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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 2 2007, 6:20 PM EDT (current) | dave_jaffe | |
| Nov 2 2007, 6:19 PM EDT | dave_jaffe | 4 words added |
Changes
Key: Additions Deletions
More Storage Stuff
11-2-07 -- Comments
Over the past few weeks I've wrapped up a few more storage-oriented projects that I wanted everyone to be aware of:
Todd Muirhead and I built 2000 1 gigabyte mailboxes on our PowerVault MD1000 direct attached storage with Exchange 2007 cluster continous replication (CCR) and stressed them successfully with Microsoft's LoadGen for an 8 hour test period. With CCR you have an active Exchange node and a passive Exchange node, each with their own copy of the Exchange database on direct-attached storage. The two copies are kept in sync by log shipping from the active node to the passive node. The idea is to let the application handle the replication rather than spending a ton of money for highly available high-end storage. You can see the details here.
I've also added a section on how to write scripts to automate tasks on our MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays. The management tool for these arrays, the Modular Disk Storage Manager, is a nice tool but after you've created a few dozen LUNs on it manually you start asking yourself if there is a better way. There is and it's called SMCLI or storage manager command line interface. The thing about scripting is, if you try to read the manual to get the syntax it usually takes awhile because you miss a quotation mark or semicolon, but if you have examples to go by you can get started much quicker. Now you do!
That's it for now. ACL was a blast. As usual some of our favorite bands were ones we had never heard of, like Common and Zap Mama (I know, I know, you probably know all about these guys already 'cause you're hip. My wife and I are definitely not hip). Steve Earle was good playing solo, but dude, "Copperhead Road" needs a band!
Dave -- Comments
iSCSI Summer
9-14-2007 -- Comments
I think I will look back at this as my iSCSI summer. Barely being able to spell it a few months ago, I've spent the summer putting all of our iSCSI storage arrays to the test and you can see the results in our Storage section. I've had the pleasure of running serious tests on our Dell/EMC CX3-20c (which also supports Fibre Channel), our Dell PowerVault NX1950 (which also supports NFS and CIFS), and, most recently, our Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a pure iSCSI box with a great price and simple management tools that Michael and the storage team announced this past Monday. (I'm actually not on a first name basis with Mr. Dell as Scott is; it's just what we call him around here).
For the NX1950 Todd and I ran a test where we showed that the array with 45 disks could handle the key storage needs - mail, database, file serving - for a 1000-employee company!
For the MD3000i (which is not really a box - the brains are in the controller cards inside the disk pod) I showed that the storage requirements of 5 servers - both the active and passive nodes of an Exchange continuous cluster replication configuration, a web server, a database server, a file server - can be consolidated on an MD3000i with 45 disks, while backups were being taken off the Exchange passive node.
In both these studies we ran 8-hour full stress tests. These are not marketing slides! (With apologies to our buddies in marketing).
While I was doing this work I collected screen shots, especially around setting up multipathed connections to all of these arrays for failover and load balancing with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. All the detail you could ever want is here. (I know, I owe you open source guys some Linux MPIO stuff - hope to get to that soon).
Well, you won't see me hanging around the ol' wiki for too much longer today since that great institution, the Austin City Limits Music Festival (known to those of us cool people simply as "ACL") starts in a few hours. Six stages including the Dell stage and the AMD stage (this is Austin, remember). Decisions, decisions. Joss Stone or Crowded House (I'm going for Joss). Steve Earle or Stephen Marley. Arcade Fire or Cross Canadian Ragweed. This is the only place you will find Bjork and Charlie Musselwhite on the same bill (I know, you younger cats will have to look up who that is). The one thing I know is I will be at the AMD stage at 4:30 on Sunday for Lucinda Williams. Wouldn't miss her.
Dave -- Comments
7-12-2007 -- Comments
An HP and IBM machine are on the way to do comparisons on my thermal virtualization consolidation paper. That should be fun, I shouldn't have any problems setting up the old IBM machine :-)
We are starting to get linked from the real outside world. A study was done comparing HP and Dell blades and it generated some buzz on Blade Watch. They actually linked backed to our wiki.
Still looking for the first person to find any of the eggs I hid. Send me a private message on this site when you do !
- Scott -- Comments
6-27-2007 -- Comments
I've been working in the lab on setting up Exchange LCR and CCR. Look for some additional stuff in that area soon. These new abilities of Exchange allow for more flexibility in the type of storage used to create HA solutions.
I've also spent some time working on the wiki and trying to figure out what are the best ways to use this new (well new to me anyway) medium to communicate with the technical community. We have setup a few pages that are dedicated to hosting a specific whitepaper - and on that page we are asking for comments and discussion. I do have one to one discussions with customers in person, over the phone, and via email about these same whitepapers on a regular basis. I think that everybody would benefit from that same type of discussion here on the wiki - directly below the link where you download the paper.
