EA7849 - Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere

VMware | Aug 30, 2010

Hanging out checking out some information on Exchange and decided to hit this session. My company is looking at upgrading and since we are going to Exchange 2010, I'd like to get us virtual on vSphere if we can make it happen. Alex Fontana, our presenter, is a Microsoft Technical Specialist for VMware.

The trend has been clients have been pushing to virtualize Tier-1 apps such Exchange. At VMworld 2007, Dell had a Exchange 2003 performance study. VMworld 2008 introduced the SVVP program along with Exchange 2007 performance white papers. Along with the early adopters pushing the envelope, Exchange has improved its approach to disk access every release. It requires less and less IOPS in each release and still provide acceptable performance.

Over the years ESX has been improving and offering less overhead versus native performance in every release. Starting with ESX 2 which had anywhere from a possible 30-60% overhead costs to now ESX 4 which is <7% . This along with better hardware generations every 18 months has given even more performance.

This is backed by some performance tests done. In general the virtual has been within 5% of the the physical in a scale up test. In a private vSphere Cloud spread across the US, when using DRS, have seen about an overall 18% improvement in system performance versus not enabling DRS on the cluster with Exchange in it.

Some of the best practices mentioned:

• Go with a basic 1-1 ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs to start with. Scale out after monitoring to make sure performance is acceptable. Basically don't go with over subscription if possible.
• Don't over commit memory until steady state is stable and available RAM
• Spread the heavy I/O systems across several LUNs
• Use eagerthickzero VMDK files (Option at time of creation, select enable for FT in vSphere 4.x GUI)
• RDMs are not any better than VMFS. VMFS can't do quorums though. Performance of VMFS is typically a little bit faster.
• Use VMXnet3 driver - highly optimized performance in both lower CPU and TOE
• Note: VMware does support VMotion/DRS for Microsoft Cluster Nodes. Cold migration does work fine though.

As you design your Exchange 2010 need to keep in account the limitations of vSphere Configuration Maximums. One additional one is keep the DAG under 1TB a piece to say under the 2TB limits of each VMFS volume. Along with that be sure to take into account passive databases in DAG setups.

There is a large set of good slides to cover various VMware products and how they work with Microsoft clustering and DAGs. Things like SRM functionality and vMotion and HA. Definitely more details in the slides than I will cover here.

Exchange 2010 is nicely VSS friendly and as such can take array based backups quickly and painlessly offline. It can easily have a 10 second backup window where we have impact on the Exchange systems.

At the end of the day we need to define what level of availability do we need? What are the SLAs? What level of corruption do we need to be concerned about? Can recovery be manual or does this need to be automated and why? Can we use VMware features or do we need to use the Exchange features?

VMworld 2010 - The Future Here & Now

VMware | Aug 23, 2010

The year, the past.

The place, a convention in a week.

I'm prepped. I'm ready. I'm excited. I'm nervous. I've got a presentation I'm going to do. There's going to be tons of announcements and product releases. I'm working myself into a frenzy about everything that's going to happen and things I need to be ready for and and and...

Needless to say at this point I need a stiff drink. My friends know that doesn't work so they come over and we start talking. Lots of silliness in-sued and stress occurred. Something fun that came out of that stress release is a game that I like to do about the next convention I'm heading to.

Rules of the Prophecy Game:

1. You get a point for each item you bring up first that happens.
2. If it is NDA, can't mention it. No fair to the game as you already know the announcement and we don't want you getting in trouble.
3. If it is massively public knowledge, you can say it, you just don't get points for it coming true. (Team vote if prophecy is public knowledge already.)
4. Winner at end of convention for most points gets crowned "Oracle of VMworld2010".

• Number of Booths with uninformed Booth Babes/Dudes will be less than VMworld2009
• Session turnout will be smaller on average than last year
• iPad is the raffle gift of choice this year (a gimme I know)
• EMC will show some incredible tech (VPLEX) that will encourage VMware to one-up it
• vD0dgeball will have a significant turnout of vSquirrels, vSpecialists and just everyone
  • vSpecialists are going to win 5 out of 9 games
  
  
  
  
• Symantec will have some new product that will attempt to replace some VMware supplied tech and be rather disruptive to your environment again instead of using APIs supplied
• Citrix or Microsoft will have some marketing approach that is rather childish
• Lots of VMware announcements about the Ionix acquisition
• Twitter will hit a good 30k tweets in #vmworld
• @jTroyer will get 2 hours of sleep a night all week
• @Lynxbat will announce some cool enhancement to a virtual appliance

• Will announce general availability of VMware's first Cloud Delivery Tool (Likely called Service Director) for your own private cloud
• Announce cross datacenter vMotion & Storage vMotion capabilities
• VMware will purchase Teradici for $50mil
• Will announce VMware is getting into selling servers (everyone else is doing it why not VMware?)
• View 4.next will finally go GA
• VMware join the battle to buy 3Par

Upgrading to ESX 4 Classic sets NIC speed to static setting

VMware | Jul 30, 2010

Recently I found that my environment of ESX 4 Classic has a lot of static NIC speed settings. This is a rather interesting discovery as I've been a strong proponent of using Auto Negotiation on all the NICs as that will help one find flaky or poorly connected cables along with a variety of other issues. If you have it force set to a speed, you won't get any notification that a given connection is working poorly until someone digs in pretty deeply.

