Zen of IT

Most SAN storage devices allow you to increase the size of a logical drive. To do this you:

1)     Physically add a new hard disk

2)     Assign the hard disk to an array

3)     Increase the logical drive by the required amount of data

If you do this in a vmware VMFS environment, you will not be able to access the additional capacity. The Datastore will show a higher capacity but the VMFS partition will remain the same size. To increase the size of a VMFS partition you need to use “extents”. Extents allow you to put multiple LUNS together so that a VMFS partition can span across them. Note that this applies to LUNS. A single LUN should have no more than 1 VMFS partition on it. Hence the correct way to add storage is not to increase the size of the logical drive but to create a new logical drive – give it a new LUN and use Extents to add the new LUN to the existing VMFS

If you are trying to upgrade a single controller IBM DS3400 to a dual controller the sytem must be told that it is now a dual controller model - otherwise the "manage controller" icon is not available to pring the new controller on line. To do this enter the following command at the CLI

Smcli ctlr_A_IP_address -c "set storageSubsystem redundancyMode=duplex;"

Found this great tool for allowing you to drag and drop files between ESX and Windows. Ideal for pulling off diagnostic logs instead of mucking around with USB at a Unix prompt - nightmare!

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-fastscp.html

Todays top tip is to hit the refresh button everytime you make a change to the Configuration of Networks or Storage in Virtual Center.

I recently had issues with installing HA at a client site. All newsgroups pointed towards checking case sensativity of ESX names. In my case it transpired that the clients gateway (default setting for isolation address) was not pingable and HA simply uses a ping on the isolation address. To change the isolation address:

1 In the cluster’s Settings dialog box, select VMware HA
2 Click the Advanced Options button to open the Advanced Options (HA)
dialog box
3 Enter "das.isolationaddress" in the text box in the Option
column and the ip valued it should be set in the Value column.
4 Click OK