Brocade Fabric Watch

The other day whilst trying to resolve a pathing issue with a blade chassis. I noticed some CRC errors in one of the Fabrics.

So I'm now in the process of setting up Brocade Fabric watch (yes you do need a license for it) to monitor and alert me on these errors.

Fabric watch goes a bit deeper then the Webtools event view will show you , and anyone out there running Brocade switches should turn it on.

Because it might save you one day.

Getting there in style

So it was my 30th a few weeks ago , and on the wish list was to grab myself a Mustang (I got my ESP when I was 21)

But with all the dramas with banks etc , I had to put it on the back burner. Anyway my sister and mum got me the next best thing. A ride in a 65 coupe which drop me off at the bday venue.

A tour around Sun's Cloud Data Center

Where is my LUN Vmware ??????

So if you have multiple SAN's and you add a brand new SAN into your ESX environment , and you've done a LUN rescan via Virtual Center , and via esxcfg-rescan and you still don't see the storage.

Reboot your ESX host as your HBAs Bios will then be reset ( I'm thinking this is something to do with it getting its SCSI id sequencing re-ordered). And then your Vmware guys will be presented with there new LUNs

How many SCSI ID Targets can I present to a VMware ESX Cluster

So I got an offical answer to my question from Vmware , as I have multiple SAN's which are presented to the ESX cluster.

15 SCSI id targets
16 hba's per hosts (ESX 3.5 update4)
256 vmfs volumes per host.

SNIA Assessment & Planning Design Exam Passed

Just passed my SNIA "Assessment & Planning" exam , I've now moved up the SNIA ranks to "Architect"

It's been a long time coming , but I finally got there

SNIA "Assement & Planning" Day 4

Today was all about "Performance Tuning" from host/fabric & subsystem level. Learn't alot of good tips and can't wait to try them out when I get back to work.

SNIA "Assement & Planning" Day 3

Today was all about ISCSI & FCOE , I've never really been such a big fan of ISCSI but today I saw the SNIA way of incorprating ISCSI into an existing Fiber Channel infrastructure. Because at the end of the day it's all about getting rid of DAS (direct attached storage) so ISCSI can solve those servers we have , sitting out in our data centers that require very little I/O access.

Big thanks to an old freind from "Landesk" Gavin Stearns for dinner and showing me around Melbourne.