ESXi 6.7 U1 fixes: APD and VMCP is not triggered even when no paths can service I/Os

It has been over two years since I blogged about APD handling bug which I discovered, during partial storage outage in my environment. All path down (APD) handling and VMware Component Protection (VMCP) is not working when you have paths physically connected, but they are not able to serve any… Continue reading

ESXi installation fail with IBM x3650 M4 and m5110e storage controller after Firmware upgrade

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Yesterday, we experienced a problem where we couldn’t install ESXi on the one of ours IBM x3650 M4 servers. We suspected it could be a firmware issue as we performed a complete firmware upgrades just before the installation. If you already had your ESXi installed and did the firmware upgrade… Continue reading

Bricked QLogic Broadcom BCM57840 after driver update

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Two weeks ago, we started with regular updates of our Flex system servers, including drivers and firmwares. It is good practice to update drivers first so I followed this procedure as usually. Our update list included ESXi driver for CN4022 (QLogic Broadcom BCM57840). Since IBM/Lenovo doesn’t provide VMware drivers for… Continue reading

Just Another ESXi 6.0 Storage APD Handling Bug

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It’s been a while since we experienced partial outage on our storage infrastructure running under IBM SVC storage. Few LUNs (vdisks in IBM SVC world) presented from storage went offline. I’m not going into details why it happened as HW problems just happens sometimes. Important thing is how are you… Continue reading

SoftLayer local disk performance SATA/vSAN/SSD

SoftLayer local disk performance SATA/vSAN/SSD What disk performance you can expect from local drives in Softlayer with VMware vSphere6, vSAN & local SATA or SSD drives? This article is here to help you see and decide if performance will be enough for your needs. I have 3 hosts with: hardware… Continue reading

Updated: Building vSphere 6 with VSAN on IBM Softlayer: Part 4 – Configuring VSAN on Softlayer

UPDATE: I do not recommend using this guide for any future deployment. The information included is quite outdated and is not relevant anymore. The article should only be used as reference for some commands. My recommendation is to check  IBM’s official offering of VMware on IBM Cloud. A lot of… Continue reading

Building vSphere 6 with VSAN on IBM Softlayer: Part 3 – Configuring Networking on Softlayer

Now when we have ESXis installed and vCenter server deployed, we need to do some patching and, of course, networking config. First, it is always a good idea to have your vSphere environment up to date. The thing is that Softlayer uses Images to provision servers and those images are not… Continue reading

Building vSphere 6 with VSAN on IBM Softlayer: Part 2 – Ordering vCenter server on Softlayer

This is the second part of Building vSphere 6 with VSAN on IBM Softlayer series. In the first part we’ve discussed how to order bare metal server with ESXi 6 installed. In this part I will show how to order vCenter Server 6 on a Windows Cloud Instance (aka CI –… Continue reading

Building vSphere 6 with VSAN on IBM Softlayer: Part 1 – Ordering ESXi hosts on Softlayer.

I am recently spending a lot of time with IBM Softlayer, in particular I am building vSphere running inside Softlayer. In this series of articles I want to show how you can build an environment with vSphere 6 and VSAN inside Softlayer. One important note: although I work in IBM, my view is form… Continue reading

IBM FlashSystem V9000 and VMware vSphere ESXi Guidelines

I’m really glad I had opportunity to participate on a RedBook residency regarding IBM FlashSystem V9000 and VMware “Best Practices” (it was actually one of my last thing which I did as IBMer) and till the RedPaper is released for public I decided to write a sneak peek with some… Continue reading