-Todd -- Comments
6-22-2007
Been working in the lab this week on a thermal consolidation study with a virtualization twist. Findings are looking interesting. As part of the lab work I wanted to move the physical machine to the ESX server. This was the first time I used VMware Converter 3, and I must say, I'm quite impressed with the ease of use and quickness.
I installed it and had the machine up and running on the ESX server in less than 30 mins. The whole process of migrating the machine only took 10 mins. And I didn't even crack open the documentation (who reads that anyways :-)
Well, I'm also hiding some more easter eggs on the site. Be on the look out for a promotion from us soon to find them all.
Anybody find the first one yet ?
- Scott -- Comments
6-19-2007
We started a simple awareness campaign using ads on Slashdot this morning. The idea is to get the word out to technical minded people that the wiki is here. I thought that it was really cool to see the wiki being promoted on slashdot.
- Todd -- Comments
6-7-2007
I've just added the first material to the Storage section, a pointer to a white paper about using Dell iSCSI storage arrays for VMware, along with a long pdf detailing how to set up iSCSI with ESX. I'll be adding content to the Storage section over the next weeks and months so please come check it out and contribute!
- Dave -- Comments
6-6-2007
More content is begining to fill the wiki. Looking for ideas on how to get people interested and motivated to explore the site. I went ahead and put an easter egg on one of my pages. Let me know if you find it !
Think cheesey 80's movie about the internet, and you'll have some idea of what to look for.
- Scott -- Comments
5-18-2007
We took down the screener last night and we are now live and available for all to see and contribute. Still lots of work to do getting things initially populated and cleanned up, but it feels good to have moved into public view. Now the real fun begins.
- Todd -- Comments
4-19-2007
I was trying to describe the wiki concept to a coworker today. This came out of the thin air to me, not sure if anyone else has described it this way, but here goes, "A concrete wall and everybody on the internet has a can of spray paint."
Seems to fit. Trying to build a community of individuals interested in discussing technical topics, and able to put those ideas on the site.
We are looking forward to your contributions, so please put your can of spray paint to work !
- Scott -- Comments
Roger Foreman is the Manager of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Roger has a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, as well as an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.
Dave Jaffe, Ph.D., is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center who specializes in cross-platform solutions. Previously, he worked in the Dell Server Performance Lab, where he led the team responsible for Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks and the Dell Technology Showcase. He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University.
Todd Muirhead is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Todd has a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas and is Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet (MCSE+I) certified.
Scott Hanson is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Scott has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas and is Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet (MCSE+I) certified and a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).
11-2-07 -- Comments
Over the past few weeks I've wrapped up a few more storage-oriented projects that I wanted everyone to be aware of:
Todd Muirhead and I built 2000 1 gigabyte mailboxes on our PowerVault MD1000 direct attached storage with Exchange 2007 cluster continous replication (CCR) and stressed them successfully with Microsoft's LoadGen for an 8 hour test period. With CCR you have an active Exchange node and a passive Exchange node, each with their own copy of the Exchange database on direct-attached storage. The two copies are kept in sync by log shipping from the active node to the passive node. The idea is to let the application handle the replication rather than spending a ton of money for highly available high-end storage. You can see the details here.
I've also added a section on how to write scripts to automate tasks on our MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays. The management tool for these arrays, the Modular Disk Storage Manager, is a nice tool but after you've created a few dozen LUNs on it manually you start asking yourself if there is a better way. There is and it's called SMCLI or storage manager command line interface. The thing about scripting is, if you try to read the manual to get the syntax it usually takes awhile because you miss a quotation mark or semicolon, but if you have examples to go by you can get started much quicker. Now you do!
That's it for now. ACL was a blast. As usual some of our favorite bands were ones we had never heard of, like Common and Zap Mama (I know, I know, you probably know all about these guys already 'cause you're hip. My wife and I are definitely not hip). Steve Earle was good playing solo, but dude, "Copperhead Road" needs a band!
Dave -- Comments
iSCSI Summer
9-14-2007 -- Comments
I think I will look back at this as my iSCSI summer. Barely being able to spell it a few months ago, I've spent the summer putting all of our iSCSI storage arrays to the test and you can see the results in our Storage section. I've had the pleasure of running serious tests on our Dell/EMC CX3-20c (which also supports Fibre Channel), our Dell PowerVault NX1950 (which also supports NFS and CIFS), and, most recently, our Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a pure iSCSI box with a great price and simple management tools that Michael and the storage team announced this past Monday. (I'm actually not on a first name basis with Mr. Dell as Scott is; it's just what we call him around here).
For the NX1950 Todd and I ran a test where we showed that the array with 45 disks could handle the key storage needs - mail, database, file serving - for a 1000-employee company!
For the MD3000i (which is not really a box - the brains are in the controller cards inside the disk pod) I showed that the storage requirements of 5 servers - both the active and passive nodes of an Exchange continuous cluster replication configuration, a web server, a database server, a file server - can be consolidated on an MD3000i with 45 disks, while backups were being taken off the Exchange passive node.
