Virtualization, Storage, Community

Dell Management Plug-In for VMware vCenter Review

Ok, I've had the plug-in running for a few weeks and have gone through some of the primary functions of it (firmware updates, inventory, monitoring, warranty retrieval, create hardware profile for deployment)

I'm not going to go through the initial setup, that's been covered pretty well on DellTechCenter.com.

Here are the claimed major functionalities with my notes as far as day to day usage as well as some miscellaneous thoughts at the end.

Deep-level detail from Dell servers

The level of detail here is quite good; much deeper information and more clearly laid out than the basic 'Hardware' tab in vCenter. But what stands out to me is the efficiency of not having to rely on another tool, be it OpenManage, iDRAC, IT Assistant, etc. I spend a lot of time in vCenter and it's fantastic to not have to leave that for another program.

The amount of detail for hardware information is ridiculous. All of this information is available if you have the Enterprise iDRAC in your server, but to be able to get the serial number and manufacturing date of your RAM in the same place that you can check your warranty status is just beautiful.

Deploy BIOS and firmware updates within vCenter

This is a wizard based process that requires you to have a CIFS or NFS repository, which the initial setup walks you through for configuring. I've found it pretty straight forward, easy and quick. Well, the wizard is quick. While this feature is fantastic and works very well, the actual upgrade, however, takes quite a while. The server goes through multiple reboots throughout the process. After the updates are downloaded to the repository, the server is automatically put into Maintenance Mode and then reboots into an EFI environment to do the updates. After each update, the server reboots and re-enters the System Update environment to continue with the next update (firmware/bios). If you attempt to perform many updates at once (NIC firmware, BIOS, HD Firmware, etc.), be prepared to wait.

Build hardware and hypervisor profiles and deploy any combination of the two on bare-metal Dell PowerEdge™ servers without a preboot execution environment (PXE)

This is accomplished through the magic of the combination of the LifeCycle Controller and the iDRAC. While I've built the profile which seems very straight forward, I've yet to be able to test this (spare Gen11 PowerEdge servers are hard to come by, though if one were donated, I would not complain). Although I have a new server coming to replace an out of warranty cluster host that I was planing on testing on, I found this little nugget in the Admin Guide

The system needs to have a Virtual Disk for installation of the OS.

The Plug-in will not install the hypervisor to an internal SD card.

Bummer. This is the standard config for my cluster going forward. No Hard Disks. My great hope is that this is resolved in the next version. If not, this is a huge feature and potentially massive time saver that's not available to me.

Automatically perform Dell recommended vCenter actions based on Dell hardware alerts

The Plug-in adds a whole host of new Dell server specific alarms to vCenter. These range from power consumption to OS driver version monitoring. If something critical enough happens, say a single power supply in a dual power supply system dies, the Plug-in will automatically put the host in maintenance mode until the issue is fixed. This can theoretically save you from encountering an HA event, which, while cool, is never fun.

When I first installed the plug-in, I was immediately alerted to the fact that I was running on a quite old RAID controller driver. Handy.

Receive proactive renewal alerts from Dell before your warranty expires and access the Dell hardware warranty page online

I've always been bad at doing this myself. It seems easy to track on my own, but we're all lazy in some areas, I guess this in one of mine. So, thanks, Dell, for enabling me to not have to come up with a better solution on my own :) I have yet to receive this because the server I'm testing on still has almost 1500 days of warranty left. But I see the link to click to renew it if I like, and its status is in the Overview page in the Dell Server Management tab.

Misc Thoughts and Issues

Hardware Provisioning and Deployment
- Unfortunately, v1.0.1 cannot deploy a hypervisor to an internal SD card. This is how we plan to move forward with our ESXi installs (including the R610 I just ordered)
Pricing
- Retail pricing is $299.00 for up to 3 hosts, $799.00 for up to 10, $1,799.00 for up to 50 and $2,999.00 for up to 1000 hosts
  - If you have 1000 hosts, you can probably afford this. It might be hard to sell $800 to my management to manage my 5 hosts. Essentially, we'd have to save about 25 hours of work to break even
  - I'm not asking for it to be free. It does too much to be free and is really bordering on what you can define as a plug-in. What I'd like to see is up to 3 for free (throw the SMBs a bone and gain market share in the process), $300 for 5 hosts, etc.

Posted by Matt Vogt

New Dell EqualLogic Arrays

Dell unveiled an update to 2 of their EqualLogic PS series array platforms today along with their first sub-$10k array. The new PS6100 and PS4100 series arrays are a refresh of their PS6000 and PS4000 units. The new boxes are being touted as having up to a 67% improvement in I/O performance.

Here are the major new features for each:

PS41000

- shrinks down to 2U

- 24 x 2.5" drives - up to 21.6TB

- 12 x 3.5" drives - up to 32TB

- Now starting at under $10,000

PS6100

- 2U version with 24 x 2.5" drives - up to 21.6TB

- New 4U design with 24 x 3.5" drives - up to 72TB

- NEW Dedicated management port

Both arrays will ship with the latest 5.1 firmware and are certified for VMware's vSphere 5.0 storage APIs (VASA, VAAI, etc.). The SSD options will go up to 400GB per drive, which I'm sure will be slightly over the $10,000 starting price in the PS4100.

This may sound lame, but the addition of the dedicated management port on the PS6100 is something that I'm very excited about. I never understood why there was one on the PS4000 but not the PS6000. It was maddening to lose 25% of my total network throughput on an array if I needed to attach it to a dedicated management network.

Being in the market for a Sumo (Dell's EqualLogic Monster PS6500 series array), I was hoping that those would get the same refresh, and even though I knew it wasn't going to be refreshed yet, I'm still a bit bummed that I may have to purchase it just before it gets its own upgrade.

