Month: July 2014

EqualLogic DPM Hyper-V network tuning

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I’m in the process of configuring DPM to back up my Hyper-V environment, which resides on an EqualLogic PS6500ES SAN.

It was during this that I encountered an issue with the DPM consistency check for a 3TB VM locking up every other VM on my cluster, due to high write latencies. During this period I couldn’t even get useful stats out of the EqualLogic because SANHQ wouldn’t communicate with it and the Group Manager live sessions would fail to initialize.

 

After some investigation, I did the following on all my Hyper-V hosts and my DPM host:

– Disabled “Large Send Offload” for every NIC

– Set “Receive Side Scaling” queues to 8

– Disabled the Nagle algorithm for iSCSI NICs (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/7636.iscsi-and-the-nagle-algorithm.aspx)

– Update Broadcom firmware and drivers

 

Following these changes, I still see very high write latency on my backup datastore volume, but the other volumes operate perfectly.

 

 

 

Server 2012 R2 Upgrade and BSOD

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I’m currently in the process of upgrading a standalone Server 2012 machine running Hyper-V to Server 2012 R2.

Due to resource constraints, I’m performing an in-place upgrade, despite this server residing 800km away from me. Thank goodness for iDRAC Enterprise.

 

However, during this process, during the “Getting Devices Ready” section I received a Blue Screen Of Death, with the error message:

whea_uncorrectable_error

 

After it hit this BSOD twice, the upgrade process failed out and reverted back to Server 2012. I was unable to find a log file of what occurred in any more detail, and was worried that I would be stuck on Server 2012.

Thankfully, I discovered a log file on the iDRAC with the following message:

A bus fatal error was detected on a component at slot 1.

This triggered my memory, and I recalled that we have a USB3 PCI-E card installed for pre-seeding an external drive with backup info.

I used the BIOS setup (Integrated Devices > Slot Disablement) to disable Slot 1, and then retried the upgrade with fingers crossed.

Success!

 

Microsoft TechEd 2014 recorded sessions

Jeff Miles Leave a comment
Image from http://channel9.msdn.com
Image from http://channel9.msdn.com

I have never attended Microsoft TechEd, but I REALLY want to, especially after seeing the sheer number of sessions that are relevant to me in 2013.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the TechEd website for some time after the event closed, watching for the posting of the recorded sessions, and now they are up, all 60 something pages of them.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2014#fbid=

 

I’ve gone through the list of every session, and collected a link list of 59 of them I want to watch, with some standouts like:

  • Windows PowerShell unplugged
  • How many coffee’s can you drink while your PC starts
  • DFSR 2012 R2 enhancements
  • Storage Efficiency with Dell and Storage Spaces
  • Mark Russinovich on Cloud Computing
  • Upgrade your IT skills and Infrastructure: Cloud Computing
  • Performance Optimize your ASP.NET
  • O365 Identity Management
  • What’s new in Windows 8.1 Deployment
  • Hyper-V Recovery Manager
  • Backup Strategy for Private Cloud

And so much more…