Recent content by NickFerrar

We use 300GB or 450GB 15k FC drives in our Clariions for VMware and generally create a RAID 5 groups of 4-7 drives with a single LUN in each for the VMFS LUN. What works for you does depend a lot though on what's running on your VMs.

Good luck with it - we use VCB (via NetBackup v6.5.3.1) to backup up about 4TB across two sites and get a very high failure rate. Unfortunately failures with VCB usually generate a generic snapshot 156 error but can be for a variety of reasons so can take a lot of time sorting out (Monday's I...

Not read the doc but presumably setting up a new port group specifically for the old FTP VM and throttling the bandwidth for the port group would do it (although that would affect the entire server's bandwidth not just FTP traffic). Much better to do it at the application level though.

Hmm sounds like there's an artificial limit that's been set as the two main server types you'd connect (Windows and ESX) have 2TB limits (OK apart from GPT for Windows). I can't see why it would be a limitation of the MD3000i itself. I'd raise a call with Dell and ask if there's a workaround.

On the MCSE etc. thing - whilst I value mine I'd say without experience they are of very little value. Maybe it would make the difference when choosing between two people with no experience for a junior role but I'd say you're better off doing voluntary work or work experience to gain some...

@jpm121 We use Dell PowerEdge 2950's as our standard ESX 'building blocks' 2 x quad-core 3GHz CPUs and 16GB RAM. With either fibre HBA's or quad port NICs depending on if it's iSCSI or FC attached to a SAN. For the client there's currently only 2 ESX hosts servers + 1 NetBackup/VCB proxy server...

Have you created the RSG for the store you want to restore?

For a 100 user mailbox Exchange server there's absolutely no reason to worry about performance when using RAID 1 for transaction logs. We run 300-400 user mailbox Exchange servers on single 5 disk RAID 5 arrays (so the O/S, Db and log volume are all on the same disks) without any performance...

Used the Self-Test ones myself and they were good (used Transcenders way back in NT 4 days and they were good to). Just make sure you avoid brain dump products like Test King...

As you already have a server-attached tape drive then yeah iSCSI connecting the server to the SAN seems the obvious choice. We use a FC tape library directly attached to the SAN and then multiple servers can backup directly to it which is a lot quicker but also a lot more expensive to set up...

There's devices like NetApp's V3000 which sit in front of SANs and give you a common inferface, never used one though so couldn't tell you how well they work...

We create multiple RAID 5 sets on our SAN (preferably each dedicated to a host but more often than not we end up having multiple hosts sharing the same set of disks). I was a bit worried at first this would have a major impact on I/O performance but we've not seen that yet (mostly due to the...

You do this via port groups on vswitches or by using dedicated vswitches (if you want to entirely isolate a vmnic). You then assign the VM to the appropriate port group.

400 desktops and 400 servers is a pretty big environment for 4 people to look after. My team's 5 people and we look after 120 servers (although we do consultancy etc. as well). I moved from a small company (80 office staff) where I was the new junior guy so did all the ops stuff (changing...

I disagree, at least for medium to large firms. It just takes up too much HR department time if you try and do it in-house. I don't disagree most recruiting firms offer a poor service though (both for employers and employees).