Ok, so not Virtualisation related at all but I thought there might be others out there interested so here goes my experiences with the Vodafone Access Gateway http://www.vodafone.co.uk/gateway.

Having recently moved I’ve gone from having a full Vodafone signal at home to being able to only pick up a single bar in the bathroom at the new house.  A far from idea situation.  I’ve been using Vodafone for years and have been totally happy with their service so didn’t want to swap to another provider.  I learnt from http://www.ewan.net/ that Vodafone were soon bringing out an ‘Access Gateway’ which is effectivley your own base station in your house.  So here are my experiences of obtaining and using one.

I normally deal directly with Vodafone over the phone so my first step was to call them and get one ordered.  Here was the first stumbling block.  Once I got through to someone who knew what I was talking about it transpired that I can’t order one over the phone, I have to go into a shop.

The next day I pop into the Liverpool Street Vodafone store on my way home to pick one up.  Here again I’m faced with sales guys who don’t know what I’m talking about!  A quick chat to the manager and he produces a cheat sheet for the sales guy detailing the Access Gateway.  No sales speech needed, I know what I want, just sell it to me :)  I’m given 4 options for buying the device:

• Outright for £160
• £10 a month for 12 months
• £7.50 a month for 18 months
• £5 a month for 24 months

Obviously it’s cheaper to buy it on a monthly plan so I opt for that.  Then they decide to tell me that they don’t actually stock it and it has to be ordered in.  Worse than that they have to have it delievered to the shop and can’t send it to me directly.  This was at 17:30 on a Friday and I’m told it’ll be in on Tuesday and they’ll give me a ring.  All in all I spent about 30 minutes in the shop for what should have been a simple sale.

Tuesday comes and goes with no phone call.  Wednesday I decide to give them a call execpt you can’t call the shops directly so I have to pop in on my way home.  Thankfully it has arrived but they don’t know why no one called me to tell me.  Now we get to the fun part of payment.   I’m told that they don’t know how to put it on the monthly contract, only for a one off fee.  Que numerous phone calls to their head office to sort it out.  Eventually after another 30 mins of hanging around they sort it out on the contract and I’m out of the store with my new toy

Sitting on the train on the way home the instructions seem all too easy.  Plug it in, register it on the web site, wait for a txt and email saying it’s working within 24 hours.

Arriving home I plug it in and register it on the web site.  The instructions tell me that the top lights will flash for an hour whilst it establishes a connection.  Once that’s done I will have a txt and email within 24 hours and it’ll all be working.

24 hours passes and still the lights flash.  I put in a call to their helpline.  A dedicated line for the Access Gateway so these guys should know all about it.  20 minutes on hold and I’m told that the systems are down and they have a big backlog.  Don’t worry about the flashing lights they’ll flash until Vodafone have manually set it up.  The instructions are wrong.  I’m told it should be done by 8pm.

Another day passes but I do get an apologetic email from Vodafone saying they are having issues.  Then 3 days after plugging it in I get the txt and email I’ve been waiting for, it’s working!

Arriving home from work I reset my phone and am presented with a full signal.  I wander around the house and out into the garden, still full signal :)  Calls work, txt works, 3G internet works.  The Access Gateway does exactly as it says on the tin.  The only outstanding issue I have is how do you add more phones to it in the future?  As part of the registration process you have to enter all of the phone numbers that will be using the device.  Once that’s done there doesn’t seem to be a way of changing it.

Overall the Vodafone Access Gateway does exactly what it’s supposed to do and works very well.  It would appear that Vodafone could have done a better job on training their staff on the product but the product itself appears to be rock solid.

In a surprise announcement today Data Domain have revealed that they have an agreement in place to be acquired by Netapp. This deal will bring the market leaders in both the primary and archive storage together. In these uncertain times it’s bold but wise move by Netapp. As a consultant working with both companies I can only see this as a good thing for my clients. Both product sets really are market leading.

More details here http://bit.ly/IIc9

Following the successful regional user groups Alan Renouf is setting up and Online VMware User Group.  The first meeting is scheduled for 1st June 2009 so head on over to Alan’s blog to find out more information http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/05/13/unofficial-online-vmware-user-group/

Something that I get asked a lot is how to bind multiple ethernet links together between an ESX host and a Cisco switch using Cisco Etherchannel (802.3ad).  In reality it’s actually quite simple but does have a small gotcha.  Let’s look at both ends individually:

This is an example config taken from a Cisco switch:

port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip

spanning-tree mode rapid-pvst

interface Port-channel1
description *** ESX Trunk Group 1 ***
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk native vlan 10
spanning-tree portfast trunk
spanning-tree bpdufilter enable
spanning-tree bpduguard enable

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
description *** Port 1 in ESX Trunk ***
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk native vlan 10
channel-group 1 mode on
spanning-tree-portfast trunk
spanning-tree bpdufilter enable
spanning-tree bpduguard enable

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/2
description *** Port 2 in ESX Trunk ***
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk native vlan 10
channel-group 1 mode on
spanning-tree-portfast trunk
spanning-tree bpdufilter enable
spanning-tree bpduguard enable
As you can see it’s a fairly normal Etherchannel configuration.  The gotcha that I mentioned is the ‘port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip’ line which sets the load blancing mode to src-dst-ip.  The default is src-mac which doesn’t work well with ESX.  In the next section I’ll show you how to configure this from the VMware end.  The other differences are the spanning-tree lines.  As VMware can’t bridge traffic between two physical NICs we need to disable spanning-tree on the ports connected to our ESX servers.  This isn’t totally possible but adding the lines shown will achieve the same result.

