ESX 3.5 U4 Kickstart for IBM xSeries and QLA4050

This was our shop’s first real dive into kickstarts. The material I read in Visible Ops really emphasized track able/repeatable processes for setting up systems. One great way to do that is through kickstart scripts and some kind of version control system. We used Subversion. I’ve edited a few parts out of this, but I spent a while finding several kickstart scripts that accomplished parts of what we needed. I highly customized one for our environment....

August 27, 2009 · itsahill00

iSCSI SAN performance woes with VMware ESX 3.5

We filed support requests with IBM and VMware and went through a very lengthy process without any results. Each of our hosts had the following iSCSI HBAs: QLA4010 QLA4050C A while ago we found out QLA4010 is not on the ESX 3.5 HCL even though it runs with a legacy driver. As our virtual environment grew we noticed storage performance lagging. This was particularly evident with our Oracle 10G Database server running our staging instance of Banner Operational Data Store....

August 27, 2009 · itsahill00