The ArchestrAnaut

Looks like the word is official, VSphere 5.0 is finally officially supported!  Check out the announcement

https://wdn.wonderware.com/sites/WDN/Lists/Article/Article.aspx?List=10839c88%2D47d4%2D43fb%2D8699%2D1b9ce20313ca&ID=367

(You’ll need a WDN login to access).  This also includes a link to a really big PDF detailing lots of considerations and detailed instructions on virtualizing your system.  I highly recommend reading it cover to cover.

A brief summary from a recent communication I had lists the following features that are supported.

VMOTION
DRS ( Dynamic resource allocation)
HA (High Availability)
DR (Disaster Recovery)
FT (Fault Tolerance)
And Snapshots (Although we recommend not using this on production systems)

Not totally sure about why snapshots aren’t supported.  One speculation is that a VSphere snapshot can stun the VM for a couple seconds.  There was an issue a while back with ESXi 4.1 that caused a 30 second freeze on NFS datastores.  I’ve seen a 2-3 second freeze on my low end ISCSI SAN. 

Either way this is a really big deal on the support front. I know a pretty good list of customers now who went ahead and took the plunge a while back and have yet to experience an issue related to the fact that the system was virtualized.

A little aside is that I’m going to work on a white paper that goes really deep into the considerations when choosing storage for your environment.  If you’ve ever seen one of my presentations or chatted with me about virtualization I will beat you about the head and shoulders about how critical it is to get your storage right.  If you screw up your servers that’s really easy, and relatively inexpensive, to fix.  If you screw up your storage you’re in for a long expensive process to get it fixed.  Keep an eye out for a white paper on WDN sometime in the future.

- Andy

As I promised a while back I’ve started some explicit testing with IAS on VMWare VSphere (ESXi 4.1 Update 1 to be specific).  We all know the official support position of Wonderware but I wanted to prove or disprove some things to myself.

Well, I’ve come across the first thing that could bite you really hard if you are unaware.

There is a bug in the current release of ESX(i) that freezes your machine if you are running on an NFS data store and you try to remove a snapshot with CBT enabled.  While this may seem like a lot of things that have to line up, it’s actually not.  I think for most you can simplify this to if you are running NFS and you perform VM Backups with a modern software package you’re going to get caught.  By the way, CBT is changed block tracking.  It’s VSPhere’s way of tracking what data changes between backups.  This gives a huge assist to your backup software as it tries to perform differential backups.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are a blogger on a decent platform one of the metrics you will see is what kind of search terms people used to find out.  We run WordPress so we get this kind of useful intel.  When I see certain terms I want to run off and write a white paper on it because some is interested and I want to teach.  Unfortunately I just don’t have that kind of time.   With that in mind I have decided to take a handful of search terms, either frequent ones or interesting ones, and write a one or two line blurb about each.  They may distill down to even to two or three world comment.  Hopefully it will help someone along the way.

So,  without furuther ado I present the First Edition of of Search Term Lightning Round

Read the rest of this entry »