Thursday, March 25, 2010

Great VMware resource - VMware Knowledge Base TV

Late last year VMware started publishing technical videos from the VMware Knowledge Base.

Here's the link if you would like to check out some interesting videos for common and sometimes not so common tasks.

http://blogs.vmware.com/kbtv/

Starwind offers iSCSI SAN software for FREE!!

StarWind Offers High Availability iSCSI SAN Software Free to Microsoft MVP, MCP and MCT Professionals
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/news/31

New StarWind High Availability iSCSI SAN Software Free for Any VMware vExpert, VCP or VCI
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/news/30

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Configuring VMkernel port with an MTU of 9000 bytes - Part 2

As a follow up to my original post "Configuring VMKernel port with an MTU of 9000 bytes" I thought that it would make more sense to include more of the configuration commands that are included in the VMware vSphere 4.0 iSCSI SAN Configuration document.

In the original post I only included the commands that enable you to create a vmkernel port with an MTU of 9000 bytes.  In this post it includes the details from the original post as well as the configuration of the virtual switch and a second vmkernel port.  In addition to that there are commands that bind the vmkernel ports to the software iSCSI adapter and removes a physical uplink from each vmkernel port.

In this example there are four physical network interfaces in the vSphere host, vmnic0 through vmnic3.  Vmnics 0 and 1 are one physical adapter and vmnics 2 and 3 are another.  We will be using vmnics 0 and 2 for vSwitch0, that way we have some redundany between physical adapters.  You can configure vSwitch0 with vmnics 0 and 2 using the virtual infrastructure client.

Once you have finished configuring the vSphere host you should use the virtual infrastructure client, configuration tab, storage adapters, and rescan for new storage devices and VMFS volumes.  The result should be that the existing LUNs will continue to be available except for the fact that the details of those LUNs will indicate that they have multiple paths.