Tech Round Up 25th July

Interesting tech stuff that was filling my inbox. With stuff from Cisco, Citrix, Cray, Dell, HP, Microsoft, NetApp, pfSense, ping.eu, The Register, Veeam, and VMware!

Cisco

Configuring VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP) – Document ID: 98154
... VTP reduces administration in a switched network. When you configure a new VLAN on one VTP server, the VLAN is distributed through all switches in the domain ...”

Cisco

Spanning Tree from PVST+ to Rapid-PVST Migration Configuration Example – Document ID: 72836
... provides a sample configuration to migrate the spanning tree mode from PVST+ to rapid-PVST+ in the campus network ...”

Cisco

IPv6 - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Citrix

How to Implement Rate Limiting on a NetScaler Appliance by Using the Responder Feature
Rate Limiting on a NetScaler appliance is a method to detect client connections and limit them by the number of connections available or bandwidth.”

Citrix

Troubleshooting XenDesktop brokering process
... Most common problems
1.) Firewall configuration …
2.) DNS not properly configured …
3.) Time synchronization not properly configured …
4.) Domain membership problems …
5.) Multiple Network Adapters …
6.) Service Principal Names (SPNs) …
7.) Proper DDC not found …
8.) “Access this computer from the network” rights …
9.) Operation timing out ...”

Citrix

Black Screen is displayed when Virtual Machines start.
Black Screen is caused by ghosted monitors listed in the Device Manager ...
Via RDP:
Command Prompt:\> set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) remove all Ghosted Display Monitors.
Restart.”

Citrix

Release: Citrix XenClient Enterprise 4.1

Citrix

HDX Monitor 2.0.7 Published

Citrix

CloudPlatform 3.0.4 Release Notes

Citrix

Load Balancing TFTP with NetScaler

Citrix

3 redundancy mistakes in the Desktop Delivery Layer
... best practice is to implement a minimum of two controllers per XenDesktop site, regardless of the size of the environment.
... best practice is to implement either SQL Clustering or SQL Mirroring, in order to ensure automatic failover and continuous service.
... best practice is to perform a full DB backup every day and keep the backup for up to six months by following the Grandfather-Father-Son Principle.”

Citrix

What’s coming for Citrix Receiver

Cray

Cray bags $21m Cascade super deal down under
Replacing “the 'Epic' system already built by iVEC is an HP ProLiant blade cluster that has 9,600 cores across its 800 nodes, which are linked by QDR InfiniBand switches. The machine is installed at Murdoch University and went into production last June, and is rated at 87 teraflops.”
The Cray Cascade Supercomputer “will be expanded to 1.2 petaflops of raw floating-point performance (double precision), and will … be based on a mix of Ivy Bridge and 'Haswell' Xeon processors as well as Xeon Phi coprocessors.”

Dell

Dell announces Host Integration Tools for Microsoft 4.5

Dell Customer Stories

Matrix IBS
Company: Matrix IBS
Industry: Hosting Solutions
Employees: 20
Services:
Dell™ Support Services
- Dell Compellent™ Copilot Support
- Dell ProSupport™ Next Business Day onsite service
Hardware:
Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN
Dell PowerEdge™ R610 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors
Software:
Dell Compellent Data Progression
Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity
Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager
Dell Compellent Fast Track”

Dell Customer Stories

C4L
Company: C4L
Industry: Hosting
Employees: 56
Services:
Dell Solutions Centre
Dell Support Services
“– Dell ProSupport™ with Mission Critical
Hardware:
Dell™ PowerEdge™ M710HD blade servers with Intel® Xeon® processors X5650
Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosures
Dell PowerEdge R410 servers with Intel Xeon processors E5640
Dell PowerEdge R610 servers with Intel Xeon processors X5650
Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers with Intel Xeon processors L5640
Dell EqualLogic PS6510E/PS6000X/PS4000E storage arrays
Dell PowerVault™ MD3000i storage
Software:
VMware® vSphere™ 4
Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters”

HP

HP P2000 Remote Snap Technical Cookbook

Microsoft

VMware vCenter vs. Microsoft SCVMM

Microsoft

StarWind and Windows Server 2012 Scale-Out Servers

NetApp

PeakColo Guarantees 100% SLA for the Cloud with Data ONTAP 8 Clustering
“The Solution: ... deployed a combined 10 NetApp FAS3270 and FAS3240 storage systems in its 5 Type-II SSAE 16/SOC 1 data centers. NetApp Data ONTAP 8 operating in Cluster-Mode provides the massive throughput and scalability needed to rapidly grow ... NetApp Vserver helps PeakColo achieve maximum flexibility of its shared storage infrastructure with secure multi-tenancy ...
“Data ONTAP 8 operating in Cluster-Mode is configured in pairs for high availability ... The Data ONTAP operating system equips PeakColo with the flexibility to add up to dozens of FAS controllers and storage as needed to scale to multiple gigabytes per second of throughput and petabytes of capacity ... leverage both NFS and iSCSI investments. NetApp deduplication ... reduce storage requirements by up to 73%, decreasing hardware, power, and cooling costs.”

NetApp

Blue Shift Blog – Category: Netapp

NetApp

Virtual Machine Considerations For NetApp Storage
By segregating the OS, Application, page file (OS) and vSwap drives and then placing them onto common volumes, we can maximize our ability to find common blocks within a single volume, and thus maximize our disk savings.”

NetApp

How to Create and Use Flash Pool?
1. Create a 64-bit aggregate with SATA drives.
2. Set the aggregate option hybrid_enabled to on.
3. Add SSDs to the aggregate.”

Flash Pool Read Policies
read-cache = none
read-cache = meta
read-cache = random-read
read-cache = random-read-write”

pfSense

Create a stretched LAN between your site and vCloud using pfSense
Note: pfSense is an Open Source Firewall Distribution

ping.eu

Port check – Tests if port is opened on specified IP

The Register

Watch out Fibre Channel: 12 gig SAS has arrived

The Register

OpenStack cloud fluffer growing faster than Linux

The Register

Microsoft picks October 26 for Windows 8 launch

Veeam

NEW AND FREE: VEEAM EXPLORER FOR MICROSOFT EXCHANGE
Exclusive Beta, Part of all Veeam Backup & Replication Editions for VMware and Hyper-V

Veeam

Guide To Setting Up A New Veeam Replication Job

VMware

Microsoft Lync 2013 Support with VMware View Desktops!
Customers will be able to communicate and collaborate with the Lync 2013 client, using rich voice and video features, all from within the VMware View desktop.”

VMware

vSphere HA isolation response... which to use when?
Isolation of a slave
T0 – Isolation of the host (slave)
T10s – Slave enters “election state”
T25s – Slave elects itself as master
T25s – Slave pings “isolation addresses”
T30s – Slave declares itself isolated and “triggers” isolation response
Isolation of a master
T0 – Isolation of the host (master)
T0 – Master pings “isolation addresses”
T5s – Master declares itself isolated and “triggers” isolation response”

VMware

ESXi 5 Unresponsive VM – How to Power Off (using ESXTOP)
# esxtop
c” for CPU resource screen, “shift+V” to display VMs only, “f” to change display fields, “c” in order to show the LWID (Leader World ID), “ENTER”, press “k” and enter the LWID number of the VM you want to stop.


VMware

VMware Buys Nicira For $1.26B in Cash
From http://nicira.com/en/network-virtualization-platform : “... network virtualization is simple … (it) decouples and isolates virtual networks from the underlying network hardware ... the physical network is used only for packet forwarding and treated as an IP backplane. Virtual networks are then programmatically created and operate completely decoupled from the underlying hardware ….”

VMware

Mission: Find the perfect SAN for our datacenter
03-Apr-2011 “... Keep in mind that if it is Campus Cluster there are only 3 configs officially certified for HA in a single cluster as far as I know:
- EMC VPLEX
- NetApp Metro
- Lefthand ...”
Has this list changed since then???

VMware

Whitebox Clouds – Building a VMware vCloud Lab, Part 1 of 3
Software:
Primary Microsoft Active Directory (+add-ons)
Secondary Microsoft Active Directory (+add-ons)
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Windows 2008 R2 “golden image”
RHEL 5.6 x64 “golden image”
CentOS x64 “golden image”
VMware Solutions:
VMware vSphere (ESXi) 5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.x
- vSphere Web Client
- vSphere SSO Server
VMware vCloud Director 5.x (on RHEL 5.5 x64 VM)
VMware vCloud Connector 5.x
VMware vShield Edge 5.x
VMware vFabric App Director 1.0
VMware vCenter Orchestrator 5.x
VMware View 5.1
- View Manager
- View Security Server (opt.)
- View Composer
VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 beta
- UI VM
- Analytics VM
VMware vCenter Chargeback 2.0
VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.2 beta
VMware Zimbra 8.0 beta”

VMware

All about the UNMAP command in vSphere
Due to varied UNMAP command completion response times from the storage devices, the UNMAP operation can result in poor performance of the system which is why VMware is recommending that it be disabled on ESXi 5.0 hosts.”
“How can UNMAP be disabled?
“either # esxcli system settings advanced set –int-value 0 –option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete
“or # esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete
“... must be run individually on each ESXi host to disable UNMAP support.
“ to check # esxcfg-advcfg -g /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

VMware

ESXi host connected to multiple storage array - is it supported?
Yes “... Some caution must be shown however.
1. … SATP …
2. … queue depth …
3. … recommendation … single-initiator-single-target zoning ...”

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