mainesysadmin.com

After a year of service the 3 685 c class blades that I work with have served us well.  They started as Dual Proc AMD 8216 (dual core 2.4ghz) with 16gb of ram.  In order to expand the virtualization in our environment we decided to double the resources in each of the blades by adding 2 more procs and 16gb of ram.  I added the ram last week, but because of limitations in the system bus you need to have all 4 procs installed before the other 8 dimm banks are activiated.

Steps involved to upgrade procs & memory:

1. Add new licenses from vmware (esx is licensed by every 2 physical procs/sockets)
2. Login to Virtual Center and put host in maintenance mode.
3. This should vmotion all virtual machines from that host to other running hosts.
4. Shutdown host
5. Carefully install cpus and ram
6. Start server (will reboot once after starting)
7. Upgrade complete with ZERO downtime in the middle of the day.
8. 685c blades are now 4 cpu, 8 core and 32gb ram and ready for some more action.

Lots is going on this week at VMworld 2007. I watched a video at the AMD booth of a server being upgraded from dual proc dual core to dual proc quad cores featuring their new “Barcelona” F series cpu. The only change required is a bios upgrade which they actually replaced with a new physical bios chip. They stated in the video that no additional power, cooling or hardware is required for the upgrade. The upgrade made a significant change in system performance. FMI for quad core opterons…

I’m seeing a lot more companies adapting a de-duplication technology to their product. Netapp and Data Domain are a couple of vendors that I spoke to about this. Data Domain was interesting to me because they supply you with an entry level HW appliance with redundant disk storage at RAID 6. The cost is about $17k for their entry level appliance. The appliance comes with 2.5 raw tb of space which is the equivalent to 25tb of actual vm files because of the capabilities of de-duplication. Pretty incredible.

Ubuntu is visiting VMworld again. They’ve released a version of ubuntu that’s slimmed down for usage with virtual appliances and virtual machines. The product is called Jeos (pronounced juice).

Tonight is the VMworld 2007 Party…