VM Squad

Well as meetings progress and executives sit impatiently, our D.R. plan is slowly coming together. Having to test and choose products is always a great learning experience, though doing this with deadlines takes some of the fun away.

We’ve already sat through the presentations from Lefthand and Equallogic since we’ve narrowed our choices for our production SAN down to these two venders. Just from meeting the reps from both of these companies, I’d have to say that the Lefthand guys seem more down to earth and know what the hell they are talking about. The Equallogic reps we’ve had out are just salesmen who have had minor hardware training and only answer questions with generic answers. The Lefthand guys do this for a living and for fun it seems, the Equallogic guys are just salesmen, period.

One of the biggest downsides for us with Equallogic was that when it comes down to upgrading the firmware on the modules, it will take down network connectivity for 15 seconds while it switchs over to the secondary controller inside the array. I don’t know about other companies and how they would handle their SAN being down for 15 seconds a couple times a year but I’ll pass. With Lefthand, because of their network RAID design, no downtime is required. I’d have to say we’re leaning very heavily towards Lefthand for the SAN purchase.

We’ve settled on VMware 3.5 for our virtualization needs. Virtual Iron will hopefully make it into our plans some day but they just aren’t mature enough for what we need. I’d like to actually use the licenses we’ve purchased for Virtual Iron to create a testing lab for our dept since we just don’t have space for phsyical machines.

And I finally found the time to install and configure Cacti to replace Servers Alive. The newest release from CactiEZ is really the best and easiest solution i’ve found for the price paid, FREE! The features that cacti has and the plugins available really do compare to most enterprise solutions that cost a bucket full of cash. I have almost all of our servers setup and am going through networking equipment to add as needed. In the past if a developer said they needed a new server because a current server just couldn’t handle the load, we would just buy it. Now with performance monitoring and tracking I can ask them to prove the need. In the past month i’ve had to pull statistics on a few servers for this exact reason.

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve posted on anything I’m doing at the day job.

Because of the usual budget crunch I’m building an Openfiler server to use as a temp solution. It’s amazing how much the lack of space across the board hinders your overall day to day job.

We’ve pretty much settled on VMware ESX 3.5 for our virtualization platform. Virtual Iron really just isn’t up to the table all the way when it comes to the extra features that VMware offers. They may seem like minor features but honestly it’s what makes VMware the best solution for us.

I’m also really looking hard for something to replace our current monitoring solution that is way long in the tooth. A previous administrator had Servers Alive setup for simple monitoring of availability and Solarwinds setup to monitor bandwidth across our VPN concentrators and frame routers. I would really like something open source of course, but something that combines availability and bandwidth monitoring. Alerting is a must, we use email but are considering setting up SMS for emergency alerts. Any suggestions? Please drop them in the comments.

Thanks, and I’ll try to keep this updated a bit more.

John Spiers from Lefthand has a blog called the Virtual View. I love blogs like this. You get the true unfiltered opinion from these guys. There are a few blogs like this where the owners truly let it all out for the world to see and it’s really needed. Sometimes sales depts can start throwing numbers and specs and it can get kind of blurry. To have someone like John just putting the truth out there it really helps to see who is behind the scenes and what they are about.

John’s blog of course focuses on their SAN/iQ offering but as more posts have appeared he’s started to post about other items that relate to it. Like how awesome (it really is!) iSCSI is compared to it’s older but aging competitor Fiber Channel. He brings up a lot of good points that companies need to look at as they move forward or begin looking at the differences between the two. Even with FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) FC still has a long way to go.

Note: We still haven’t bought our SAN solution yet and I wasn’t paid for this post.