By mike
So I’ve been restoring some Windows servers from NetApp snapshots today, specifically single hard disks that had been having problems (long story involving Windows problems, etc). I found this pretty easy to do once I got the syntax down – basically, all I was looking to do was to restore the C: of a server, but keep it’s D: intact – that way I’d keep the most recent data, in this case some SQL files, but could roll back to a point where the Windows OS was a little less hosed up. Mostly for my own quick reference in the future, this is how I cranked a bunch of these out.
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By mike
…when I flipped the page over on my desk calendar this morning and noticed that the January 31st Virtualization Tip of the Day from the fine folks at PrintedOwl.com has this to say:
It’s a best practice to keep the number of COS software installations to a minimum. Here’s a case that’s justified for some environments to ensure graceful host shutdowns. Mike at motogobi has done some leg work & put up a procedure: http://www.motogobi.com/2008/11/13/setting-up-powerchute-network-shutdown-in-vmware-esx-35/
I’m flattered 
By mike
It’s good to see Lifehacker focusing on backup tools. After literally years of struggling with backing up various computers and laptops I’ve owned over the years, and having learned my disaster-recovery lesson the hard way when I lost the hard drive on my desktop in 1996 or something, I’ve recently settled into a very cozy relationship with Mozy. I signed up for the yearly Home Unlimited plan ($50/yr per machine) and have been nothing short of pleased with it’s performance.
Check out other options over at Lifehacker, but whatever you do? Make sure you’re backing up your data…
By mike
Click for larger, more confusing view
Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – and they’re here to help us make heads or tails of iSCSI storage. You’ll even be able to make sense of that diagram above after reading:
As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.
This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.
Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:
Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?
Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?
Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?
Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?
Here are the answers you seek…
By mike
It’s inevitable: hard drives just fall by the wayside. Even more so with the switch from IDE to SATA over the last couple of years. Where I work, large amounts of data had been stored on single spinning IDE disks (bad), so one of my goals was to migrate that data to redundant arrays for better protection. OK, that’s fine. But what to do with the oddly-sized 500 and 750gig IDE hard drives that end up in a pile on your desk?
One word: NAS. (okay, so it’s an acronym for Network Attached Storage)
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By mike
I currently admin a sizable VMWare ESX deployment hosting a couple dozen domains and over a hundred Windows servers. Most are for testing and could be rebuilt pretty quickly, but some are for production deployment – at least one of which is fairly irreplaceable. This past summer our office suffered some extended outages due to city-wide power interruptions, so it was a no-brainer to approve the purchase of PowerChute services for these servers. Turns out, APC is lagging a little on getting an ESX 3.5-compatible current version of PCNS out there so I decided to get v2.2.1 running on my five ESX hosts.
Here’s how I did it – mostly for my own future reference: Read more »
