Varrow Blogs

Well NetScaler VPX is now GA, actually I’m a little late as it was announced last week.  If you recall, I touched on this subject a few weeks ago when harping on the importance of a true load balancing solution for high availability in a XenApp environment.  As a brief recap, the VPX line of [...]

I encountered an issue this week where multiple VMs on a certain ESX host start having corruption of their TCP/IP stack. The 2008 VMs were unable to retain their gateway while the 2003 VMs were unable to retain any IP info whatsoever.  While still researching the cause, there is a solution. To repair the TCP/IP stack, just run this command which comes from this KB from Microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357

netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt

Here is a VMware Communities post with similar symptoms.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1336502#1336502

This thread discusses the problem as well but doesn’t really mention VMware.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasp/thread/27fd86ad-caad-4698-9032-63550695ee3d

A few weeks ago, I submitted a blog about connecting Windows 2008 servers to EMC DMX storage arrays. After thinking about my past experiences with connecting pre-Windows 2008 servers to EMC storage storage arrays, I began to wonder if it was still necessary to align the disk partitions with Windows 2008.
Not aligning the partition [...]

If you have EMC as your storage platform and VMware vSphere or ESX 3.x as your virtualization platform there is a handy little plug-in from EMC that can help make life a little easier for you.  Afterall when you have to deal with everything from “it won’t print!” and “I just deleted my entire departments [...]

Here’s to a crew of hardworking, motivated and passionate individuals, not to mention dedicated vendors that want nothing but to see us succeed! 
Not bad for a team of 20!
 

Posted in varrow Tagged: accolades

As reported here and here AT&T released their new 3G MicroCell yesterday in the Charlotte test market.  Hey!  That’s where I live!  I’ve been waiting on this device for a while.  Ask anyone I work with how my cell coverage is at home and you’ll find out it’s abysmal.  Calls are short, frustrating, and futile.  [...]

The other day I wrote a bit about UCS and the idea behind it.  This time I want to go a little deeper in to the components that make up a UCS system and how they connect.  One thing about Cisco is they offer very modular solutions.  Usually this is great but it can be [...]

A classic stereotype for Citrix XenApp as a technology, in about any IT organization, is that it requires a lot of effort to manage.  This especially holds true in larger environments with a lot of concurrent users, therefore usually translating to a number of servers to maintain. 
While there are a lot of creative ways to [...]

I recently implemented a new CX4 with the latest version of Navisphere, FLARE 29.  There’s been a lot of hype around this release because 29 now gives storage admins the ability to peer into VMware environments and even see which guest VMs exist on which LUNs. ESX hosts icons appear differently and are easy to decipher form other hosts. I really like the integration and setup was straight forward.  Just a quick wizard to run through that requires authentication to your virtual center server and your good to go.  I’ve only tested the new FLARE in with vsphere so I’m not sure if the interface would give similar results and visibility into a VI3.5 environment. 

Another change in FLARE 29 that appears simple at first but, in my opinion, is quite a great enhancement is an upgrade to the “connectivity status” section of Navisphere.  Host wwn’s and iqn’s are now grouped together in a tree structure under the hostname.  No more sorting and trying to figure out if all your initiators registered successfully or not!  What a time save if you’re implementing several new hosts in an environment. 

CAUTION:  It does appear that there is a bug with FLARE 29 and Site Recovery Manager. If using SRM with MirrorView, hold off until the next version of SRM is released and do the SRM upgrade first.  Hopefully, this will also be the time a vSphere compatible version of SRM is released as well.  For more information about this issue, check out the end of this fine article from Chad Sakac.

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/09/a-couple-important-alua-and-srm-notes.html

For those of you who have made the jump to Cisco Nexus or FCoE you are probably already familiar with what a CNA adapter is and have them installed in your servers.  For those of you not yet familiar with the technology, just think of it as the next generation of HBA that allows you [...]

Sanbolic, Inc offers two shared storage solutions – Kayo FS and Melio FS. Each is designed to support concurrent blocklevel access to data stored on Storage Area Networks (SANs).
Kayo FS was initially developed to enhance certain feature aspects of Microsoft’s® Hyper-V™ server virtualization technology. By providing multiple hosts with concurrent access to virtual machine [...]

Updated RP release yesterday here are the new features that lie within..

Support for Gen 4 hardware-Support for Dell R610 hardware which uses a single, quad port QLE25XX 8Gb HBA
Support for 8Gb/s SANs
Enhanced support for thin LUNs on Clariion CX4 arrays with FLARE 29 installed
Support for Clariion LUNs up to 32TB in size
GUI [...]

In Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, Microsoft has disabled the Copy To.. button on the User Profiles screen. This process has been used for years to create a custom default user profiles and now they go and break that with no real workaround. They want people to move to Windows 2008 and Windows 7 [...]

The new FT (Fault Tolerance) feature in vSphere (video demo here) is very cool but it has some requirements and restrictions.  Sometimes when you try to enable it you’ll get an error back that isn’t always informative.  Basically, it’ll tell you that your host doesn’t meet a requirement but won’t say what that requirement is.  [...]

It’s always fun to see someone, big or small, enter a new market and really shake things up.  I think we’re seeing Cisco do that with their Nexus switches and UCS (Unified Computing System) platform.  The Nexus line shouldn’t be a big surprise, that’s Cisco’s core market interest.  But combine it with UCS and they [...]