In my last post, I discussed building a lightweight VMware infrastructure for a customer using a Synology RS2414RP+ NAS. Today, I wanted to do some performance testing and baselining to get an idea of the kind of load it would support. To do this, I used a VMware Fling called VMware I/O Analyzer. A Fling is an ad-hoc tool built by VMware engineers or the community as one-off side projects.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
How to set up VMware ESXi, a Synology iSCSI NAS, and Active/Active MPIO
Update: Looking for NFS instead of iSCSI? Check out this post: How to set up VMware ESXi, a Synology NFS NAS, and Failover Storage Networking
This week, I’ve been working on a lightweight virtualization infrastructure for a customer and I thought you’d like to see a little of how I put it together. The customer wasn’t really interested in paying for a full SAN solution that would include chassis redundancy and high performance. They opted instead for a 12-bay Synology RS2414 RP+, a couple of HP servers for ESXi hosts, and a Cisco 2960 Layer 2 Gigabit storage switch all tied together with VMware vSphere Essentials Plus.
While not exactly a powerhouse in terms of speed and reliability, this entry-level virtualization platform should serve to introduce them into the world of virtual servers, drastically reduce rackspace and power consumption, provide the flexibility they need to recover quickly from server hardware outages, and allow them to more easily migrate off of their aging server hardware and operating systems all without breaking the bank. Today, I’m going to show you how I set up Active/Active MPIO using redundant links on both the ESXi hosts and the Synology NAS, allowing for multipath failover and full utilization of all network links.
Importing a Foreign VMDK
One of my users asked me for a VM last week to test out some demo software. I created the VM and handed it off. Later, he told me that something was wrong with the server because he couldn’t get his demo to run. It turns out that the demo was provided as a zipped-up collection of virtual machine files. The software vendor had instructed him to install VMWare Player, load up the files, and run it that way. Of course, the VM I provided him wasn’t set up to run a nested player, so I told him to give me the files and I would load them up as a native (and un-nested) virtual machine.
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