I’ve been working intensively with vmWARE products for the last couple of months.
I’ve already wrote about LabsPhoenix’s MYTH cluster entering phase 02 of its development – few months ahead of schedule. It is currently configured as a 3 nodes vSphere Enterprise+ cluster of very modest capacity (Resources: CPU 21GHz, Memory 48GB, Storage 4TB). Next phase is within 60days and will see those resources grow by another 66%. This ‘demo‘ has been so successful that we are already drafting plans for another cluster.
One of LabsPhoenix’s main client also asked me to re-factor its lab environment. Here, we are talking of a 4 nodes vSphere Enterprise cluster, built from scratch, with some very nice capacity (Resources: CPU 95Ghz, Memory 252GB, Storage 2TB).
I’m not throwing those numbers out there to poke anyone, its more of an offer: If anyone got some specific questions about vmWARE deployment, feel free to ping me. I’m often available for a quick chat. My cie, LabsPhoenix, also has some competent sysadmin if the problem get too large / if speed is of the essence.
Sometimes, we get hit by strange errors: Following an upgrade of the Cisco 3750 switches configuration to an higher MTU value (9000bits, to support jumbo frame on the attached iSCSI MSA); The VCENTER process started acting up on the management server. Quick restart of the process worked fined, but nothing in the log shows why the switch’s configuration reload broke that specific service.
Also, changing MTU value in a vmKernel interface is quite easy on vSphere 4.1 – it can even be done through the gui. You might search the option for quite some times though! It is hidden in Home>Inventory>Networking, in the distributed virtual switch configuration (right-click on it, edit setting). If your not using dvSwitch, then, your stuck through CLI commands.