http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices Just another WordPress site Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:57:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices/best-practices/not-your-father%e2%80%99s-protocol-analyzer/#comment-2704 Greg Phillips Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:57:21 +0000 http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices/?p=96#comment-2704 I would further add that this “Yeah, we bought one of those Xgigs a few years ago. It was expensive, no one knows how to use it and it sits in the corner.” sentiment is also pushed by a major switch vendor. I happened to be at their RTP facility doing a deep dive w/their product engineers a few months back and when I asked why they weren't at least having the TAPs incorporated into the Fibre Channel portions of both of their recent "Virtualization offerings w/VMware and EMC and VMware and NetApp they told me that their SPAN functionality negated the need for it. However, well, if you have a switch that is "over subscribed" at 4Gbps FC (let alone at 8Gbps FC) you'll find that typically when the switch is being over subscribed is one of the times that you'd want to look at traffic. In this particular vendor's case you'd then quickly realize that when the switch is stressing b/c of said over subscription it "intelligently" disables what it considers "unnecessary" services, one of which is SPAN.... I would further add that this “Yeah, we bought one of those Xgigs a few years ago. It was expensive, no one knows how to use it and it sits in the corner.” sentiment is also pushed by a major switch vendor. I happened to be at their RTP facility doing a deep dive w/their product engineers a few months back and when I asked why they weren’t at least having the TAPs incorporated into the Fibre Channel portions of both of their recent “Virtualization offerings w/VMware and EMC and VMware and NetApp they told me that their SPAN functionality negated the need for it. However, well, if you have a switch that is “over subscribed” at 4Gbps FC (let alone at 8Gbps FC) you’ll find that typically when the switch is being over subscribed is one of the times that you’d want to look at traffic. In this particular vendor’s case you’d then quickly realize that when the switch is stressing b/c of said over subscription it “intelligently” disables what it considers “unnecessary” services, one of which is SPAN….

]]> http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices/best-practices/vmware-makes-the-case-for-san-aware-performance-monitoring/#comment-937 Greg Phillips Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:00:18 +0000 http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices/?p=27#comment-937 This is good however, I wish VMware would make more mention of the help in this regard that NPIV provides. They implemented that feature in ESX 3.5 if you're using RDM and have some very good whitepapers (you have to dig for them though) written with vendors on leveraging NPIV. This is good however, I wish VMware would make more mention of the help in this regard that NPIV provides. They implemented that feature in ESX 3.5 if you’re using RDM and have some very good whitepapers (you have to dig for them though) written with vendors on leveraging NPIV.

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