Reviews/Guides

In the second of this three-part series, I’ll walk through the initial configuration of the Flash Cluster and prepare for part three which will be the actual test. I didn’t plan to test performance since my lab isn’t exactly built from production gear and I didn’t figure it’d be a fair test. Out of curiosity, I tested anyway, and lets just say that the results are worth sharing after all. But that’s for later. For now, let’s get set up!

Set Up

In the screenshot below, you can see that I’ve allocated a 30 GB SATA SSD to each host. This is what FVP will use for the Flash Cluster we’ll create in a moment. Just wanted to show what we’re working with. For the record, in my lab this is a consumer-grade SSD.

Create a Flash Cluster

A Flash Cluster is the aggregation of local flash devices pooled to accelerate block storage. In the screenshots below, I’ll walk through set up. This was super simple, and in a real world scenario you could walk through this your first time in half an hour. I’m sure professionals do this in about 5 minutes. I love how much focus is going on from vendors lately on simplicity! People don’t want to pay for 8 hours of professional services to get their product up and running! (/rant) Alright, step 1: open the Flash Clusters screen from the vCenter section of the vSphere Client.

[Read more…] about PernixData FVP – Configuration (Part 2 of 3)

In the first of this three part series, I walk through the installation of the FVP product from PernixData. If you aren’t familiar, let me give you a quick overview. FVP pools local flash devices in your hosts that it uses to accelerate block storage. I have heard that NFS support is coming, but at this time only FC/FCoE/iSCSI are supported. This effectively allows your to drive more IOPS at lower latency without performing a forklift upgrade of your existing storage array(s). Let’s get started!

PernixData FVP Host Plug-In

The first requirement is to install a plugin on the ESXi hosts themselves that will manage the local resources. I have previously written about this installation process in general here and here but we will deal specifically with the FVP package here. First things first – we need to upload the package to the host. The files all come together in a .zip file from PernixData, so make sure you grab the right file. At the time of this writing, the archive included packages for 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. I grabbed the 5.5 package since that’s what I’m running in the lab. In the screenshot below, the package is SCP’ed over to the host.

[Read more…] about PernixData FVP – Installation (Part 1 of 3)

As I was browsing the Program Files directory on a 5.2 Connection Server the other day (trying to solve a totally different problem) I stumbled across something neat. I’ve never heard of this before, and I think a lot of people who administer a View environment day in and day out would find this really useful. It turns out that VMware has included a vSphere Web Client plugin in Tech Preview that will allow you to see the relationship between View users and their VM from the vSphere console.

The View Desktops Plug-in

With a quick search, I found that this is, in fact, included in the 5.2 documentation. It doesn’t seem to be widely blogged about though. I’m curious about why this isn’t a big deal; everyone I’ve mentioned it to since I found it seems to think they’d really like to be using it. I’ve gone through the process of implementing it in my lab, then in a non-prod environment, and now I have implemented it in a production environment. The results are really cool! Allow me to give an example to show where this could be really useful: [Read more…] about View Desktops plug-in for vSphere