IT Systems Engineering
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Thin provisioning savings in a 3PAR SAN
I recently implemented a 3PAR SAN. After migrating 10-15 VMs onto it, I looked at the disk utilization. I was happy to see how good the thin provisioning in the 3PAR SAN’s operating system was working. Summary: Total space the Hyper-V servers “think” they have = 1600 GB Total space the Hyper-V servers “think” they have used = 596 GB Actual space the SAN has reserved for these LUNs = 403 GB So that counts as a savings of around 193GB worth of real disk space (32%). Sweet, eh?) Full details below.
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P2V using Hyper-V 2012
Here is how I started doing P2V on a Hyper-V 2012. I have SCVMM 2012. I want to do a V2V from a Citrix XenServer VM to a Hyper-V VM. The way to go about it is to do a P2V. The official technet documentation says run System Center Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer (VMMCA) first. Installing and running SC VMMCA So I installed System Center Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer on my Windows 7 workstation. It needed a couple of prerequisites like MBCA 2.0. Actually VMMCA is run from inside MBCA. When I run it I get this error message: Troubleshooting: Test ping: yes I can ping the VM…
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Getting Started with SCVMM 2012
After I installed SCVMM I wanted to get up and running quickly. At that time I wrote this document. However after using VMM for a few months I fouund what I did wrong. I re-installed VMM and now I have updated this document to reflect the changed. Here are the updated steps: Start SC VMM manager on the VMM server (At least once start the VMM manager on the VMM server, later on you can install and use it from your own Workstation.) Authenticate to the localhost using the admin account (I was already logged on using an admin account so I chose the option – “Use current…) On the…
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Presenting LUNs to Hyper-V 2012
Here are my notes on presenting a LUN from a 3PAR 7400 SAN to a Hyper-V 2012 server running no GUI. The SAN is connected to the server via Fiber. There is a FC switch in between which has been properly configure, zoned, etc. Multiple paths to the same LUNs are configured for redundancy and speed so we need MPIO. Procedure: 1. Install MPIO feature and reboot the Hyper-V server Note that I did not run the mpiocpl GUI or the mpclaim command as I described here earlier. You may have to do that. 2. From inside the SAN management console, present a LUN to the Hyper-V server. Note: while…
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Device management using PowerShell
There are some cmdlets available for device management. They are useful on a server core type installation like Hyper-V 2012 First you need to download and import the cmdlet modules from here Then you can run commands like get-device. However a more useful command is: Get-Device | Sort-Object -Property Name | ft Name, DriverVersion, DriverProvider, IsPresent, HasProblem –AutoSize More command examples are here