Set this virtual appliance free!
I've been playing with the Celerra VSA in our lab environment in order to have a platform to test Celerra CIFS/NFS/iSCSI features. After closely following Chad's great posts and videos and using the OVF template on the Virtual Geek blog, I became quickly enamoured with the idea of using this great tool on my Cisco UCS based vSphere cluster. (Chad's excellent articles, video tutorials, and OVF template are available on his site, here)
The lab gear where I work is quite extensive, and having four Cisco UCS blades with dual Nehalem processors each, backed by an EMC CLARiiON array, connected over 10gbps switch Fabric, I was hoping for some rocking performance. Unfortunately, I was a little remiss to see this virtual appliance using the "Flexible" NIC, and the standard LSI Logic SCSI adapters, which don't perform as well as their Virtual Hardware 7 counterparts, the VMXNET3 adapter, and the PVSCSI controller.
I say it's time to break the shackles on this virtual appliance, and get a VMXNET3 / PVSCSI based version of this tool. So far in my limitted testing over a period of one day, I've been able to get PVSCSI to work, and VMXNET3 to work individually, but there are a few kinks I need to work out.
Stay tuned, I'll be updating nightly with my findings. If this is something that interests you, or you have some other ideas to improve the Celerra VSA, please comment below.
March 25'th 11:45pm - Update:
I have successfully configured a Virtual Hardware 7 version of the latest available Celerra Simulator. Initial testing is pretty positive. Nothing glaringly wrong with this image. I will be posting an OVF on this site tomorrow (it's currently exporting out of virtual center) after I reimport the OVF and verify that it works appropriately when freshly imported onto virgin hardware.
March 28'th 4:45pm - Update
I haven't had a chance to test the OVF template I created, but the VM I created it from is working just fine. When you first install this OVF, it will throw some errors until you configure your IP addresses on it. For those brave souls that want to download this OVF, I've attached it to this article. You must be logged into the site in order to see/download the 1.9GB file (the attachment size claims 0KB, but that's the url shortcut, and not the actual file size).
My plan is to finalize some more settings in this Virtual Appliance, and re-package it as a single OVA file instead of a zipped up OVF.
March 29'th 8:00pm - Update
The tested OVA version of the Celerra Simulator on Virtual Hardware 7 is here! Please note, that after importing the OVA file, you will need to edit the hardware of the VM and add 3 Network Interfaces using the VMXNET3 interface. This is due to the import process of the VM automatically creates VMXNET interfaces instead of VMXNET3 interfaces, so I removed the network interfaces from the package to avoid this confusion. Any network interface aside from the VMXNET3 will not work with this OVA since I removed the unnecessary drivers.
For instructions on how to configure the Celerra VSA please see the excellent blog posts by Chad on VirtualGeek. Links for your convenience:
Celerra Virtual Appliance HOWTO 101 - Basic Setup and Configuration
Celerra Virtual Appliance HOWTO 201 - Adding More Physical Storage
Celerra Virtual Appliance HOWTO 301 - Replicating Between Two Celerra VSAs
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Last Updated on Sunday, 30 January 2011 17:46.
