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Excerpt: I’m working on setting up a lab that consists of leading storage and compute products for testing, and I ran into some interesting issues with a few different things…some with respect to the way the Cisco ASA does hairpinning, as well as allowed connections in such a configuration. There were also some routing issues experienced as a result, and I want to explore my experience in all of this during this post. I encourage you to lab this up in GNS3 – you will learn a lot about the basics of TCP as well as routing. First off, the overall…
TCP Handshakes, Routing, Hairpinning – Oh My!
January 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
vSphere 5.1 Auto Deploy on Cisco UCS C220 M3 Server
January 7, 2013 by 1 Comment
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Excerpt: I set up Auto Deploy in my home lab using vSphere 5.1 on an existing server, in order to boot a Cisco UCS C220 M3 server whose local hard drives have not arrived yet. I followed Duncan Epping’s walkthrough for Auto Deploy on vSphere 5.0, but this post is about what I had to do differently to get it working. Hopefully I save you some headaches. There might be some improvements to this process, but I was under a deadline and I know that it worked for me – please share any improvements in the comments. I will first go through my installation…
ESXi 5 on Cisco UCS – No Local Disks Showing Up
September 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: I am installing ESXi 5 on a Cisco UCS B440 M1 blade, and ran into some local disk issues. I used both the stock ESXi 5 image from VMware, as well as the recently released image from Cisco that contains the latest UCS drivers. Same issue on both. The issue was that when I got to the disk selection screen on the ESXi installation, I did not see any disks: I had a gut feeling that the RAID controller was configured incorrectly, which turned out to be true. There are two ways to fix this. Via UCS Manager Check out the documentation regarding local…
KIClet: Sub-Optimal Fibre Channel Path Selection
July 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: The SAN I’m currently working with connects a pair of Netapp FAS3270 filers running ONTAP 8.0.2 7-Mode. If you’re running VMware ESXi in your environment in front of a Fibre Channel SAN, path selection is discovered more or less in a first-come-first-served fashion. I got this message on my Netapp filer: FCP Partner Path Misconfigured: Host I/O access through a non-primary and non-optimal path was detected. Since the LUNs mounted by ESXi were residing on the A-side filer, the paths going through the B-side filer would just be sent over the partner link to the A-side, which is less efficient than going directly through A….
Management VLAN Best Practices in ESXi and Cisco UCS
May 1, 2012 by 3 Comments
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Excerpt: If you’ve set up an ESXi host, you’ve likely seen this screen: This allows you to configure which VLAN is used for management. But what does this really do? Time after time I run into very smart engineers that primarily work on virtualization and not as much on the physical networking side – and they miss a few of the networking fundamentals that those of us that were brought up in ROUTE/SWITCH know and love. Most immediately say that a VLAN trunk is an interface that allows multiple VLANs. In order to set the mood for the article, I’d like to start…
