My new Job with New MacBook Pro

After I joined Citrix they gave me new Mac Pro. I have never used MAC in my life and was finding difficult to operate. Finally I found nice Youtube song

Citrix provisioning server cool video

Citrix has acquired a company called Ardence in the year 2006 which used to provide streaming solution. Citrix rebranded it and called it as Provisioning server (PVS)for desktops. What the PVS does is stream the OS to the desktop after authentication from AD. This desktop can be bare metal. I found a cool video demonstrating the same

New Job!!!

On May 7th I quit Infosys after working for 5.6 years. It had been longest time I have spent with any organization in my 10.6 years. It was a great experience working with company like Infosys.
On 10th of May I joined Citrix as a Principal consultant. Yes you have heard correctly I have joined Citrix. I guess I should know all the aspect of virtualization including hyper-V. I strongly believe that , to become virtualization consultant you should also know about other solution offering. I will be based out of Bangalore Citrix office.
Please do keep enjoy reading my blog but you may find more stuff related to Citrix J
Happy Blogging and Happy Reading

Working with Blade8:Configure VLAN for ESX host on Blade

With Blade networking is very important aspect if you are planning to roleout ESX on it. Because based on networking you will plan how you want to define this on VC-Flex10 module. There are many way you can define it but I like this :

a) Two LOM goes for Service Console

b) Two LOM goes for VM network

c) Dedicate two LOM for vmotion and confine traffic within VC domain.

d) Two LOM for NFS/ISCSI.

For VM network where you have to define multiple network. You need to create all the VLAN’s under shared uplink set which you want to trunk on VM network vSwitch

Vmotion network using internal link

1. For vmotion we will be creating a Ethernet Networks but will not be assigning any uplink to it

2. For rest all network it should be like this

3. Once this Ethernet link is created and blade has this profile assigned this nic can be used for vmotion. So create a vmkernel for vmotion, assign the IP address of your choice as the same IP address scheme you need to use it for all the vmotion vmkernel or else it will not work.

VM network using multiple network.

For VM network we create multiple VLAN on single vSwitch. This means VLAN should be in trunk mode. We also do tagging at ESX level .

Click on the tab as shown above and then it will pop up

Here you can select what ever VLAN you want be seen by VM network vSwitch.

SRM Error :Failed to recover datastore

We had setup srm with 4.0 U1 and VM’s were on ESX3.5 U4. We setup replication across location and then decided to simulate DR using  “Test RUN” option.  It goes and mount the lun on ESX host fine but when  it try to recover VM’s it was failing with error “Error: Failed to recover datastore: ” .

We then tried to run this with console to NetAPP filer open and we found that

Filer 01> Fri Apr 23 05:04:36 EST [XYZNAP005: wafl.volume.clone.fractional_rsrv.changed:info]: Fractional reservation for    clone 'testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP' was changed to 100 percent because guarantee is set to'file' or 'none'.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: wafl.volume.clone.created:info]: Volume clone  testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP of volume S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP was created successfully.Creation of clone volume 'testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP' has completed.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: lun.newLocation.offline:warning]: LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun12 has been taken offline to prevent map conflicts after a copy or move operation.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: lun.newLocation.offline:warning]: LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun11 has been taken offline to prevent map conflicts after a copy or move operation.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: lun.newLocation.offline:warning]: LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun9 has been taken offline to prevent map conflicts after a copy or move operation.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: lun.newLocation.offline:warning]: LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun10 has been taken offline to prevent map conflicts after a copy or move operation.

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: wafl.inode.fill.disable:info]: fill reservation disabled for inode 33411686 (vol testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP).

Fri Apr 23 05:04:37 EST [XYZNAP005: wafl.inode.overwrite.disable:info]: overwrite reservation disabled for inode 33411686 (vol testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP).

Fri Apr 23 05:04:38 EST [XYZNAP005: lun.map:info]: LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun12 was mapped to initiator group srm_esx_host=0

Fri Apr 23 05:04:38 EST [XYZNAP005: app.log.info:info]: AMSVCS001PP: Disaster Recovery SAN Adapter Storage Replication Adapter 1.4: (2) Test-Failover-start Event: Disaster Recovery SAN Adapter executed Test-Failover-start operation with errors from OS major version = 5 ,minor version = 2 ,package = Service Pack 2 and build = 3790

Fri Apr 23 05:04:42 EST [XYZNAP005: iscsi.notice:notice]: ISCSI: New session from initiator iqn.2000-04.com.qlogic:qle4062c.lfc0852h55321.2 at IP addr 10.X.X.X

Fri Apr 23 05:04:48 EST [XYZNAP005: wafl.vol.full:notice]: file system on volume testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP is full

Fri Apr 23 05:04:48 EST [XYZNAP005: scsitarget.write.failureNoSpace:error]: Write to LUN /vol/testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX013_14_15_16PP/lun12 failed due to lack of space.

NetAPP look at the error and told me that it is getting timed out during retry process and not really looks like space issue because “aggr” on which this lun was mounted had enough space.

I decided to test it myself and created two lun of size 100GB and 90GB . These lun’s had few VM with around 75% of free space.  I ran SRM in test and DR mode and both worked great. This gives me enough reason to believe that this is caused by space and not due to some bug.

I called NetAPP and shown him what actually I am doing. At this point they ran following command

Filer > df -r testfailoverClone_nss_v10745371_S_XYZESX001PP  (This is actually the cloned  volume which SRM were trying to mount). It found that that fractional space is filled and because of which cloned lun were not able to mount

During these test I understand that if  protected lun is totally filled and then you try to run test SRM (FlexClone mechanism is used) against it . You have to make sure that at recovery site the volume should double the size as it try to mount the cloned lun on the same volume