x(perts)64

Several manufacturers have provided 64-bit BIOS flash utilities, but there are still some holdouts. Acer, for one, can't seem to manage to create one for their Ferrari, even though there are a lot of Acer Ferrari owners out there running 64-bit Windows - either XP x64 or Vista 64-bit. Not a huge problem if you have a USB floppy drive you can boot to, but the Acer BIOS doesn't support booting to a USB Flash drive. Well, fellow MVP and Ferrari owner Barb Bowman has come up with a nice workaround, using the built in WinPE boot process of Windows Vista. All you need is a 32-bit Vista DVD, a USB flash drive, and the BIOS files from your OEM. Nice job, Barb.

Charlie.

Well, it had to happen. I knew there was bound to be something I really wouldn't like about this ML350. And I've found it. They have a LOUSY power supply. I've had two power supplies fail, for no apparent reason, in the little over six months I've had this server. That, frankly, stinks. And a replacement, even with exchange, is more than $250. That's outrageous, given what a good power supply from any of the better normal suppliers costs. And there's nothing special about this power supply, either. Except its cost. And it's proprietary nature that prevents me from plugging in any other brand, of course. I really, really hate that. So, here I am, sitting with two power supplies to trade out, praying that I don't have the one more failure which would leave me dead in the water until a replacement could get here. And all it takes is a quick perusal of the HP support forums to know that my experience is not an isolated one. These things are failing right and left. More so in some of the DL series servers, where they are also used, but clearly they are fragile. Sigh.

Charlie.

So, in Part 1 I talked about the whole process of borrowing and setting up my EqualLogic PS3800XV SAN.  Now that I've got it powered up, I needed to add IP addresses for it, and connect to it. Setting IP addresses is straightforward - you can let DHCP handle it, or use the provided null modem cable to log in to the SAN command line interface and issue a few commands to get it done. All this is detailed in their docs, though they generally assume you'll do everything over the web or the graphical interface. And if I had had the x64 version of their Remote Setup Wizard available when I started, I wouldn't have needed the CLI at all.  But since I didn't have an x64 version of it to start, no sweat, I just had to telnet into the SAN to do the setting. They provided the cable, after all, and it was long enough to easily reach. A nice touch. Just fire up HyperTerminal, set it to 9600 baud, 8N1, and you're in business.

Once IP addresses are set up, the next step is to install the software. Ooops - the shipping version doesn't support Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, much less the x64 version of Windows Server 2008. An email to support got me the first (and it's probably the shipping version by now), and a couple more emails to my press contact got me on the beta for the second. We're in business.

Now if I'd only wanted to use their software, and their interface (rather than needing to use the Microsoft Storage Manager for SANs because I was writing about it), I'd have actually had an even easier time of it. Their software is good, and includes all the options you'd usually pay more for. My favourite option that is included, by the way, is called "thin provisioning". Think of this as sort of like dynamically expanding disks in Virtual Server. You don't actually commit disk space until it's needed, allowing you to better manage overall disk utilization on the SAN. And since you can always add more disk space by plugging in another unit, you can build out your infrastructure logically as needed from the beginning, but not have to plunk down all your cash for the actual hardware until you need to. I like it.

The actual setup of your first LUN is straightforward. First, open their Group Manager application, and set the RAID policy. The choices are RAID-10 (striping on top of mirrored sets), RAID-50 (striping on top of RAID-5 arrays), or simple RAID-5 (but configured with a spare disk). For my purposes, I chose RAID-5, but if I were doing this for a production network hosting many VMs, I'd have chosen RAID-10. Virtualization is very write intensive, so you need to design your disk strategy accordingly.

Next, create a volume, assigning it a Volume Name and a size. You can also specify a snapshot reserve space (100% is the default). Specify the iSCSI access for the volume (CHAP, IP address, or iSCSI Initiator name), and you're done. At least on the SAN side. Now you just need to connect the server that will be using the volume to it, using whatever iSCSI initiator you are using. I used the built-in iSCSI initiator in Windows Server 2008 (but you can download one for Server 2003 here). And I was lazy and didn't use CHAP for authentication, but in a real world scenario, I'd recommend it.

