HP NIC Teaming, Netapp CIFS, vRanger Pro Issue

I was seeing extremely slow CIFS performance on servers with HP NIC teams. This includes our vRanger backup server. I would map a drive and it would take minutes to come up, etc. I finally found a NOW article suggesting to run:

options ip.fastpath.enable off

This command, from my understanding, will not use cached MAC addresses. Because of the way our HP NIC team is setup, different MACs were being presented and this caused an issue. So far so good.

Virtualizing Citrix

I have recently virtualized a customers entire Citrix environment. It is performing quite well actually. No issues so far. I did follow some of the recommendations here

I did not, however, follow everyones suggestion not to P2V the Citrix servers. I was forced to P2V them and they are running perfectly thus far. The 2 main things that I followed were disabling the memory balloon driver and shared folders within VMware Tools.

The memory balloon driver acts as a program within the VM and will give and take memory based on the host and VM requirements amongst other things. With Citrix, I decided to not enable it.

For information on how the balloon driver and the swap file work, check it here

Varonis on Netapp

To get Varonis to manage Netapp CIFS volumes you must run the following fpolicy commands to create an fpolicy.

fpolicy create Varonis screen
fpolicy options Varonis required off
fpolicy enable Varonis

Replicating and failing over VMs

When you automate the replication and failover of virtual machines, you will need to make a change to the config file if you dont want to answer a question per-VM on failover because the UUID changed in the new environment.

In order to automate this process, when you build a VM edit the vmx file to include:

uuid.action = "keep"

This will keep ESX from asking a question on whether or not you want to change the UUID.

Windows Server 2008 Cannot Ping or Connect to Internet

I am building out some Windows Server 2008 machines. One of them couldnt be pinged, couldnt connect to the Internet, but could reach servers on its own subnet. When I ran an ipconfig I could see that one of the default gateways was 0.0.0.0. When I went to network properties it wasnt there. I tried deleting the entry from the registry, it didnt work.

The solution was simple: run the command route delete 0.0.0.0 and then go into network settings and add the real gateway again.

ESX NFS Snapshot Issues

I have been having snapshot issues with ESX on Netapp NFS. The server is hanging for a long time when deleting snapshots. We are also seeing ESX Ranger issues when doing backups.

The Netapp guide mentions to install patch ESX350-200808401-BG. I am on the version 3 of ESX 3.5 so it wasnt necessary. All I had to do was add this line to the esx config file.

prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks = "TRUE"