2013 – Goals

Hello Everyone,

This is the first year I have decided to write some personal and professional goals into this blog. I saw on Twitter a few people posting these up and thought it would be a good idea to write something down that I can reference throughout the year.

• Finish an MBA with a concentration in business from Salve Regina University.

  • This has been an ongoing march for me over the past 3 years, and I’m finally at the point where I can sit back and say I will finish my degree either this Summer 2013 or this winter 2013. It all depends on my workload. If your interested in getting an MBA, Salve Regina offers all online classes through the Black Board Mobile Learn system. I have four classes left:
    • Organizational Development
    • Global Business
    • unnamed elective in business
    • Strategic Management and Business Policy

• PMP Certification

  • Project Management has always been something of interest to me. Over the past several years of my IT experience I always end up working in Project Management. It’s about time I take some official training and sit the exam. It’s funny over the past year I have become more specialized in IT, deep diving into servers and virtualization all while increasing soft skill sets such as business analysis, project management, and ITIL. The more time I spend in the soft skills the more I enjoy them. There will always be a passion that exists for me in virtualization but, I get just as excited about swim lanes and RACI matrices now.

• Be a better Person

  • Wow that was a generic goal, but hear me out. We all have things that we can think back on and learn to improve. For example, ask yourself how can I be a better husband, co-worker, dad, son, etc. This is a really personal goal but, if you actually take the time to reflect back on the year and think about ways you can improve yourself, ways you can improve how you act it will be worth it to you professional and personally.
    • How can I improve my relationship with my daughter and son? I think about ways I can be better, can I keep my patience longer? Can I let my 3-year-old daughter be more free and explore more? Do I take her out for ice cream just because enough? Do I spend enough time with my 4 month old son? Do I read to him enough?
    • How can I improve my relationship with my Wife? Can I be a better husband by doing the dishes more, cooking dinner on the weekends because I get home from work to late to cook during the week? Did I get her flowers enough during the year? Can I be more thoughtful in my gift giving, (my wife is incredible at giving gifts, me not so much)?
    • How can I improve my relationships with Co-Workers? How can I better show that I respect them? How can I be more humble? How can I help them be better at what they do?

• Business Analysis – CCBA

  • This one is a lofty goal, but is it worth the time to invest in the CCBA certification. I’m not truly a business analyst by title, but I am, we sort of all are. I work mainly in Infrastructure and continuously have to gather requirements from other members in IT to provide them an improved level of service. If the requirements aren’t correct and we miss something it could delay a project.

• VCP 5

  • Certifications seem to be showing up more and more on this list but, I did take the Optimize and Scale course last year and I really should sit down and take the VCP 5 exam pre VMWorld where vSphere and ESXi 6 will probably be announced.

• Take at least one picture of my kids everyday

  • This is one of my wife’s goals, but I want to help her out with it, so it’s going on the list.

• Figure out what’s up with Agile and relearn the SDLC

  • As I said earlier I’m in Infrastructure and I haven’t looked at the SDLC (Solution not Software), Development Life Cycle since I finished my Bachelor’s in 05. It’s time to revisit it. It’s also time to review the Agile philosophies. Agile seems to be more and more prevalent in business today and I’m tired of reading about it and not fully understanding what it is.

This is my list for 2013, I’ll try to keep updating posts as I complete or take steps to complete them. 2013 is shaping up to be a great year and I’m looking forward to it. I hope everyone feels the same way.

Have a Safe and Healthy New Year!

Jim Peluso

Dell Servers, ESXi 5 recommendations, and NIC driver Versions

Dell wrote a recommendation document on what BIOS settings you should enable to achieve the greatest performance out of their servers. I agree with most of what they say but have a couple of modifications. The original document can be found here.

Within the document they also reference the Best Practice white papers from VMware. It’s all a good read for any VMware Admin.

Here’s the bread and butter:

Before you go live always make sure you firmware is up to date on the server. For me I always build a new Firmware disk using the Dell Repository Manager, I also check on Dell’s website to verify what the latest firmware is and if I need to import the bin files.

