EMC

EMC giving away some awesome free training!!

Posted by Arjan Timmerman on sep 30, 2011 in EMC | 0 comments

When I went to the Education site of EMC today I noticed they are giving away some great training for FREE!

To get hold of this free training go to the EMC Education Site and look for the highlights in the Education store (see picture)

Click on VNX Foundations >> FREE

The Powerlink Login screen will appear. When you already have a powerlink acoount, use it. Otherwise register a new account:

After login the course info will pop-up.

Just click register, after this the Registration Confirmation box will appear

Click Launch to begin the training.

The VNX Foundation training will give you an overview of the EMC VNX line.

For an complete overview of the training view this PDF file:

http://www.vdicloud.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Course-Description.pdf

Hope you’ll enjoy!

 

 

 

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Enable Jumbo frames on a Qlogic iSCSI HBA

Posted by Arjan Timmerman on jul 11, 2011 in EMC, VMware | 3 comments

Last week I was googling for a post on how to enable Jumbo frames in VMware ESXi on a Qlogic QLE406Xc iSCSI HBA. There are a couple of great post on how to enable Jumbo frames on Software iSCSI, like these:

http://www.vladan.fr/enable-jumbo-frames-in-esxi-4/ by by Vladan Seget (@Vladan)

http://defaultreasoning.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/configure-jumbo-frames-on-hardware-iscsi-hba-in-esx-4/ by Marek Zdrojewski (@MarekDotZ)

But they didn’t provide the solution for me.

To set the MTU of the iSCSI HBA you need to be in the Bios of the card. So restart the host and at the right moment press Control + Q.

When you’re in the Qlogic Fast!Util(bios) Choose the HBA and press enter:

Choose Configuration Settings, and press enter:

Choose Advanced Adapter Settings, and press enter:

In the Advanced Adapter Settings go to te MTU setting and press enter:

In the pop-up menu choose 9000 and press enter:

Check if the MTU setting is correct and press Escape:

In the pop-up screen choose to save the changes and press enter:

Do this for all HBA’s in the host and reboot the server.

Your iSCSI HBA’s now have an MTU of 9000 (Jumbo frames). Make sure your SAN (in our case an EMC VNXe3300) also supports jumbo frames.

 

 

 

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A new vSphere Homebrew/Whitebox EU style

Posted by Arjan Timmerman on feb 16, 2011 in EMC, VMware | 0 comments

Inspired by Chad Sakac’s post about his whitebox update I decided to see what the prices for two new whiteboxes would be like in Europe. After some investigation I ordered the following setup (twice ):

• A Intel mainboard: https://www.afuture.nl/products/8743/BOXDH55HC_Intel_DH55HC.html
• 16 GB DDR3 RAM: https://www.afuture.nl/products/136933/GVP38GB1333C9DC_Geil_GVP38GB1333C9DC.html
• A WD 1 TB HDD: https://www.afuture.nl/products/123020/WD10EALX_Western_digital_Caviar_Blue-_1TB.html
• A Midi tower with powersupply: https://www.afuture.nl/products/57919/ATX7006B_LC-Power_7006B_-_ATX_Classic.html
• A intel Xeon 3440 (HT): https://www.afuture.nl/products/8874/BX80605X3440_Intel_Intel_Xeon_X3440.html
• Two Intel GT NIC’s: https://www.afuture.nl/products/15738/PWLA8391GT_Intel_Intel_PRO-1000_GT.html

Be Aware that in my list no Graphic card is included which is a must with the XEON processor (when you want to use the onboard GPU, you’ll have to get a i7 930 or something equivalent). I had two spare ATI 4550 cards, so i’ll use them.

Total cost: € 571,30 (without shipping cost)

I sold my two old whiteboxes (Q6700, 8GB and 320 GB HDD) for € 250,- each so my total cost for a new vSphere lab:

€ 1150,- – € 500,- = € 650,- (not bad I think)

Great price and full warranty For shared storage i’ve always used Openfiler, but after watching the first two EMC webcast’s (by Simon Seagrave and Rick Scherer) i’ve decided to play with the EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance.

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