A NetApp Technical Diary

I know this is a blatant abuse of media, so please excuse this post, but please feel free to forward it on to generous people you may know of

In October, a team of 21 very mixed ability runners from B2net will be participating in the Royal Parks Half Marathon, London. I will be one of the “very” mixed ability runners along with my fiancé. I have never run a half marathon before, and despite doing a fair amount of training, a previous slipped disc injury means I will be taking the run fairly easy. I’m not entirely sure what I’ve let myself in for! 

We are raising money for CLEFT, a fairly new charity which is focused on research into the causes of cleft lip and palates and post-operative care and support. 

Cleft lip and palates can cause huge distress to patients and those who care for them and the charity aims to fund projects that improve techniques in alleviating and reducing suffering.  The charity raises money to fund projects at home and abroad, with varied objectives such as research into how and why clefts occur, how it affects speech and growth and purchasing essential medical equipment.

Please support our efforts by making a donation, large or small, at our JustGiving page http://www.justgiving.com/kranz; it’s secure and very easy to use.

To find out more about how your donation will help CLEFT please visit http://www.cleft.org.uk/your_donations.html

Thanks in advance from the B2net Royal Parks Team.

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General cleft, cleft lip, Cleft lip and palate, cleft palate, half marathon, sponsor

I arrived home today, after waiting for 2 weeks, to the following email…

“Congratulations!  You have achieved the VMware Certified Design Expert on VI3 (VCDX3) certification.   

 Your VCDX number is: VCDX47″

I can’t really express how truly happy I am at making it passed the final gate! I would love to get some level of feedback from the panelists, but being awarded the certification is more than enough for me! It validates the past year of hard work I have put into this!

So what does this mean to me and my job?

Well first of all for me personally this a huge achievement for myself! This helps me validate my hard work and justify the recommendations I make to customers daily. It takes away some of that personal doubt around whether or not I am capable of truly being an VMware / storage architect. For my job it gives me the confidence to make firm recommendations to my customers, and to assist my colleagues with their projects.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the VCDX journey is a fantastic opportunity to improve your own methodology and processes around VMware project work. Completing the journey is the icing on the cake!

I’m hoping to take this and put it to good use. What I started on this blog over a year ago, I need to put more effort into and continue (thank you all for contributing to my current 1000+ visitors per day). I need to continue showing my face over at the NetApp communities, and I’m long overdue getting involved in the VMware communities. Sounds like a lot of work, I hope I can put aside the time to keep being involved!  Read more... (319 words, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)

General vcdx, VMware, VMware Certified Design Expert

Some of you may be aware that I have been working hard through the VCDX journey over the past year / 18 months. I’m not usually a VMware blogger as I think that space is more than filled, so I usually concentrate on the storage side. However the VCDX is still fairly exclusive, so I wanted to share this journey with everyone. It’s been a really good time, and I have learnt a hell of a lot! It’s helped me better understand the solutions and help my company as a whole put together better VMware solutions, so it’s been hugely beneficial. I’d recommend anyone that is focused on VMware for their company to go down the VCDX route. Even if you don’t get onto the final Defense, it’s a fantastic journey and you will learn a lot.

I won’t go into too much detail about my experience of the Enterprise Admin or Design exams as these have been replaced by the VCAP ones. They are obviously pre-req’s anyway, but I’d say after going through the rest of the journey that they are essential training to get you ready anyway. I’ll probably be sitting both the VCAP exams in the next few months just to make sure my skills are kept up to date.

The Defense Application

Make sure you free your diary for at least a week of solid work. People have said be prepared to do 30-40 hours of work on this, but I think I spent closer to 70 or 80! I had a full week off work, and used both weekends too. I had a lot of work to do as I haven’t really done many fully structured deployments as expected in the Defense application before, so I had to make one up. This is definitely a lot harder as you have to visual everything, including limitations and obstacles. If you make something up, you don’t usually make up challenges for yourself. To compensate, I think I ended up making my scenario a little more complex and I had to do a lot of checking through support docs which added to my work load.  Read more... (2616 words, 2 images, estimated 10:28 mins reading time)

General architect, VCAP, vcdx, VMware

I’m definitely looking forward to VMWorld this year! I haven’t been since Cannes in 2007, so I’m looking forward to seeing how much it’s grown and even more so as I have my VCDX Defense out of the way so I’m relatively stress free! The sessions seem a little overwhelming, I’ll be spending the next few weeks catching up on missed sessions online I think!