In both these studies we ran 8-hour full stress tests. These are not marketing slides! (With apologies to our buddies in marketing).
While I was doing this work I collected screen shots, especially around setting up multipathed connections to all of these arrays for failover and load balancing with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. All the detail you could ever want is here. (I know, I owe you open source guys some Linux MPIO stuff - hope to get to that soon).
Well, you won't see me hanging around the ol' wiki for too much longer today since that great institution, the Austin City Limits Music Festival (known to those of us cool people simply as "ACL") starts in a few hours. Six stages including the Dell stage and the AMD stage (this is Austin, remember). Decisions, decisions. Joss Stone or Crowded House (I'm going for Joss). Steve Earle or Stephen Marley. Arcade Fire or Cross Canadian Ragweed. This is the only place you will find Bjork and Charlie Musselwhite on the same bill (I know, you younger cats will have to look up who that is). The one thing I know is I will be at the AMD stage at 4:30 on Sunday for Lucinda Williams. Wouldn't miss her.
Dave -- Comments
7-12-2007 -- Comments
An HP and IBM machine are on the way to do comparisons on my thermal virtualization consolidation paper. That should be fun, I shouldn't have any problems setting up the old IBM machine :-)
We are starting to get linked from the real outside world. A study was done comparing HP and Dell blades and it generated some buzz on Blade Watch. They actually linked backed to our wiki.
Still looking for the first person to find any of the eggs I hid. Send me a private message on this site when you do !
- Scott -- Comments
6-27-2007 -- Comments
I've been working in the lab on setting up Exchange LCR and CCR. Look for some additional stuff in that area soon. These new abilities of Exchange allow for more flexibility in the type of storage used to create HA solutions.
I've also spent some time working on the wiki and trying to figure out what are the best ways to use this new (well new to me anyway) medium to communicate with the technical community. We have setup a few pages that are dedicated to hosting a specific whitepaper - and on that page we are asking for comments and discussion. I do have one to one discussions with customers in person, over the phone, and via email about these same whitepapers on a regular basis. I think that everybody would benefit from that same type of discussion here on the wiki - directly below the link where you download the paper.
-Todd -- Comments
6-22-2007
Been working in the lab this week on a thermal consolidation study with a virtualization twist. Findings are looking interesting. As part of the lab work I wanted to move the physical machine to the ESX server. This was the first time I used VMware Converter 3, and I must say, I'm quite impressed with the ease of use and quickness.
I installed it and had the machine up and running on the ESX server in less than 30 mins. The whole process of migrating the machine only took 10 mins. And I didn't even crack open the documentation (who reads that anyways :-)
Well, I'm also hiding some more easter eggs on the site. Be on the look out for a promotion from us soon to find them all.
Anybody find the first one yet ?
- Scott -- Comments
6-19-2007
We started a simple awareness campaign using ads on Slashdot this morning. The idea is to get the word out to technical minded people that the wiki is here. I thought that it was really cool to see the wiki being promoted on slashdot.
- Todd -- Comments
6-7-2007
I've just added the first material to the Storage section, a pointer to a white paper about using Dell iSCSI storage arrays for VMware, along with a long pdf detailing how to set up iSCSI with ESX. I'll be adding content to the Storage section over the next weeks and months so please come check it out and contribute!
- Dave -- Comments
6-6-2007
More content is begining to fill the wiki. Looking for ideas on how to get people interested and motivated to explore the site. I went ahead and put an easter egg on one of my pages. Let me know if you find it !
Think cheesey 80's movie about the internet, and you'll have some idea of what to look for.
- Scott -- Comments
5-18-2007
We took down the screener last night and we are now live and available for all to see and contribute. Still lots of work to do getting things initially populated and cleanned up, but it feels good to have moved into public view. Now the real fun begins.
- Todd -- Comments
4-19-2007
I was trying to describe the wiki concept to a coworker today. This came out of the thin air to me, not sure if anyone else has described it this way, but here goes, "A concrete wall and everybody on the internet has a can of spray paint."
Seems to fit. Trying to build a community of individuals interested in discussing technical topics, and able to put those ideas on the site.
We are looking forward to your contributions, so please put your can of spray paint to work !
- Scott -- Comments
Profiles
Roger Foreman is the Manager of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Roger has a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, as well as an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.
Dave Jaffe, Ph.D., is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center who specializes in cross-platform solutions. Previously, he worked in the Dell Server Performance Lab, where he led the team responsible for Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks and the Dell Technology Showcase. He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University.
Todd Muirhead is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Todd has a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas and is Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet (MCSE+I) certified.
Scott Hanson is a senior engineering consultant of Dell's Enterprise Technology Center. Scott has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas and is Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + Internet (MCSE+I) certified and a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).
