vSphere Upgrade: Rearranging LUNs for Better Performance: Updated

In my last post “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail” I realized that I badly configured my SAN from the start. So I bit the bullet and started a process to change the number of spindles per LUN to 11 of 12 disks, with the 12 disk being a hot spare. Performance on SAN LUN is directly proportional to the number of spindles in use by the RAID set and my old setup had 3 Disk LUNs instead of using virtual LUNs ontop of one larger physical LUN.

IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail

Recently my IBM DS3400 SAN gave an alert that the controller batteries had to be changed out. So after ordering some batteries, receiving them, it was time to perform a battery exchange. The steps are quite straight forward but still require a bit of forethought. I run IBM System Storage Manager 10 from within a VM running Windows 2008 R2, it is actually my VMware vCenter Server. In order, for me to exchange the batteries the IBM System Storage Manager 10 must be able to talk to the controllers either over the network or over the fibre connection. Since this is a VM, all I can do is control the SAN over the network at this time.

vSphere Upgrade – The Backup Saga

My Backup solutions require Windows 2003 and the Belkin FL5009 only works with Windows XP, Vista, or 7, which I found very frustrating until I discovered this post, “Setting up USB in VMware ESX and ESXi”. With only a few tweaks I was able to get the Belkin FL5009 to work as a service. The first tweak I did, was to upgrade my Windows 2003 template to Virtual Hardware version 7, which required a VMware Tools Upgrade to be done first. Once that was completed, I also added a USB device to the VM.

vSphere Upgrade – 2nd Disk Issues with Hardware 7

As vStu discovered all virtual machine disk files (VMDKs) are presented to VMs as SAN disks and Windows 2008 changed how SAN disks were handled, in effect they are offline until you set them online. I kept getting a pesky, “Disk is Offline because policy was set by an administrator” message. Microsoft’s website does not even know about this error message apparently. But the solution is a combination of websites. First you need to change how Windows 2008 sees the SAN devices, then you need to clear a readonly flag, then you are good to go.