If you are there, come track me down. I’ll be hanging about with the NetApp guys a little, teasing the other storage vendors, and I’ll definitely be at the NetApp Communities event on Tuesday night – http://communities.netapp.com/thread/10582.

Here is a quick list of the sessions I think I’ll attend. I’m still undecided about a few and have narrowed it down to 2. I’ll be sure to watch a lot more sessions than this after the event as there is a lot of good stuff I’m missing out on! I look forward to seeing everyone there though!

Monday
9am : ALT2002 – vCenter VSheild
10am : SS1055 – Partner Super Session
10.30am : TA6720 – Troubleshooting with ESXTOP for Advanced Users
12pm : BC7773 – SRM Misconceptions and Misconfigurations
12pm : GD01 – vSphere Security
1.30pm : BC7729 – Intelligent HA, Application awareness with HA
3pm : TA7994 – vStorage Update for vSphere 4.1

Tuesday
11am : MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies
12.30pm : TA8218 – VMware Storage Vision
2pm : SE8206 – Security Hardening Guidelines for vSphere
2pm : ALT3001 – SRM Extended Configuration
3.30pm : DV7706 – View Composer, Technical Deep Dive
3.30pm : SE8389 – Architectural Overview of Security for the Private Cloud
5pm : ALT3003 – Performance Tuning for vSphere  Read more... (446 words, 1 image, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

General communities, NetApp, vmworld

I had the task of replicating an existing customers filer to their new DR system. This was quite a large system, and as much as creating SnapMirrors isn’t particularly complex, it is time consuming. So as with many things I do, I wrote a script to help my achieve this task quicker, and go have yet another coffee.

You’ll need pre-shared keys setup (as ever), but the rest is prompted for. There’s no data validation (no surprise). The script will output 4 text files, one for creating/restricting all the volumes, one for the “snapmirror.conf”, on to be used in place of “snapmirror.conf” while you are doing the baseline initialization, and finally one to actually initialize the snapmirrors. There’s no intelligence around concurrent streams, so initialization is still a bit of a juggling act and waiting game.

Please let me know if you find this useful.

#!/bin/bash

echo “Please enter the name of the PRIMARY filer: ”
read PRI_FILER

echo “Please enter the name of the DR filer: ”
read DR_FILER

ConnectString=”ssh -c 3des”
#ConnectString=”rsh”

SnapMirrorHour=22
SnapMirrorMinute=0
SnapMirrorStagger=5

echo “” > ${DR_FILER}_filer_volumes.txt
echo “” > ${DR_FILER}_snapmirror.conf
echo “” > ${DR_FILER}_sm_initialize.txt
echo “” > ${DR_FILER}_snapmirror_init.conf

for AGGR in `${ConnectString} $PRI_FILER “aggr status” | awk ‘$2!~/State/{print $1}’`
do
 SIZE=`${ConnectString} $PRI_FILER “df -Ah $AGGR” | sed ’s/\([0-9][KMGT]\)B/\1/g’ | awk ‘$1!~/.snapshot|Aggregate/{print $2}’`
 for VOL in `${ConnectString} $PRI_FILER “aggr show_space $AGGR” | awk ‘$1!~/Space/{print $0}’ | awk ‘$4~/volume|file|none/{print $1}’`
 do
  echo “vol create ${VOL} -s none ${AGGR} ${SIZE} ” >> ${DR_FILER}_filer_volumes.txt
  echo “vol restrict ${VOL}” >> ${DR_FILER}_filer_volumes.txt
  echo “snapmirror initialize -S ${PRI_FILER}:${VOL} ${DR_FILER}:${VOL}” >> ${DR_FILER}_sm_initialize.txt
  echo “${PRI_FILER}:${VOL} ${DR_FILER}:${VOL} – ${SnapMirrorMinute} ${SnapMirrorHour} * *” >> ${DR_FILER}_snapmirror.conf
  echo “${PRI_FILER}:${VOL} ${DR_FILER}:${VOL} – - – - -” >> ${DR_FILER}_snapmirror_init.conf

