Indonesian Greeting on Voyager Golden Record

In September 5th 1977, NASA launched space probe named Voyager 1. The mission to observed our solar systems and beyond. It's still traveled with speed of 62.140 km/h and going untill unpowered its self. They'd been sent an Indonesian Greeting male voice as follow, snap in to Golden Record on Voyager 1. it's currently travel to interstellar beyond our solar system and became the farthest an Indonesian male voice ever been sent by human

How to access ESXi 5.1 console

When switching from ESX to ESXi one of the bigger downsides is the lack of the Service Console (Tech Support Mode). There is however a basic commandline option on the console which you can use for troubleshooting. Of course, for accessing this commandline you need either physical access to the host, or access to the host through a remote access card. We use IBM xSeries, so a IMM (Integrated Management Module) is what we'll use for this. First just access the console and unlock it by pressing F2 and provinding the root credentials. Then use the keyboard to access the menu item “Troubleshooting Mode Options”. Here you can do all sort of things, but now we need to enable the ESXi Shell by selecting the option and pressing ENTER. When done you'll see a notice on the right side telling you the shell is enabled:

Then to access the shell you'll need to press ALT+F1 at the same time. Now that might be hard using an IMM so use the menu option to send the key combination to the server:

Now you'll see a login prompt where you can enter the root credentials again, and then issue, for example, a command to add a route to a specific host:

For reference, this is the command example so you can copy it:

esxcfg-route -a 192.168.100.0/24 192.168.0.1
esxcfg-route -a 192.168.100.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1

Special for those who hunger of IOPs

the Fastest in-production shipping SSDs - September 2013 - © STORAGEsearch.com
form factor	rackmount SSDs Earlier versions of this document only listed the single fastest rackmount SSD in each u-size (1U, 2U etc) - but there were some disadvantages in that method because the listings were dominated by RAM SSDs - even though flash SSDs represented the realistic choices made by most users. To make this rackmount SSD list more useful I've changed this section to include the top 3 or so companies in each market/ application silo. You'll have to look at each vendor's own offerings to get the exact specifications - but these are the vendors who are positioning themselves as the companies to beat in each of these market segments. ultrafast rackmount SSDs (RAM SSDs):- Kove, Texas Memory Systems and Kaminario. fast rackmount SSDs (fastest flash):- Texas Memory Systems, Violin, Nimbus, WhipTail fast-enough rackmount SSDs (budget priced):- Skyera, SolidFire, and Pure Storage - as well as all the companies in the "fast" category above. Speed has a different value in fault tolerant rackmount SSDs - where the raw latency and IOPS may be outweighed by user preferences about the exact design and consequences of the differing FT architectures.
PCIe SSD cards	See also:- the article - the 3 fastest PCIe SSDs list - or is it really lists? And here's another thing you may be wondering about - how will Memory Channel SSDs affect the PCIe SSD market?
	Fusion-io	ioDrive Octal double-width card	PCIe	1 million IOPS 6.2 GB/s of bandwidth.
	Virident Systems	FlashMAX 1/2 height, 1/2 length	PCIe	160K IOPS (4KB), 75/25 R/W, 1.6GB/s sustained write, 47us READ latency, 1.5 million read IOPS (512B)
	Texas Memory Systems	RamSan-70 single slot card	PCIe	600K / 250K R/W IOPS, R/W throughput - 2GB/s and 1.4GB/s respectively, latency 30 µs
	OCZ	Z-Drive R4 - full height	PCIe	2.8GB/s R/W throughput - 410K / 275K R/W IOPS
	The specs below - for 3.5" SAS drives are performance indicators for the older 6Gbps products
3.5"	STEC	ZeusRAM SSD	SAS 6Gbps	under 23 microseconds average latency
	STEC	ZeusIOPS	SAS 6Gbps	80,000 IOPS random read, 40,000 IOPS random write with transfer speeds of 550MB/s read and 300MB/s write.
2.5"	In the 2.5" form factor - the 2 competing interfaces with claims for the "dastest 2.5 inch SSD" will be the 2.5" PCIe and 12Gbps SAS. However, in the current state of the market - the very small number of 2.5" PCIe SSDs don't have impressive write performance - and are mostly pitched at read intensive applications.
	Samsung	XS1715	2.5" PCIe	3GB/s read, 740,000 read IOPS
	HGST	Ultrastar	SAS 12Gbps	1.2GB/s read, 750MB/s write, and R/W IOPS of 145,000 and 100,000 respectively
	SMART	Optimus	SAS 6Gbps	100K/50K random IOPS and 500MB/s sustained R/W transfer rates
	OCZ	Vertex 4	SATA 3	95K / 85K random IOPS (4K blocks) and 535 MB/s throughput.
1.8"	SMART	Optimus	SAS 6Gbps	R/W speeds of 500 MB/s. IOPS is 45,000 for read, and 100,000 for write.
1"	This form factor includes a diverse range of SSDs on a chip and modules which aren't all plug compatible. For indicative performances see the tiny SSDs page.		SATA
USB	Renice Technology			R/W speeds of 400MB/s and 320MB/s respectively.