Posted by Matt Vogt

How I Feel After Tech Field Day 7

Full. From great conversations, vendor product information, BBQ and cakeballs. Tech Field Day 7 was quite the event. I was able to meet a few people whom I've either followed on twitter or read their blogs for a while who have been influential in my development as an infrastructure professional. I also met others I was not familiar with who have already informed my thinking, and I can only assume that they will continue to be a great resource of experience and knowledge.

Speaking of the delegates, I want to thank Stephen Fosket and Matt Simmons for gathering such a great and diverse group of infrastructure professionals. Also, as one of the younger delegates, both in terms of age and experience, I want to thank the delegates for listening and taking the time to explore topics that were new for me.

I'm fortunate to be able to head straight to vacation right after TFD. Rather than head back to the crazy of work, I'll (hopefully) be able to better process what just happened in Austin. As I think back through the presentations and conversations, there's a lot of processing to do.

Posted by Matt Vogt

New Role and Opportunity

For the last 4 years I've operated as a Windows Systems Administrator, primarily focusing on (surprise!) Microsoft technologies - patching, security, Active Directory, Group Policy, etc. When I took this position, our virtualization environment was quite small, not very complex, not needing a lot of love or development, and not really my job. We had about 30 virtual machines, 4 hosts running ESX 2.5 all with internal or direct attached storage, 3 hosts running EXS 3.5 with still more internal storage and one single controller NetApp FAS270 with a whopping 1.25TB of iSCSI storage! These ESX 3.5 hosts were also running un-clustered.

With demands growing much faster than our budget (centralized backup, Antivirus, patching, deployment, file and print services, CMS, LMS, better-than-just-pop-email), it was obvious that we could no longer afford physical servers. We had neither the budget nor the physical space, power, cooling, etc and had to come up with a better plan. Virtualization was the answer, and somebody had to do it. I fell in love with the technology and jumped right in. As most of you have probably experienced, it soon became the majority of my daily functions.

We quickly added one more ESX 3.5 host, consolidated 2 of the ESX 2.5 hosts into the 3.5 hosts, added a second shelf to the NetApp (now all of 3.5TB) and added a Dell PowerVault MD1000 attached to a PowerEdge 1950 running Red Hat serving as an NSF store (3TB also).

Sounds great. We should be set, right? Boy was I wrong. I had no idea how fast we could chew through storage and host resources. With our NetApp nearing End of Life (not to mention being well out of warranty), it was time to consider new storage and another host or 2. While we loved the performance of our NetApp, we couldn't afford a system with multiple controllers, couldn't afford death by licensed features and found it difficult to administer. Through a process I won't detail here, and with a price my Dell AE swore me me to protect, we decided to migrate to and standardize on EqualLogic. So we purchased a PS6000XV for primary storage (6.5TB usable) and a PS4000X for replication.

We're now sitting with a single ESXi 4.1 cluster with 5 hosts and 3 EqualLogic arrays in two groups. We're still using the old NetApp iSCSI and MD1000 NFS SANs as tier 2 storage and now have a grand total of 26TB of storage (96TB more coming).

With the evolution of my workload and focus, as well as a new project building a remote data center in Houston as both a multi site cluster and DR site, I was offered the new position of Sr. Systems Administrator - Virtualization and Storage, which I gladly accepted. While this in part realigns my job title and description with what I actually do and where the Datacenter and IT services field is headed, it also adds more opportunities for growth. I will be taking on the role of Scrum Master (Srum is our internal project management framework), operate as lead/backup technician for the rest of the Sys Admin team and be responsible for server/service patch management oversight.

It's big and a little bit scary, but if im not a little bit scared of what I'm doing, I get complacent and don't learn nearly as much.

Here's to being scared.

Posted by Matt Vogt

Contact Sharing at VMWorld

Connecting with new people and exchanging contacts at VMWorld is a crucial component of the conference (or any other conference, for that matter). I've networked with many people over my admittedly short conference going history, and the value of being able to easily contact colleagues in the field post-conference is only outdone by their willingness to help out.

It can be a terrifying experience to go these conferences and try to ask questions of these experts because no one wants to show that they may not know exactly what they're doing. Once you do that and have the experience of not being treated like an idiot or as a lesser admin, you'll see that it doesn't matter how much you know or don't know. What matters is that we all are in this together, to help our respective constituents use technology to their greatest benefit. Someone will always have made a design decision that you never thought of. Some one will have tested and re-tested theories and made mistakes for you so that you don't have to. This enables you try new designs, theories, technology based on other's work and the field (and our knowledge) advances that much quicker. The more we all, as operators of these technologies. cooperate in community, the better we admins, consultants, integrators, vendors and the industry as a whole become. This includes everyone from the newbies to the seasoned vets.

That all being said, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to not only get your information, but to save it. 2 weeks before VMWorld last year, I lost all of my business cards in an office move. I didn't have time to get any made up through my employer, but I needed something. What I came up with was a QR Code picture shortcut on my Droid. So when someone wanted my contact info and they, too, had a smart phone, they could just scan my QR code and my contact information would be automatically entered into their address book. It was a huge success!

This year, I'm going to have both a QR code and Microsoft Tag on the back of my business cards as well as shortcuts on my Droid. I'm adding the Tag because it can hold so much more information in the vcard than the QR code can. I would suggest you consider enhancing your contact info before your business card becomes a soggy wad in the bottom of the Bellagio fountain.

Posted by Matt Vogt

Navigation

Sites I Like

Tags

Archive

Contributors

Dell Management Plug-In for VMware vCenter Review

New Dell EqualLogic Arrays

How I Feel After Tech Field Day 7

New Role and Opportunity

Contact Sharing at VMWorld