On the VMware ESX side we need to assign the trunked NICs to a vSwitch and then open up the properties of the vSwitch.  The example below shows a team of two NICs.

The important thing to check is that your Load Balancing is set to ‘Route based on ip hash’ which will interact correctly with the Cisco switch.

The next thing to do is setup our Vlans correctly and I’ll cover this in another post.

More details are emerging on the upcoming NetApp System Manager or NSM for short.  Information is still a little sketchy ahead of the official Beta release but there are some screenshots emerging.

The main idea for NSM is to create a slightly easier to use interface than the existing cli or FilerView which can be a little clunky.  NSM will allow you to view all of your filers together and will reconise cluster pairs which is something FilerView doesn’t really do at the moment in terms of monitoring.

Creation of Aggregates, Volumes and LUNS will be via a very intuitive GUI interface and will certainly make the process a lot quicker than using FilerView.  Personally I find the cli quicker and easier but I guess that what coming from a Linux background does to you.

The main use I can see going to be from a monitoring aspect.  For those than haven’t invested in extra monitoring tools or NetApp Operations Manager this functionality will be a Godsend.

So how does SRM licensing differ from regular VMWare licensing?  Well for a start SRM is licensed per CPU not per 2 CPUs like ESX.  It is also licensed only for the ‘Protected’ servers.  The project I’m currently working on has 4 ESX hosts in the Primary or Protected site and 4 ESX hosts in the Secondary or Recovery site.  Each of these hosts has 4 quad-core CPUS so I need 16 SRM CPU licenses and 1 SRM Server license on the Protected site and no additional licenses on the Recovery site.  These licenses are of course in addition to your normal ESX vCenter licenses.  This license model works for a typical uni-directional solution enabling Fail-over and Fail-back.  If say you had a site in London and another in Cambridge where they were each going to be able to Fail-over to the other site then you would need CPU licenses for both ends to enable Bi-directional Fail-over.

The next issue is now to install the licenses.  All of the documentation tells you to just add them to your existing license server.  Easy Peasy then!  Well most of us will be running a license server with only one license file for our hosts as this is the default.  So what do you do?  The VMWare licensing web site won’t allow you to combine the licenses into one file.  You can’t manually combine the files so you’re left with two license files.  If you look on the ‘Config Services’ tab in your license server you’ll see that the license file path points to your existing license file.  The trick is to change this to the directory where the license files reside.  There is an inportant caveat to this though.  Make sure you don’t put a trailing / on the end.  If you’ve followed the default installation then you need the location to be ‘C:Program FilesVMWareVMWare License ServerLicenses’  Once this is done then you can save the service, restart the license server and the re-read the license files.

So NetApp have announced the release of NetApp System Manager or NSM for short.  This will bring full Microsoft MMC integration to the NetApp product range starting with the FAS2000 and 3000 series.  Despite what others have reported NetApp are adament that this will not replace FilerView, rather it’s in addition to.

NSM will apparently enable users to get a FAS system up and running in under 5 minutes through their Windows server.  Now is this a good thing I wonder?  Surely someone setting up a SAN such as this should have a througher understanding of the system and be more confident in setting it up through the cli?  NSM will apparently come with Best Practice configurations built in along with a system tray monitoring utility which will certainly be a bonus.

What will they be offering for us OSX or *nix users?  I know myself and quite a few of my clients don’t use Windows as their primary OS so perhaps a cross platform tool would have been a better option.  We’ll wait and see I guess.

More info can be found here and details on the beta build when it is released can be found here.

SRM or Site Recovery Manager is a new product in the VMWare range aimed at providing automatic fail-over capabilities between ESX clusters.  I’m currently working on a large project involving SRM and it’s the first time I’ve used it in production so it’s quite a steep learning curve.  There is very little information out there on SRM but Mike Laverick of RTFM Education has written an excellent book on the subject that I’m currently working my way through.  I’d highly recomend obtaining a copy from http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147 if you’re looking at an SRM project.

With so much happening in the world of Virtualisation currently I thought it would be a good idea to collate my thoughts and knowledge into one place so here I am.  Currently I’m working as a consultant in London specialising in Virtualisation and Storage.  Primarily my work centres around VMware and NetApp but I also have experience with XenServer and Hyper-V Virtualisation along with HP and EVA storage.