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March 13th, 2009 05:00
ESX server on M600 and AX4-5f
I'm looking for some information regarding setting up VMware Infrastructure (Enterprise) on M600 blades with our AX4-5f.
I'm keen to keep our setup “supported” by both EMC and VMware. The AX has recently been upgraded so it is now fully redundant and the blade enclosure has two Brocade FC switches.
I’ve installed two ESX servers (local boot on M600’s) already but I’m a little unsure how to progress and have a few questions.
- Without Powerpath, how is the path failover handled by the ESX servers (AX4-5f)?
- I’ve read that “Navisphere agent” has be installed if you are runnig a CX array but I believe that if you have an AX array you would install Navisphere CLI & Array Initialization software. Is this correct? - would I have issues as I only have Navisphere express.
I have presented a test LUN to one of the ESX servers and it is visible (via VCentre) so unsure why I would need array initialization software…
- I believe I need to upgrade the flare to 02.23.050.5.703 to be supported?
I’m wading though about 3 foot of documentation so trying to pick out points relevant to my setup.
Any comments/help appreciated.
Thanks
Dev Mgr
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9.3K Posts
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March 13th, 2009 07:00
1. VMware ESX has native failover capabilities (for fibre channel and iSCSI). It's limited to failover only, but untill 'ESX 4' (I believe I heard it's been given a different name), there is no support for load balancing.
2. The Navisphere Agent isn't required; you can register the server manually as well and it would still be fully supported.
3. The initialization utility is only used to assign the initial IP addresses to an EMC Clariion array. After that's been done the only thing I've ever used it for is to find the IPs of a running system if they were unknown/forgotten/lost.
4. I'd recommend upgrading to the '703' flare for the fixes and the added capabilities (raid 6, support for SAS drives w/o needing the expansion tier license (the expansion tier is still needed to support more than 10 servers and/or to add additional enclosures)). I believe that it introduced support for ESXi, but I honestly doubt it really makes a difference (and you didn't mention you were running ESXi, but then again you didn't mention you were running ESX either).
A short reminder; ESX/ESXi doesn't support virtual disks (luns) over 2TB in size (2048GB). I usually max size it at 2047GB to be sure it doesn't accidentally goes 1 single bit over 2TB (if you go over 2TB I've seen 2 possible results; the disk isn't seen at all, or it's seen as 0 bytes).
gedi
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March 13th, 2009 08:00
Thanks for this DevMgr.
I have two ESX3.5 servers (local boot) and one vCentre server running on M600’s - trying to nail the infrastructure before I configure VMWare.
Is the expansion tier just for Physical servers and not VM hosts?
Also, do you know if it is worth installing NaviCli onto ESX’s and VM’s? - I only have Navi Express so not sure what this would be giving me…
Dev Mgr
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March 16th, 2009 10:00
NaviCLI will allow you to do some management things from the command line.
Unless you're going to use the array-based snapshot or sancopy features or so, you'll probably never use/need it.
The expansion tier doesn't affect the number of virtual servers; it increases the number of physical servers that can be registered from 10 to 64 and adds support for additional disk enclosures (and before the 703 flare version it also added support for SAS drives).