Once connected, open Disk Manager (or DiskPart.exe if you're a dedicated command line type), and bring the volume online, initialized and assign partitions, etc to it just as you would any local hard disk. (Don't make it a dynamic volume - they're just a bad idea with SANs. And all the RAID stuff is already being taken care of by the SAN, so what's the point.)

Speed? Well, once I got things set up, I created eight(8) Windows Server 2008 RC0 server virtual machines, ranging from a single CPU, 1GB gateway VM, to an x64, dual proc, 8 GB Terminal Server VM, all on that same volume and started getting serious. I don't have any concrete benchmarks - just real world use in my environment. The SAN is as fast, or faster, than the local SAS array on this server. And that's darned fast!

So, overall, am I happy? Oh, yeah. Except that I don't get to keep it. Even though it really isn't an appropriate unit for the average home office, this SAN is so well made, and so redundant, that I can't NOT want it. And trust me, I'd find a simple solution to the noise problem. In fact, I've already got a spot picked out, and it even vents to the outside. Just need to run CAT6 to it, and I'm in business. So, if the folks at EqualLogic want to leave it here for an extended test? Say 3 years or so? No problem, I'll be happy to keep using it and writing about it. Hmmm, I wonder just how many hours of TiVo I can fit on it?

In order to write about Storage Area Networks (SANs), you really need to have access to a SAN. Now if I had an unlimited budget, I'd happily have set up a SAN here in my office, if only for the simplicity and the ability to centralize storage across all the computers here. And with an iSCSI SAN, there's really no speed penalty at all - in fact, quite the opposite from my limited experience. Windows Server 2008 adds native support for SANs, allowing you to easily integrate them into your environment. Which, of course, was why I needed one so I could write about it for the Windows Server 2008 Administrator's Companion book for MS Press.

So, I poked around a bit, and finally decided that the best looking SANs out there for simplicity, and quality, were those from EqualLogic. Of course, that was a "view from Google" - I had no personal knowledge at all. So, poked around EqualLogic's web site, found the "press contact" email address, and sent off a blind query, asking if they'd lend me one for a few months. Hey, it never hurts to ask!

So, imagine my surprise when I get an email back in less than 24 hours asking me some details about how I'd want to use it, etc., and what I actually needed. After a bit of back and forth, they sent me a new PS3800XV SAN with 16 146GB, 15k SAS drives in it. And set me up with a support contact (nice touch, that!) so that if I had any issues or problems, I could just call or email. Sweet.

So, I'm off on a business trip, and get a call from my co-author, Sharon Crawford. She says the FedEx person had been to the office with this enormous box that weighed 50 kg. And when was I going to be back home because no way was she dragging that monstrosity up 2 flights of stairs to the office.

Well, when I got home, I opened up the shipping box and tried to take it up myself. Nope, that's not going to be fun. So I took the 16 drives out and hauled it up to the office. Once it was all put back together, I had a chance to appreciate it. This is a really, really well built unit. The 16 drives in their hot swap cages are fairly typical, but the entire back panel screams of redundancy. Dual power supplies, dual controllers, each with 3 Gb Ethernet NICs in them. And even with all the drives removed, the whole thing is seriously heavy.

Now the PS3800XV isn't exactly designed for home offices - it takes serious power, and it's not exactly quiet. And I can imagine what an entire rack of these things would sound like starting up. But even just the one had me looking for a closet to hide it in  - when you first start it up, it sounds like a 747 taking off. After a bit it settles down to a dull roar, but that first power up is impressive.

The goal of this exercise was to test out a SAN in "production" - both as a clustering resource (since Windows Server 2008 doesn't support shared SCSI for clustering, unlike its predecessors), and as a central storage for holding virtual machines. In part 2 we'll talk about exactly how well that went, from creating our first LUN to using it to host 8 Longhorn server VMs.

Charlie.