vMotion | That... could be a problem...

24May/1212

Playing with ESXi and Synology in the home lab…

So I finally bit the bullet and bought a NAS for my home lab. Ended up with a Synology DS411 due to some good timing from a NewEgg sale.

I went with Synology for two reasons: 1. I could supply my own disks (I don't want the "Green" drives that came with most other NAS units) 2. I always hear REALLY good things about them, they're always highly recommended.

I happened to already have a set of 4 Hitachi Deskstars sitting around so I tossed them in and started running some tests with IOMeter (Run all tests). I did a test on a RAID5 grouping of all 4 disks which were presented to the ESXi host as an iSCSI target and then I did the same test with a RAID 5 grouping of all 4 disks which were then presented to the ESXi host via NFS. I was amazed at the results.

From a personal standpoint, I fully expected iSCSI to blow away NFS. Wow, was I wrong. iSCSI pulled a whopping 270 IOPS from the IOMeter test. Then I ran the exact same test only via an NFS share... NFS blew iSCSI out of the water with a 1,070 IOPS. My jaw is still on the floor from that result. Here's some of the rest of the results:
NFS vs iSCSI

I'm also seeing some excellent regular performance as well. 45MBps worth of write during an SvMotion.
Cooler

So to say the least, I'm quite impressed at what this little guy can do with 4 SATA 7200RPM drives and a single NIC.

One other tidbit to add in an unrelated fashion is how much cooler the new Hitachi Deskstar runs compared to the older ones. A full 12F cooler. That was another surprise...
Cooler

Tagged as: DS411, ESXi, iSCSI, NFS, Storage, SvMotion, Synology, vMotion, VMware 12 Comments

6Jul/110

Installing the VMware vDR Appliance…

Go to VMware's website, go to the "Downloads" section, click on "vSphere 4" and scroll down until you see "VMware Data Recovery", click on the "Download" button.
Accept the EULA and download the ISO. Once downloaded, extract the ISO (I use 7zip)
Remote Setup Wizard

Go into your vCenter and go to "File" then "Deploy OVF Template..."

Browse out to where the ISO was extracted to and select the ovf file in the VMwareDataRecovery-ovf-i386 folder, then click "Next"
Remote Setup Wizard

Verify the information, then click "Next"
OVF Details

Select the name and add it to where it should go (the cluster in this case)
Name

Select the cluster and then the individual host
Host Config

Select the Datastore to store the files and the format of the disk
Disk Setup

Select the Network it should be on
Network Config

Select the Timezone
Time Config

Verify the information and click "Finish"
Verify Config

Wait for the system to be successfully deployed
Installing
Completed Install

With the appliance installed, the plugin for vCenter will now be needed. To install it go back to the extracted ISO folder, run the "VMwareDataRecoveryPlugin.msi"
Plugin Installer

Click "Next", "Next", "Next", choose "I Agree" and "Next", "Next", "Close"
Plugin Installer

Once installed, by clicking on the "Plug-ins" through vCenter and then "Manage Plug-ins", the Plug-in Manager should look similar to this:
Plugin Installed

Tagged as: Data Recovery, install, OVA, OVF, plug-in, vCenter, vDR, vMotion, VMware, vSphere No Comments

1Jun/113

Fixing vMotion

Fairly simple fix to that pesky "vMotion is not enabled on the host of the virtual machine. To migrate the virtual machine, enable vMotion on the host or power off the virtual machine." error.

What you'll see:
vMotion Error Notice

To fix this, go on over to the "Configuration" tab, then click on the "Networking" link. You'll want to go to the properties of the Virtual Switch that contains the "Management Network" VMkernel Port:
Networking Properties

Once there, click on the "Management Network" port and notice that in the "Port Properties" how vMotion is Disabled:

Click on the "Edit" button, and while on the "General" tab, check mark the box next to vMotion and click "OK":
Enabling vMotion

After clicking on the "Close" button for the vSwitch, you should be able to go back to the system you were trying to vMotion and the error should be gone:
vMotion Error is gone