Next I always set these settings in the BIOS:

Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Enabled
Hyper-Threading Enabled
Node Interleaving Disabled
Power Management to Maximum Performance
Disable all COM Ports, and USB Ports if your are not using them for your firmware updates.
Disable C states and C1E

You might be asking how to check the BIOS version while ESXi 5 is running. That’s simple in vCenter click on your host then click on Hardware Status. This will outline several pieces of information, one of them being the BIOS Version.
To get the details of the NIC Firmware version is a little more complicated. First you need to identify which NIC you want to check the firmware on.  Reference this KB article for the full details.

Simply put:

enable SSH or Local Support Mode and connect to the host.

run esxcli network nic list to list your pNICs on the server

then run ethtool -i VMNic Name
This will list in detail the Driver Version and Firmware Version, write these down because you will need them later!

Then use vmkchdev -l | grep VMNic Name

This will get you the detailed VID/DID/SVID/SDID

Then you can run over here to verify the pNIC driver version and firmware version is compatible with the version of ESXi you are running.

A CYA Moment with broken Windows VMs

Ran into an issue today with today where one of my storage arrays lost connection to the hosts because of a scheduled power outage (long story) but, I ran into an interesting issue.

A few of the virtual machines Windows and Linux were showing the MKS:file missing from the console prompt. What was interesting about this was the storage was reconnected and other Windows VMs were fine, the Linux ones were hosed, root file system went RO, no way to remount, etc. Those were restored from snapshots, but I didn’t want to just give up on the Windows machines so when attempting to reboot them I received “Operation Failed since another task is in progress.”

OK I have seen this before, I have to log into the console grep the VMX world ID and kill it, or I run ESXTOP and kill the VM. With the advent of ESXi 5 and the new esxcli commands I was wondering if there was another way to do it.

Well come to find out there is. There is an entire KB article about how the many ways of forcing a VM down. The way I shutdown the VM was by running:

esxcli vm process list
and then
esxcli vm process kill –type=[soft,hard,force] –world-id=WorldNumber
I ran it with the hard command and didn’t need to force it

This is a KB article to add to your toolkit.

the new MCSE? What the ?

OK, Many of you out there may have the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certification. It took me personally 15 months to get this certification I finished it in December of 2010, and now with the advent of Server 2012 being released out comes a new MCITP: EA no wait WHAT!!?!?!?!?! they are bringing back the MCSE!!!!!! So wait let me get this straight after working extremely hard for almost a year and a half my EA certificate has been downgraded to a MCSA: Server 2008.

At least I only have to take 3 test now to get an MCSE but still Come on Microsoft! Downgrading a certificate? Give me a break. At least now the MCSE is no longer tied to the Server edition that you earn it for. It’s just a certificate that you need to now take another Microsoft test every 3 years.

If you want to learn more about the new MCSE Click here.

Let me break this down again for those that are MS certified:

You need to have the MCSA:2012 which if you have the MCSA:2008 is 70-417.

Once that’s done  you take the 70-413 and 70-414.

All well sounds like I have a tall order ahead of me: continue finishing my MBA (6 classes left!), take the VCP5 and figure out the MCSE exams. Phew! now I just need to finance those certifications!

Updates from me

I’ve had one of those weeks when I remember why I work in IT. It was the inaugural super user group meeting for the VTUG, I’ve been deep diving into performance metrics and determining the best practices for Server 2008 R2 Guest VMs running on ESXi 5 connecting to an Isilon CIFS share.

First let’s talk about the Virtual Technology User Group. The VTUG has sprouted from the NEVMUG and you can learn more about it at the VTUG website. At the head of this brain child is Chris Harney @csharney. If you do not know Chris or haven’t met him before next time you are at VMWorld, or a NEVMUG take some time to talk to him. He’s one of the few genuine great guys left. I’m looking forward to seeing what events come out of this group as well as watching the online community grow.

I ran into an interesting issue this week, we’ve been preparing some Dell R810 Servers with Broadcom 57711 10Gbe NICs to go live with a data transfer intensive application. The application would connect to a CIFS share on a Isilon. Within the virtual machines we were seeing a spiking a high spike of CPU utilization when testing the CIFS share with robocopy. The issue was odd and left us scratching our heads. This lead down a spiral of performance documentation ranging from VMware to Microsoft and Dell; I could find all the documentation I was looking for in one place so I decided this blog would be the best location.

