The StarWind iSCSI SAN has always been my lab primary SAN. It has never failed me, & I know of many companies who is quite happy with their StarWind iSCSI SAN and who refuse to move to a hardware box after seeing the benefits & how it fits their need. It has been amazing year this year as StarWind were kind enough to sponsor my blog. Though that is not all for StarWind this year. They have been nominated as finalist in multiple categories in the Storage Award 2012. Below are the categories they were nominated for & if you are a happy customer of their or welling to try their software and see if they deserve a vote, then the categories to vote for them are:

StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication). This backup tool is integrated with StarWind Centralized Management Console that enables managing backup and storage from a single window.

If you have been following on VMware vSphere closely, then you would know that VMware VAAI(vStorage Api for Array Integration) is evolving to be more important on regular basis. VAAI, as you probably aware is a method VMware use to offload some tasks to the storage. The initial release was to offload three main functionality:

1- Full Copy: It was used to offload copying VMs to the storage to handle it rather than doing it in the software. This speed up VMs Deployment & so on.

2- Zero Blocks: which is used to zero-out disk regions

3- VMFS Assisted locking, so ESXi hosts will lock only a block rather than the full store as originally was the case before introducing VAAI when any file operation was done.

When Building Virtual lab for vSphere, Hyper-V,  or any clustering solution the shared storage has always been an interesting part of the solution. Left Hand virtual storage appliance has always been a good easy to use option. After HP taking over lefthand, they have changed the product name to HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance. Here I will show how to download & install the HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance on ESXi host.

I have today  just passed my IBM 000-206 High-End Disk Solutions for Open Systems Version 1. I thought I will post out my tips for what to study to help others pass the exam as well.

1- Make sure you know when to use DS8000, DS6000, DS4000, Nseries & SVC. There are so many scenario questions that will require you to be able to distinguish between the usage of each of the above storage types.

2- Make sure you are aware of the different versions of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, when to use which version, & what its used for.

Today, you will learn how to install IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Server. You have two methods of getting the installation steps. Just watching the small video below after each section, or read the article below. Ah should I make this video training to be a paid one!!! Should it cost $$$$? Just a thought. As I am not paid to put this online & really its more of a time constrain, I was not able to add voice to these video or re-edit the videos & did not want to drag this tutorial further till I add voice to them. If you want to donate some of your time to do this, I can provide the video source.

If you have a boot from SAN server, you will be able to easily clone it for a backup or deployment purpose using the native DS8000 FlashCopy. As mentioned earlier FlashCopy is an optional feature for the DS8000, which means it will require an additional license to enable. The SAN administrator can initiate a FlashCopy of Boot from SAN Disk using the DS8000 Storage Manager GUI or using the DSCLI.

Creating a FlashCopy on the DS8000 can be as easy as running the following command on DS8000 DSCLI, where 6100 is the source LUN & 6101 is the target LUN.

mkflash -seqnum 01 6100:6101

The minimum IBM TotalStorage support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy and Virtual Disk Service (VDS) supported by IBM Tivoli Flash Copy Manager is Version 4.0.1. You can obtain the latest IBM DS8000 VDS form IBM Website at:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=ssg1S4000372&rs=1113

IBM DS8000 VDS is required in order for IBM Tivoli FCM to be able to utilize the DS8000 FlashCopy feature as a hardware provider for its shadow services. If you don’t install IBM DS8000 VDS, then IBM Tivoli FCM will use the default Windows System Provider which has many limitations. The steps below illustrate the steps required to install IBM DS8000 VDS on Windows 2003 SP2.

This section provides an overview of the installation and configuration of the CIM agent on a Windows 2003 operating system. If you have decided to use the CIM agent for HMC & followed the 3.3 section, then you can skip this section directly to chapter 4. If you are not going to the use the CIM agent for HMC and decided to install the CIM agent on a Windows 2003 host then read on.

Ensure that you know how to administer a Windows 2003 operating system before you install the CIM agent. Also be familiar with the commands that you use during installation and configuration of the CIM agent.

Perform the following list of installation and configuration tasks on your Windows operating system:

Beginning with DS8000 Release 2.4, the CIM Agent is pre-installed on the hardware management console (HMC). This section includes an overview of the setup process and instructions for enabling and configuring the CIM agent on the DS8000 HMC. The DS8000 can be managed either by the CIM agent that is bundled with the HMC or with a separately installed CIM agent. The HMC CIM agent has the following limitations:

• The CIM agent is initially disabled on the HMC and must be enabled through the WebSM management console before it can be used.

• The HMC CIM agent can only support DS8000 devices that are managed by that HMC. This CIM agent is not able to manage any ESS 800 or DS6000 devices, or any DS8000 devices that are managed by a different HMC.