Ethermind goes into very well with some deep research into WHY you should always use AutoNegotiation at Gig or faster speeds.

As such found that there are many 100meg static settings. This has a tendancy to cause problems with network performance when the other side thinks it is auto-negotiating.

To fix this if you are properly redundant is a safe way to walk through your environment updating and giving each NIC a chance to negotiate before doing the next on each host.

connect-viserver -server vCenter -cred (Get-Credential)

get-vmhostnetworkadapter -physical | where {$_.Name -eq "vmnic0"} | set-vmhostnetworkadapter -Autonegotiate

Update 30 July 2010 @ 11:38am: Just found out that I'm not the first to blog post about this. Here's an earlier post on the subject.

Upgrading Firmware on ESXi

VMware | Jun 17, 2010

A bane of any system administrator's existence is the constant stream of firmware updates to fix various bugs and issues that occur. One of these HBA Firmware updates is a fairly common issue where a new LUN or Target is not being discovered without a reboot. With Emulex there is a set of tools called the HBAanywhere that can be installed onto ESX Classic. Then you can perform an Emulex HBA Firmware upgrade without having to reboot the ESX Host.

Example script:

cd /usr/sbin/hbanywhere

./hbacmd listhbas

./hbacmd download 00:00:01:02:03:04:05 zd282a4.all

./hbacmd hbaattributes 00:00:01:02:03:04:05

With this you have just updated the firmware to 2.82a4 on an LPe11000-M4 card.

With ESXi it isn't that easy since hbacmd isn't available. The solution I came up with is to create a bootable WinPE CD with the Emulex Tools and firmware available on it. Then all you have to do is boot off this CD and you will be able to update your 10G CNA or your Emulex LPe12000 HBAs.

This script expects you to have the Windows AIK installed locally. Just update this script to point at the appropriate locations of the listed files.

CustomEmulexWinPE.cmd - Run this to create a bootable ISO that will install the Emulex WinPE utilities & drivers and then attempt to upgrade the 10G CNA & LPe12000 cards in the system.

call "C:Program FilesWindows AIKToolsPEToolspesetenv.cmd"

call copype x86 EmulexWinPE
imagex /mountrw Winpe.wim 1 mount
mkdir mountEmulex

xcopy "setupElxAll-x86.exe" mountEmulex

xcopy /s "Firmware" mountEmulex

del mountWindowsSystem32startnet.cmd

xcopy "startnet.cmd" mountWindowsSystem32startnet.cmd
peimg /prep mountWindows

imagex /unmount mount /commit

copy winpe.wim ISOsourcesboot.wim
oscdimg -n -betfsboot.com ISO EmulexWinPE.iso

startnet.cmd - This runs on boot and will attempt to update the 10G CNA & the Emulex LPe12000 cards in the system.

wpeinit

EmulexsetupElxAll-x86.exe /q

cd "Program FilesEmulexUtilelxApp"
winlpcfg download a=lpe12000-m8 i=emulexlpe12000ud111a5.all

winlpcfg download a=lpe12000-m8 i=emulexlpe12000ub202a2.prg
winlpcfg download n=1 i=emulexoce10102s1462001.ufi

winlpcfg download n=2 i=emulexoce10102s1462001.ufi

winlpcfg download n=3 i=emulexoce10102s1462001.ufi

winlpcfg download n=4 i=emulexoce10102s1462001.ufi
winlpcfg listhba

Once this script is done running you'll have a EmulexWinPE.iso that you can mount and boot off of. It will automatically run and upgrade the firmware of the Emulex devices.

This basic setup should allow you to do anything scripting wise you need to do in a Windows environment to update the hardware configuration or run various diagnostics tests outside of ESXi.

Download Locations:
setupElxAll-x86.exe
Windows AIK
Emulex Firmware - Download as needed and update the location you copy it to your WinPE ISO file in the Startnet.cmd and in the CustomEmulexWinPE.cmd.

VMworld Public Voting

VMware | May 18, 2010

In an attempt to get better sessions picked out at VMworld, the part of the selection process is now done via public voting.

http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/

This has been an interesting process watching Twitter and a variety of blogs discuss various sessions and which ones are good and which ones folks want to go see. As one would expect the immediate result is that there is a lot of sales pitching going on.

"Vote for my session". "Vote for me". "My company's session needs some love to get to VMworld".

Overall this has been fairly harmless in my mind. The immediate gut feel is the sessions are going to be popularity contests. Those folks that are the most popular are going to get sessions. That must be bad. That can't be right.. good sessions aren't only folks that are popular. True to an extent. Once one starts thinking about popularity and why individuals are popular, my reasoning says this is actually a good thing. The question to be asked is "Why are those folks popular?" Any of a multitude of reasons means that session is likely going to be a good one.

• The individual is a good speaker and is a lot of fun
• The individual has good things to say
• The individual knows many people

At the end of the day isn't the goal to have a good session whatever the reason this presenter is popular?