A few weeks a go I was moving a customer from an old set of ESX servers (not HA clustered) to a new infrastructure of Clustered ESX hosts. After building, testing and verifying the hosts we started moving the VM’s. It became apparent after a little while there were some resource issues. After just a few VM’s were moved an alert appeared that we could not start any new machines. I start looking at the cluster and there is plenty of extra Memory and CPU. Still nothing will start.
I say to myself, “Self, we have read about this before.” I thought back to this HA Deep Dive article by Duncan Epping.
Lets check the HA slots! (on a side note, if you use HA and have never read the Deep Dive, go do it now!)

Special thanks to Kevin Miller (@kevin_miller), for making sure I didn’t burn up anything and running out to Fry’s to get a new CPU when the orginal we ordered turned out to be not compatible.

List of the material used in final Version:

Intel DH57JG – Motherboard
Intel i5-661 Core Duo – Processor (special note: DO NOT get the i5-655k unlocked CPU in the picture, it was not compatible with any intel Motherboard)
Lian Li MINI ITX Case (6x9x12 in dimensions) supports Full size PSU
Rosewill silent PSU
Intel dual port PCIe 16x Gbe NIC
Stock intel heatsink and fan (Nexus fan in the picture was very cool, just too big to fit anything into the PCIe port.
2x Intel 80GB SSD
2x4GB OCZ Memory Kit

The server built amazingly fast using PXE boot and installing an ESXi image. Only thing that didn’t work that I wish it did was the on board NIC, 2 GigE ports will be more than enough for our purpose. This is not a lab machine but will run all the components I need to deploy a solution in an automated fashion. I really like VMware Fusion but if I try to run Windows 7, a Linux Server and a Windows 2003 server at the same time my awesome Mac Book Pro becomes useless. This is a lightweight and easy way to bring all of these components together for relatively low cost and if it can save half a day on an install it will pay for itself pretty fast.
I am running:
Windows 2003 ( a vCenter Template)
UDA20 – Ultimate Deployment Appliance that I fought with for a while and finally have it running reliably.
vSphere Mangement Assistant

As of this post working on building:
Windows 7 VM (for Powershell and other tools)
Maybe a free NFS/CIFS server for some easy file shares.
Linux Server (just in case I need it)

Now for some pics:

Sometimes you may be required to run your vCenter server that has two network interfaces. One in the network it can be reached for remote desktop access and the other where it has access to the ESX servers in order to manage the VMware hosts. This is sort of a hybrid model of an isolated management network. Where only one host can reach the management ports. One thing to think about in this model is Update Manager by default will not like it. Everything may look ok, but trying to scan a host will fail. Luckily though it is an easy fix.

In college I often would be invited to a get together that could often include the letters BYOB, Bring Your Own Beer. Sometimes a cookout would be BYOM, Bring Your Own Meat (or meat alternative for the vegetarians). So today I want to leverage this to push my new acronym B.Y.O.P. Bring Your Own Pod. Lately I have been seeing people talk about Vblocks. If I can venture a succinct definition a Vblock is a pre-configured set of Cisco, EMC and VMware products tested by super smart people, approved by these people to work together, then supported by these organizations as a single entity. Your reseller/solutions provider really should already be doing this very thing for you. You may choose to buy just the network piece, or the hypervisor but your partner should be able to verify a solution to work from end to end and provide unified support.

If you have a smaller View deployment but still want to have redundant connection servers look no further than Microsoft NLB. Solve this problem without the need for an expensive hardware loadbalancer. Will it have all of the bells and whistles? No. If you have less than a 1000 users you probably would not see the benefit of the advanced features in a hardware load balancer. Make sure to read the whitepaper from VMware about NLB in Virtual Machines.

I am making the assumption you are like me and want everything to be as virtual as possible. So the View Connection Manager servers will be VM’s

While troubleshooting another issue a week or two ago I came across this VMware knowledge base article. Having spent most of the time with other brand arrays in the past, I thought this was a pretty cool solution verses just increasing the queue length of the HBA. I would recommend setting this on your 3par BEFORE you get QFULL problems. Additionally, Netapp has an implementation of this as well.

Be sure to read the note at the bottom especially:

If hosts running operating systems other than ESX are connected to array ports that are being accessed by ESX hosts, while the latter are configured to use the adaptive algorithm, make sure those operating systems use an adaptive queue depth algorithm as well or isolate them on different ports on the storage array.

I do need to dig deeper how this affects performance as the queue begins to fill, not sure if one method is better than another. Is this the new direction that many Storage Vendors will follow?

Until then, the best advice is to do what your storage vendor recommends, especially if they say it is critical.

Here is a quick run through for you.