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Just got an email this morning regarding the immediate availability of PS Series firmware v 5.0.5.
It’s recommended for installation ASAP, so plan accordingly, especially if you’re using replicated volumes!
Issues Corrected in This Version
Changelog & Issues corrected in this version are described below:
So I’m working on migrating few routed IP’s which are attached to my company’s cable modem over to a CIDR block of IP’s provided by our ISP (COX Communications).
Here’s the situation, apparently there’s a limit to the number of WAN IP’s that can be attached directly to your cable modem. In this case COX says that it’s 8 (this is an arbitrary number, but whatever). If you need more, you need to procure what’s called a CIDR block. Basically this is a block of addresses which is outside the subnet range of you modem’s WAN IP. Your ISP will then next hop the CIDR to your WAN IP, and it’s your job to take it from there. So instead of being able to tack a switch between your modem and your router to be able to assign WAN addresses to your server’s network cards, we need to use a router which can translate the forwarded CIDR block requests.
GREAT! I have a very nice router already! Enter the Juniper SSG-140, which is being replaced by the SRX series of devices running JUNOS, I digress however, as that’s a post better left for another time.
We initially had a number of issues trying to duplicate features that are available when you have additional IP’s that are inside your WAN subnet. Features like MIP, VIP, and the ability to attach a WAN address directly to a server’s NIC. (I know this isn’t best practice, however we have a deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 non-R2, which requires that a WAN IP be present on the NIC serving the Audio / Video Conferencing role.)
I’ll be making another post on how to duplicate all of the above functionality a little later I promise, but this post is about a NAT-DST port forwarding gotcha I encountered on me being retarded.
When you normally setup your home router, you specify the source and destination port that you want requests to be forwarded to. This is most often referred to as port forwarding, however here’s where the gotcha happens. Say you translate port 80 on your WAN IP to port 8080 on your internal network, you would actually be doing port shifting. Forwarding as it comes to mind of most people means your taking the wan port and passing it to an internal server with the same port.
When dealing with enterprise switches, you’ll often run into Source port and Destination port when referring to policies and services to go along with those policies.
I made the mistake of thinking that the source port in the screenshot above was the source port of the WAN IP address.
It’s actually the source port of the originating computer, the destination port is the destination of their request.
So you can see that I want all ports from the source computer to be accepted when requesting ports 18082, 18086, and 18087 on my WAN IP.
Remember to read and understand your networking equipment or you’ll end up like me and spend a couple hours troubleshooting something that was as easy as this.
Read MoreAs I keep digging into documents and KB articles I keep finding more and more things to like about vSphere 4.1. Today’s find has to do with the PVSCSI driver.
With the release of vSphere 4.0, VMware added a new paravirtualized SCSI driver into the VMware Tools that provides better virtual disk performance than the standard LSI driver. The PVSCSI driver promised to deliver better performance and lower overall CPU utilization for workloads that had high I/O demands. Unfortunately the PVSCSI driver wasn’t supported on virtual machine boot volumes, so folks held off on making this the default SCSI driver for all virtual machines.
After vSphere 4 Update 1 was released, VMware lifted the restriction and now supported the PVSCSI driver on boot volumes. Folks began considering adopting the PVSCSI driver in all virtual machines similar to how the VMXNET driver is a standard for nearly all virtual NICs. Soon afterwards VMware came out with a knowledgebase article stating that virtual machines that did not have heavy I/O demands could actually experience worse performance using the PVSCSI driver. YIKES!!! They recommended only using the driver for workloads that had I/O demands in excess of 2,000 IOPS.
With the release of vSphere 4.1 that is no longer a problem and you can use the PVSCSI driver in all circumstances.
Want details? Read on!
So many of you may find this site looking to see where I’ve gone, and why I’m not on Hak5 any longer.
While this is a brief post I promise I will write up a longer more appropriate post for you shortly.
Short and sweet of it is, I’ve decided to move on and focus my energy on my career, business opportunities and my undying love of internet radio.
I’ll be bringing back my internet talk show soon, and if you’re ever at an SAP conference focusing on infrastructure or virtualization, you might see me presenting 
Like I said, a more thought out post is coming shortly, and I’ll be posting on my blog pretty regularly with updates on things going on in my life.
Thanks to all the great I’ve met over the last 2.5 years, you have truly made them unforgettable!
Read MoreSo the series I’ve been doing on ESXi has been getting nothing but great feedback, and I’m glad that I can share what I’ve learned over the course of the last couple years with everyone.
On episode 518 of Hak5, we show how truly easy it is to add iSCSI storage to a free deployment of ESXi.
So what is iSCSI?
In computing, iSCSI (pronounced /аɪsˈkʌzi/), is an abbreviation of Internet Small Computer System Interface, an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval. The protocol allows clients (called initiators) to send SCSI commands (CDBs) to SCSI storage devices (targets) on remote servers. It is a popular storage area network (SAN) protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts (such as database and web servers) with the illusion of locally-attached disks. Unlike traditional Fibre Channel, which requires special-purpose cabling, iSCSI can be run over long distances using existing network infrastructure.
In simpler terms, using some free software, it’s stupid easy to create a large amount of storage which is not tied to the physical adapter of the host server (in this case, the server ESXi is running on).
So what do we need?
Now let’s get started. While it’s recommended to separate your iSCSI traffic from your other internet networking, for the purpose of this instruction, we’re just going to use the same IP subnet for all of our LAN and iSCSI traffic.
Our ESXi server sits at 10.10.1.55 and our newly installed FreeNAS server is located at 10.10.1.66
Target name: Add your own or leave the default
Flags: RW for Read/Write or RO for Read Only
Storage: Will have the extents listed that were setup, choose the one you want to use
Authorized Network: Enter the IP network that can access this drive. For us we’re going to enter 10.10.1.0 and we’ll leave the /24 as our subnet is 255.255.255.0
Once you fill in all the info click on Add.
Now we need to setup ESXi to connect to our newly created iSCSI target.
Start by logging into your your host by using the Vitrual Infrastructure Client.
Click on your host, and then click the configuration tab.
Click Storage adapters, and then select your VMHBA32 iSCSI storage adapter.
Click properties and configure, then check the enabled box.
Goto the dynamic discovery tab, and add your FreeNAS IP address (in this case, 10.10.1.66)
Click ok, then close, and then rescan the HBA.
At this point you should see your storage, now we need to format the new storage.
So click back to the storage option on the left.
Then click Add Storage.
Select Disk / Lun, and click next.
Select your new disk on the FreeNAS iSCSI target, and next, next, finish.
DONE!
Questions? Post em in the comments!
Read More© 2013 MattLestock.com | Thoughts from your friendly neighborhood technologist.
