Easy to install, easy to use (drag & drop), friendly interface....a great free tool!!!

Download link: http://sizers.houston.hp.com/sb/installs/HPPowerAdvisor.zip

Web link: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/power/index.html

07 septiembre 2013

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5 Platform & Quick Reference

Thanks to @alanrenouf for this QuickReference for the new vSphere 5.5

Quick Reference:

http://blogs.vmware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/vSphere-5.5-Quick-Reference-0.4.pdf

What´s New:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf

...but, sincerely, in my opinion there are no big changes or new features that makes new 5.5 a version to upgrade imperiously most of the knowed VMware farms.

05 septiembre 2013

Visual ESXTOP GUI for VMware

The VMware visualESXTOP is a tool from the VMware Labs to view in windows-mode (hehehe) the results of the cli command ESXTOP and with a friendly option to generate some graphics

1- Download it from: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/visualesxtop and unzip files:

2- Change PATH on the System Properties - Advanced System Settings - Advanced - Environmet Variables - System Variables: "PATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin;
(Be carefull with this changes , and backup all the the info you modify for a restore case)

3- Start from CMD or click on the "visualEsxtop.bat" and connect to a ESX host or to a vCenter Server from Menu; File - Connect to Live-server, or start it from powercli: