HP P2000 G3 vs EMC Clariion AX4
One of my upcoming projects is to install a new EMC Clariion AX4 iSCSI SAN for a customer who currently has an aging AX4 that only has SATA storage. The new SAN has 4 – 300GB drives for the vault…
Category: Storage
Running vSphere 4 on HP P2000
Because there is no document published on how to setup and run VMware off of a P2000 I have put one together after reviewing the P2000 FC/iSCSI combo unit that I lent by HP. I have also created a PDF…
ISCSI Performance
This blog post is to measure difference performance via different ISCSI paths to the same Microsoft Datastore. Storage: Directly from the Microsoft Storage Server 2008. This is not an ISCSI connection, but running directly from the server providing all of…
HP P2000/MSA G3: A First look for SMB’s
Related Articles include: HP P2000 (MSA2000i) Review and Running vSphere 4 on HP P2000 A while back I wrote a review of the HP P2000 G2 (aka MSA2000 G2) and it has generated a decent amount of page views, and…
Snapshots Explained in Layman’s Terms
One of the most misunderstood and misused things that I run into are snapshots. Regardless of whether they are at the SAN level or at the VMware level... most people just don't understand what they are really doing when they…
CIFS vs ISCSI: Centralized File Storage
I have a photography studio client that had two requirements: Centralized Storage & Speed. They had a CIF share to their server but were complaining about the lack of performance. They only have one computer accessing this information. This is what…
SANiQ 9.0 Server ‘Clusters’
I installed the HP P4000 VSA software the other day just see if there were any major interface changes and did find one so far that I think will be really helpful. Normally you would add in all of your…
Fixing ‘Datastore Usage on Disk’ Alarms when using Virtual SAN Software
Background I was doing an upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 this week on a two node cluster. This cluster is owned by an SMB and its a fully contained VMware setup, basically it has two DL380 G6 servers each with…
Howto: Windows Storage Server for VMware Storage
Why? There are countless SAN vendors out there that work very well for VMware shared storage, there are also many linux distributions that provide iSCSI and NFS options for shared storage… So why use Windows Storage Server you might ask…
Recipe for SMB Clusters
Ingredients: 1 – VMware Software Package 1 or 2 – Gigabit Network Switch 2 or 3 – 64-bit Capable Server 1 – SAN Directions: Load servers with VMware ESXi, configure vswitches Configure SAN, add SAN to ESXi servers and format…