Comments for vReality

Comment on Using Qlogic FCoE adapters with vSphere by Tomi Hakala

Tomi Hakala — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:57:31 +0000

For CIM yes, there is updated CIM provider available at QLogic site with installation instructions, http://bit.ly/aUUGcj. Twinax never worked and I didn’t receive any answer to my queries so I swapped it to fiber with optical modules.

Comment on Using Qlogic FCoE adapters with vSphere by Ruben

Ruben — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:06:26 +0000

Hi Thakala,

did you finally get it working? I have exactly the same issue with last versions os CIM provider, CNA driver and twinax cables.

REgards,

Ruben

Comment on QLogic 10GbE CNA driver installation bug on ESX 4.1 by Chris

Chris — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:57:46 +0000

This was the breakthough we needed, were having a nightmare of a time getting the drivers installed for our Qlogic CNA adapters on Dell blades. Stumbled across this on a Google seardch and followed your instructions to get them up and running. Also contacted VMware and they confirmed the bug. Advised that they were planning to fix this issue in the first update of 4.1, whenever that happens.

Comment on QLogic 10GbE CNA driver installation bug on ESX 4.1 by JR

JR — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:08:54 +0000

Tnx for your post Tomi, saved me a lot of time and frustration

@first post:

This article is about the Ethernet components of the QLogic CNA, the FC part of this CNA _IS_ supported _AND_ working out-of-tha-box… (ESX 4.1)

Comment on ESX host upgrade to 4.1 using esxupdate by Tomi Hakala

Tomi Hakala — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:34:19 +0000

Sorry, never seen that error so can’t help you with that. If you find an solution, please post it here, I’d be grateful for that.

Comment on ESX host upgrade to 4.1 using esxupdate by Martin

Martin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:18:06 +0000

This worked fine for me with ESX 4.0.0,
but not with ESX 4.0 Update 2.
I got a message ‘Duplicate Entries in the patch database’
or something similar.
So i did a new installation of 4.1 and said ‘preserve existing datastore’.
Is there a way to go from 4.0 Update2 to 4.1?

Comment on QLogic 10GbE CNA driver installation bug on ESX 4.1 by Tomi Hakala

Tomi Hakala — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:20:39 +0000

On those ESX 4.1 hosts that I have installed recently FCoE part on QLogic 8100 has worked out-of-the box, intentional or not by VMware. VMware HCL seems to be inaccurate in this respect.

Comment on QLogic 10GbE CNA driver installation bug on ESX 4.1 by FCoE in ESX

FCoE in ESX — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:05:09 +0000

81xx CNAs from QLogic are NOT officially supported by VMware out of the box. There are no out-of-the box drivers yet.

Comment on Using NexentaStor ZFS storage appliance with vSphere by Matt Van Mater

Matt Van Mater — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:18:33 +0000

I have wanted to experiment with the exact same Nexentia store/ESXi technology and use-case, but unfortunately I don’t have a SSD to use. Thanks for saving me some work!

One thing I wanted to mention is your closing comments about performance. My understanding is that it takes a while for ZIL and L2ARC to populate, so it makes sense that you would not see an immediate performance benefit. After all they are performing a cache function, and a cache is only useful the second time you try to transfer data (or on other subsequent tries). I have seen several mentions of letting the cache “warm up”, but am not sure how quickly that occurs.

With that in mind, have you had a chance to experiment with more performance testing scenarios that mimic real world usage? e.g booting multiple VMs that are nearly identical, once using the SSD based L2ARC/ZIL and once without? Same thing goes for file reads/writes like what you did in your example, but over a longer time frame and with/without the SSD based disks as cache?

One thing I have done in similar circumstances is to use an Ubuntu based VM and then read/write data between the /dev/shm mountpoint and your virtual hard disk. This should allow you to better isolate what the Nexentia based storage system bottlenecks are.

FYI /dev/shm is a on-demand allocated ramdisk equal to half the size of the RAM you allocate to the virtual machine. Similarly you can use tmpfs to create a ramdisk (allocated manually, not on demand) that has even better performance than /dev/shm. Check out this link I found for a good writeup: http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/create_turbocharged_storage_using_tmpfs/

I’ve tried the Nexentia Store community edition and I think it needs a little polishing for use-cases like this. I’m a big fan of FreeNAS and I have my fingers crossed that the upcoming v0.8 of FreeNAS is going to support the newer versions of ZFS that allow use of L2ARC, ZIL, dedup, etc.

Comment on Using Qlogic FCoE adapters with vSphere by athlon_crazy

athlon_crazy — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:29:34 +0000

Thanks for your article. It’s took me half month to understand vSphere deployment with Qlogic CNA.