There is an amazing document that VMware published that details tuning for latency specific applications, in my situation the document was great to reference and brought about ideas for testing different configurations.

Best Practice for Performance Tuning of Latency-Specific Workloads in vSphere VMs.

Within the document is this handy little chart that outlines the changes in the document,

I’m still testing the above configurations and will update when I do.

 

This lead me down the path of determining which drivers were being used for the BCM 57711 nics that I installed after installing ESXi. Come to find out I was using an outdated driver and updated the driver. I also found out that my BIOS version was outdated as well as the NIC firmware. Both were updated for the R810. To be honest I wish I could get on a Dell Mailing list that emails me every time there is an Urgent update to firmware or drivers for servers I own. I remember HP doing this but for some reason I’ve never got a message from Dell.

The BIOS, 2.7 release I installed fixed a “lock up” when L7 series processors were installed on the system. Of course I had L7 processors on this system.

The last piece was Server 2008 R2.

Which to me is the most complicated piece. I did a few things for Server 2008 R2. First I enabled File Services, second I wanted to learn more about Receive Side-Scaling, TCP Chimney Offload, and Network DMA. From what I understand TCO doesn’t work in VMs, but NDMA and RSS does.

I didn’t realize how large this post was getting so I’ve decided to split it and continue later on.

The next blog post will review how to enable NDMA, RSS and how to disable TCP Chimney Offload.  It will also include the 2008 R2 Performance guide.

Putting the User back into User Group

Well I did say things will be changing at the New England VMware User Group meeting and man they are!

Myself @JimPeluso, Matthew J. Brender @mjbrender, and Luigi Danakos @nerdblurt, have been working hard to bring a new segment to the @NEVMUG!

We have been talking for a while to determine a way to get user’s more involved with the community and we think we are on to something.

Enter the era of User Presentations. We now have several time slots available at the latest NEVMUG taking place on January 19th, 2012.

We are taking submissions for a couple weeks and are entertaining all user submissions. This means even if it is not strictly VMware related but why you went with Hyper-V or Xen over VMware and what types of analysis feel free to submit a session!

This is grassroots completely voluntary user driven approach to getting the User community more involved. You might ask yourself “Why would I use my time to present for free at a User Group?”

Well here are a few reasons:

1) You will attain experience speaking in front of a crowd

2) Your helping build a better community

3) There is nothing more exciting than telling your story, where you have been and how you got to where you are today. Taking the time to share you experience will pay dividends in the future.

4) You really get to know the Users. Bring the social back to the community.

5) You do get a free lunch

Any questions feel free to reach out to us!

Call for Papers

Starting today 30th November 2011 until21st December 2011 we will be accepting submissions to be a presenter at the 19th January 2012 Winter Warmer. The selection committee will then go through the submissions and notify the selected presenters on the 28th December 2011. The presenters then Have until 01 January 2012 to accept. The presenter will have to provide a copy of their presentation to the NEVMUG by 15th January 2012.

Key Dates*

• Submissions open: November 30th 2011
• Submissions close: December 21st 2011
• Selected presenters notified: December 28th 2011
• Presenters accept by: December 30th 2011

If this interests you please read the terms and conditions and sign up below:

Where have I been?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. I apologize to my followers. Yes, this is the apologetic blog post about not posting enough.

A lot has changed for me and for the industry since I last posted on here. There has been a couple VMworlds, the launch of vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and View 5. There has been a change-up in the vCenter Operations line up and the launch of Horizon and MVP.

For me I’ve switched jobs. I took a position as a Server and Virtualization Analyst at a Media Corporation.

I’ve built a lab at home and plan on working towards the VCP 5 using the blueprint soon. Please keep an eye on new posts relating to these steps.

Looking forward things are going to be moving and shaking related to the New England VMware User Group. Keep an eye open for changes to the normal VMUG sessions.

 

Till next time,

 

Jim