EqualLogic at Boston Medical Center
March 7th, 2010Check out this great video from Boston Medical Center who did a “bake off with EqualLogic, EMC, NetApp and IBM”.
NEW: EqualLogic Coffee Break – Data Center Bridging
March 5th, 201010 Gb Ethernet delivers a larger "pipe" for communications—ten times larger than standard Ethernet. It’s availability has prompted the development of new standards for the data center, as organizations begin to deploy unified networking—that is, a single fabric for all networking traffic.
These new standards go by several names: “Converged Enhanced Ethernet,” “Data Center Ethernet,” and the industry-standard term “Data Center Bridging,” or DCB. In this technical brief we provide an overview of the reasons DCB is being developed and how it can improve networking in the data center for applications, servers, and storage.
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=8855
Demo’ing EqualLogic from my laptop
March 1st, 2010Hello, my name is Marc and I am the tech guy at Dell that carries an EqualLogic Array around in my trunk. Depending on the week, I can do 4 to 8 EqualLogic Demo’s easily.
Doing a “basic demo” with EqualLogic is very powerful. I describe a “basic demo” as initializing the EqualLogic Array, walking through Group Manager, setting up and connecting SAN HQ with a walk through, creating Volumes, detailing snapshots and thin provisioning, mounting the Volume to your laptop, copying data, etc.
Now I can demo all of this easily from my Dell laptop running Windows 7 and directly connecting a simple everyday Ethernet cable from my laptop NIC to the Eth0 port on the EqualLogic Array. However I feel that there is even more to demo and review because EqualLogic is powerful and simple at the same time.
With the help of VMware Workstation 7 my new and improved “basic demo” now includes:
- a Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2008 which better shows the full installation of the HIT, including ASM/ME. I can review in detail the importance of Remote Setup Wizard, the VSS integration and MPIO setting (Volume Slices anyone). With ASM/ME I can show the power and simplicity of application integrated snapshots at no additional cost to the customer. A single EXE does install all that great functionality in the HIT!
- a Virtual Machine running ESXi. This is great because there are customers that sometimes cannot wrap their heads around how an EqualLogic Volume is a Data Store that is formatted with VMFS. Now I can show how to exactly enable the iSCSI Initiator, add the Group IP Address, rescan and view the Volumes, mount a Volume as a Data Store. BAM – simple yet powerful.
With a Laptop, an EqualLogic Array, an Ethernet Cable plus a power strip and a projector I am ready to go onsite and WOW our customers on all of the value that EqualLogic can bring!
EqualLogic, VMware & iSCSI Connections
March 1st, 2010This is a great post from “2vcps and a truck”
iSCSI Connections on EqualLogic PS Series
http://www.2vcps.com/2010/02/16/iscsi-connections-eq/
After reading the post above please make sure to read:
TR 1049 – Configuring VMware vSphere software iSCSI with Dell EqualLogic PS Series Storage
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=8453
EqualLogic Customer POC Part 1
February 26th, 2010Onsite at a customer today installing an EqualLogic PS5000X Array for a Proof of Concept in a heavy CIFS/NFS environment.
For this POC we “front end” the EqualLogic Array with a single physical server running Windows Server 2008 R2 which will be doing the CIFS and NFS for the clients.
The HIT Kit and SAN HQ was installed on this server. (3) NICs setup for LAN with Teaming enabled. (3) NICs setup for SAN with standard MPIO using Least Queue Depth since this is a PS5000 which has (3) Gig Ethernet Ports for SAN. NOTE: We modified Max sessions per volume slice from the default of 2 to 3.
To make sure MPIO is using all (3) NICs for SAN we created a test Volume and used IOMeter which produced around 300MB/sec throughput to the EqualLogic Volume – Rock and Roll! We also confirmed connections in Group Manager and under the iSCSI Initiator.
Before testing we are allowing the EqualLogic Array to finish building/verifying the RAID and allowing the backup battery’s on the controllers to fully charge.
For the next week and a half the customer is going to heavily test this configuration and we will use SAN HQ to truly understand the performance metrics gathered during this POC.
Stay tuned for Part 2 in a couple weeks.
EqualLogic User Conference: More Sneak Peaks
February 23rd, 2010Check out Jeff Sullivan’s Dell TechCenter Blog:
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/dell_tech_center/archive/2010/02/23/another-sneak-peak-at-sessions-for-the-dell-equallogic-user-conference.aspx
Next week’s First Ever EqualLogic User Conference is going to be great!
EqualLogic How To: Installing SAN HQ
February 22nd, 2010Installing SAN HQ is a 3 step process:
- Step 1, Install SAN HQ
- Step 2, Configure your EqualLogic Group to talk to SAN HQ
- Step 3, Configure SAN HQ to talk to your EqualLogic Group
Step 1 – Install SAN HQ
Download SAN HQ, about a 60MB EXE, from the EqualLogic Customer Support Website. This single EXE can be installed on Windows Server 32bit or 64bit. Customer can install this on a physical or virtual Windows Server.
Double-click the EXE to start the installation, click next, accept the license, choose where to install.
You will be prompted to select the installation type. Make sure to select Install Monitor Service and Client. Read More
VDI in a Nutshell
February 22nd, 2010VDI can be a big pill to swallow. There are many components to it, so we put this together to give you a concise, but full view of VDI in a nutshell. Enjoy!
Read More
Dell TechCenter EqualLogic Wiki
February 19th, 2010This is a great one stop site and hopefully you are not just following but also participating on the EqualLogic Forums here.
Links, Videos, News, Forums and more – all about EqualLogic!
Here is the link:
http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/EqualLogic
EqualLogic: Firmware 4.3.4 Available
February 19th, 2010To read all the details and download the firmware:
https://www.equallogic.com/support/download.aspx?id=9209
