App-V With RDSH

App-V Pilot at last finished:

Provisioning some different tools on application areas (Social Media, Web Browser, Backup & Recovery Tools, Network Management Tools) has been completed on VMware Horizon 7.4 and RDSH Server (2012 R2):

Add new disks to the datastore while the host is run

It’s an usual problem when the server administrators want to configure more hard disks on their servers without any service interruptions or data loss through wrong array configuration. The issue will be complicated if your server is a hypervisor. If you make a little mistake during disk configuration, it can  lead to loss of entire VMs and consequently their data. So if any HP customized ESXi version are deployed as your host (or another customized setup file for other vendors), you can leverage your array configuration without any interrupt or downtime. Because there is no more need to reboot the host and configure server’s arrays by Popular F8 RAID Menu or HP Smart Start on boot environment. So based on ESXi versions you should execute one of these commands:

1.   For versions before 6.0:  /opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli
2.   For versions after ESXi 6.5:  /opt/smartstorageadmin/ssacli/bin/ssacli

Whereas I encountered this situation in ESXi version 6.0 U3, next CLI are based on this version of ESXi HP-Customized:

1	Device Scanning	hpssacli rescan
2	Physical Disk Status	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 pd all show status
3	Logical Disk Status	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 pd all show status
4	Turn on/off Blink PD LED	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 ld 3 modify led=on/off
5	Create New RAID x	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 create type=ld drives=2I:1:5,2I:1:6,2I:1:7,2I:1:8 raid=0/1/5
6	Add PD to LV	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 ld 2 add drives=2I:1:5,2I:1:6
7	Add Spare to all array	hpssacli ctrl slot=0 array all add spares=2I:1:9
8	Check Configuration	hpssacli ctrl all show config

     

I hope you enjoy it, but attention: Before any change to your disk array, check all disks slots, numbers and so on, then execute your new raid setup commands.

VMware SDDC Design Considerations - PART One: SDDC Layers

 In the first part of SDDC Design (based on VMware Validated Design Reference Architecture Guide) I want to speak more about VMware Software-Design Data-Center (SDDC) architecture and discussing  requirements and considerations. It's a sensible reason that you always should regard capacity planning, scalability approach, extensibility potential, and disaster recovery plan. Also, there must be a design draft that will answer business needs with intelligent and predictable solutions. Traditionally we called that “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)”, and finally SDDC has extended and varied usage of it. This structure included many layers and modules:

• 1.       Physical Layer (Computing, Network, and Storage) that is included servers and other resources for Tenant and Edge services.
• 2.       Virtual Infrastructure Layer: Granting access and assigning control procedures on the physical layer (Hypervisors and SAN Storage) for provisioning and managing tenant virtual machines. Management tasks consist: Management of virtual infra, Cloud, SM, BC Solutions and Security areas will be performed on this layer.
• 3.       Cloud Management Layer: All of the service requests handling are leveraged by this layer and also SM, BC & Security components are related to the CM Layer.
• 4.       Service Management (SM), regardless of IT Infrastructure type, has a key role in service provisioning and request responding. Also, all of the monitoring, log management, and alerting operations belong to this layer.
• 5.       Business Continuity (BC) considerations addition to Disaster Recovery (DR) plan act as an SLA guarantee to make sure your IT resources (Hardware/Virtual/Cloud) are always available and if each interruption happen, there must be another way to make your IT environment online. Every Backup and Replication solutions belong to this section.
• 6.       Security considerations will increase infrastructure consistency and it includes every tool and solution to deal with most of Internal / External threats or attacks. On the other hand, each module and component belong to another layer, require some protective features. So this section is a comprehensive part of SDDC design.

 In the following parts of this post, I will discuss more details of the mentioned layers.