  SnapMirrorMinute=`expr $SnapMirrorMinute + $SnapMirrorStagger`  Read more... (335 words, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)

Command Line initialise, initialize, NetApp, setup, SnapMirror

Excuse the absence in both presence and posts. It’s been a roller-coaster past year with personal injury and flat-out work schedules, so I have had little time or motivation to blog or show my face around the communities. My apologies, and I am determined to break this habit and get back into things once again! But enough of the chatter, get on with the writings…

This isn’t something I see very often, but when I do, it’s interesting to see the stats speak for themselves. I’m with a customer who had a scripted deployment of their NetApp estate a few years ago, and it wasn’t designed or delivered with too much care or attention (something I want to discuss another day). They have a VMware estate with SQL, Exchange and other things. It all runs across a total of over 100 15k FC spindles. It’s not a huge estate in comparison with other sites, so I’m intrigued into why they have such performance issues.

Now when you run through “sysstat –u”, you can see that the filer itself is doing very little, quite happily getting on with what it should do. But the disk is hitting 100% quite often. Immediately this shows a disk problem. They need more spindles, obviously?

Firstly there is an imbalance of spindles. They have a second aggregate on the partner controller that only has test volumes. I get permission to remove this and hot, I re-allocate these to the other controller and expand the existing aggregate. This doubles the spindle count, but I know it’s not going to do anything for existing performance (in that the data won’t automatically redistribute itself!).  Read more... (805 words, estimated 3:13 mins reading time)

General disk performance, fragmentation, hot spindles, NetApp, reallocate, stats show

It’s a busy busy time at the moment, hence the lack of recent updates. However, one very important thing I am currently working on is Movember.

This basically entails growing a stately ‘tash for the month of November in order to raise money for Prostate Cancer charity.

Please sponsor me by heading over to my Mo-Space page – http://uk.movember.com/mospace/13540

My Mo-tash after 2 weeks

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General

We are currently going through a fairly large project internally, and part of this is a “risk register” against the business. Now this includes a lot more information than just simply data on disk, but also people, reputation and so on. For me, now that I have started this project, that is a key part of data protection.

It’s an interesting topic, and something that I’d like to share with you at this early stage in my own project as it makes you look at the storage aspects in a different light.

What affects a piece of data’s risk class?

1.  Who has access to it?
2. How confidential is it?
3. Does it have a tangible value?
4. How portable is it?
5. Could it potentially damage the business reputation?
6. Is it protected?
7.   … probably a lot more!

Some of these are all questions we already have asked about the data sets as we need to define snapshot, replication and tape policies, but data protection goes a lot further than just this. Interestingly the Zemanta plugin for my blog has linked “data protection” with “Information Privacy”, which is a key point!

Who has access to it?

Not just from a front-end authorised point of view, although you do need to know this. Payroll for instance, generally it would just be HR and Accounting that have access to this, but is there a mechanism for anyone else to gain access to it? If so, is there any audit control to check who has been granted access, or who has gained access? The audit control is almost more important than the security in the first place. Security can and will always be broken, but if you can prove it was broken, then you can fix it!  Read more... (1078 words, 1 image, estimated 4:19 mins reading time)

General audit, business value, data protection, Information privacy, NetApp, Risk Analysis, risk register

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWy1Sc9dtGs

New YouTube video showing some of the new features and functionality of NetApp SMVI 2.0. Not sure on a release date just yet, but looks promising!

NetApp News NetApp, smvi, snapmanager, VMware

I am actually quite proud of these. I did them awhile ago and I still refer to them quite a lot. The idea is simple, if you only configure a filer once or twice a month, the process might not stick in your head exactly and you may easily miss out a step. Rather than reams and reams of documentation, the idea is to have a couple of these pinned around your monitor and you have quite a quick visual guide on how you should configure things and it’s easy to keep to a certain standard.

I’m going to try produce more of these for various guides I do, they are much easier to understand quickly when you’re in a hurry.

The SnapDrive one here is a little dated, so please don’t hold that against the content.

General create storage, flow chart, NetApp, provision, visual