Everything-Virtual

Category: Storage

  • V-locity 5 Install and Configuration

    So I was recently offered the chance to test drive V-locity 5 to see how it compared against the previous V-locity VM product that I tested nearly two years ago, one of the big differences between the two products is that this time I am using the V-locity Management Console (VMC) as my centralised management and deployment tool.

    This post covers the installation and configuration of the VMC and the deployment of agents via it.

    One of the first things I noticed after downloading the installation file from the Condusiv Technologies website was that the new package came in quite a lot smaller in size than the previous version, I mean like about 50% smaller, now considering this includes the VMC as well as the V-locity package you have to hand it to the developers with regards to size reduction.

    Supported Platforms for the VMC and V-locity agents, as you can see you’re not restricted to either physical or virtual for either the VMC or agents.

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  • Condusiv V-locity 5 Testing

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    Nearly two years ago I was given the opportunity to take out the Condusiv Technologies V-locity VM version 4 product for a spin in my home lab, the results were pretty positive and certainly something I would suggest to anyone running a Windows estate to investigate.

    Move forward a couple of years and I was contacted by their technical director after having filled out an online questionnaire, he remembered my blog articles and wondered if I wanted to take the new version of V-locity 5 out for a spin to see how it compared, V-locity 5 now combines both the V-locity VM and V-locity Server products under one product banner.

    V-locity is an I/O reduction software solution that increases application performance in virtual, physical and cloud environments by 50% or more without the cost of additional hardware

  • Dramatically Faster Application Performance
  • Target Applications
  • Performance Validation
  • Seamless Deployment and Management (more…)

  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring ESXi Syslog Settings

    In a previous post I installed and configured the Synology Syslog server to allow me to stop me getting the below message on my hosts.

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    The reason for the message is that I run my 3 ESXi hosts using SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB keys and as such there is no persistent storage for logs. In this post I am going to show you how to configure some VMware infrastructure to point to our newly configured Syslog server.

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Installing the Synology Syslog Server

    In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives

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  • Installing the Home Lab – Creating and Configuring an iSCSI Distributed Switch for VMware Multipathing

    In an earlier post I configured my Synology DS1513+ Storage server for iSCSI and enabled it for Multi-Pathing, in this post I will show you how to create and configure a vDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) for iSCSI use and how to enable Multipathing to use more than one network path to your storage (there by increasing throughput).

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    Using the vCenter client you can see that in the above screenshot that I have 4 Intel NIC ports on my hosts that aren’t currently assigned to a vswitch.

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  • Home Lab 2013 – Storage

    With the change to my Home Lab environment recently I decided to take a fresh look at my storage capabilities and came to the conclusion that whilst the home brew solution was nice I now wanted something a little more dedicated to my vSphere environment that would allow me to play with the likes of VAAI because although FreeNAS claims to be looking at implementing this in a future release but there are no current dates on the roadmap for this.

    Having looked at the likes of Qnap and Synology I decided to go down the route of Synology for my new home lab storage, there were a couple of deciding factors in this which include the 4x1GB NICs and the nice web interface (so much nicer than the Iomega IX4 interface).

    A couple of days spent looking over various blog\forum posts all seem to indicate that this was a good choice and when I discovered that both of my colleagues had gone down this route it made more sense to do the same.

    It should be mentioned that the Synology is not a cheap unit with prices ranging from £620 – £700 per unit (excluding disks) so you have to make sure that you’re making the right decision before spending that much money.

    In the end I decided to go for a Synology DS1513+ unit, this 5 bay device is expandable to a total of 15 disks with the additional purchase of the DX513 expansion unit so offers a lot of capacity if required.

    Synology DS1513

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  • Condusiv V-locity VM Testing

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    During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).

    They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.

    V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-

  • Increase application performance by 50%
  • Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
  • Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
  • True "set and forget" management

    What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).

    I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.

    It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.

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  • Invalid configuration for device ’0′. vNIC error.

    Whilst doing some work on one of our Windows 2008 R2 templates (AV Upgrade) I discovered that we had an issue with the network being un plugged and not connecting, it turns out that the template had recently been Storage vMotion to a different data store and since then wouldn’t allow the vNIC to connect to the network.

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  • Configuring FreeNAS 8.3 – iSCSI and NFS Storage for VMware vSphere

    This post will guide you through the configuration of FreeNAS 8.3 for use on VMware vSphere.

    It is assumed at this stage that only the installation has been completed, we still need to create and configure the storage.

    Log in to the web console of the FreeNAS server and browse to the Storage tab.

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  • Iomega IX4 – Non Cloud to Cloud Upgrades are not a good idea

    Questions have been asked whether this was possible and for a short period of time Iomega even published instructions on their site on how to do it (but quickly pulled them, more on that later).

    The differences between the non – cloud and cloud edition Iomega IX4’s seem pretty non-existent (I actually couldn’t find any difference apart from the version of EMC LifeLine running between the two devices), so in theory it should have been possible to upgrade the older IX4 to the newer version of the OS.

    When Iomega released the new version of the IX4 software to fix the issues with the OSX Time Machine not running correctly if you had updated to Lion I decided to have a look at the feasibility of upgrading to the cloud edition on one of my test devices.

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