Author Archives: Barrie

What makes up a Nimble Storage array?

Posted on May 21, 2013

I have been asked a couple of times about what is inside a Nimble Storage array in terms of hardware. People have assumed that there may have been proprietary components in a high performance array, but Nimble’s architecture is completely leveraged off a commodity chassis, off … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, iSCSI Storage, Nimble Storage | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Renaming vSphere Datastore device display names

Posted on May 15, 2013

In vCenter, storage devices or volumes/LUNs present themselves with a unique identifier usually prefixed with eui. or naa. These are known as Network Address Authority Identifiers and Extended Unique Identifiers. (part of FC and iSCSI naming format standards for LUNs) However, when looking at them in vSphere and via the … Continue reading →

Posted in ESXi, iSCSI Storage, Nimble Storage, VMware vSphere | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Hyper-V converged network configuration with two NICs

Posted on May 10, 2013

Just a script I put together for my Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts that only have two 10Gbe physical ports, where I want to separate various network functions of Hyper-V into separate virtual network adapters. It also lets me use MPIO with two virtual network adapters dedicated for iSCSI. This is useful for iSCSI storage vendors who recommend using Windows … Continue reading →

Posted in Hyper-V, iSCSI Storage, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Optimising vSphere path selection for Nimble Storage

Posted on March 28, 2013

This post is mostly for documentation or a quick how-to for changing the default path selection policy (PSP) so it is more suitable for Nimble arrays. For Nimble Storage by default, ESXi 5.1 uses the ALUA SATP with a PSP of most recently … Continue reading →

Posted in ESXi, iSCSI Storage, Nimble Storage, VMware vSphere | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Storage Efficiency with Nimble Compression

Posted on March 15, 2013

In my last post I talked about performance of the Nimble Storage platform I was implementing. In a contended virtualised environment, storage is often the performance sore point or Achilles heal due to insufficient IOps and poor latency of the storage design. The other major consideration is how … Continue reading →

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