.

PCIe SSDs

PCIe SSDs for use in enterprise server acceleration have been shipping in the market since 2007.

Over 40 companies already ship enterprise accelerator PCIe SSDs. That will rise to over 100 companies as the availability of more PCIe supporting SSD controller chips, other SSD related chip sets and IP and SSD software for this market will make it even easier than it already is for newcomers to enter the PCIe SSDs market.

PCIe SSDs come in several shapes and sizes. The most familiar form factor is cards, modules and racks. But a new form factor - for 2.5" PCIe SSDs which emerged last year will open up new applications - such as displacement of fast SAS SSDs.

In the 2nd half of 2013 - the start of another type of deployment for the PCIe interface in the M.2 form factor which is aimed at the consumer SSD market and SSD notebooks. These consumer products have throughputs similar to the enterprise products of 5-6 years earlier - but aren't rated for heavy IOPS. Nevertheless It wouldn't be surprised to see them appear as enterprise components in some future arrays in read-intensive design slots.
.....


(still) the standard for enterprise PCIe SSDs
by which all others are judged
ioDrives from Fusion-io

Best Practices for SQL Server

Introduction

At VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas several of us in our virtual performance  team met with a variety of customers to talk about Microsoft SQL Server.  We already had a large base of customers running very many SQL Server  DBs on our products and we wanted to collect information on the  challenges posed in the process of virtualizing this critical workload.  We were pleased to see that ESX Server handled SQL VMs with excellent  performance. But, for many customers, the first efforts at virtualizing  SQL didn't yield high-performing SQL VM.  After careful investigation  and many, many discussions we've started to put together the puzzle as  to where SQL Server performance problems come from.  This page will  document these common problems, borrowing slides from our presentations  on the subject.

Virtualizing SQL: The Checklist

We've talked with dozens of customers in the past months to document the  issues that resulted in poor SQL performance. Happily, none of the  issues were due to underlying technologies. Here is a list of issues and  an explanation of the impacts. These items are roughly listed in the  order of decreasing likelihood of occurrence.

Item 1: Configure Storage Correctly

Storage configuration problems are the number one cause of SQL  performance issues.  Usually these problems arise because the DBA  requests a virtual disk of the VI admin, the VI admin places the VMDK on  a LUN that may or may not meet the DBA's performance needs.  For  instance:

1. VMs' VMDK files placed on VMFS volumes without enough spindles.
2. Many VMDK files placed on a single VMFS volume which could use more spindles.
3. Database and log files placed on the same LUN which, you guessed it, could use more spindles.

This may be obvious to some, but this problem occurs again and again.   The VI administrator should be aware of a few technical items that can  help understand and avoid this problem:

1. Based on the IO demands of the DB files, a certain number of  spindles should be guaranteed to this file.  This means that its VMDK  must be placed on a VMFS volume to accout for the SQL Server's demands  and all of the other demands on that volume.
2. Mixing sequential activity (such as log file update) and random  activity (such as database access) results in random behavior.  This  means that the LUN configuration in the pre-virtual physical environment  may not be sufficient for the consolidated environment.  This is  discussed some in Storage Performance: VMFS and Protocols.
3. When storage isn't meeting the SQL Server's demands, the device  latency or kernel latency (queueing time) will increase.  Read up on  these counters in Storage Performance Analysis and Monitoring.

Item 2: Use Recent Hardware

Often companies that are dipping their metaphorical toes into
virtualization want to run proof-of-concept (POC) experiments to verify
that the virtual platform can meet their performance expectations. But
its surprising how many times these experiments are run on older,
poorly-performing hardware. Presumably the shiny, new systems were in
use for production applications so only the mothballed, cobweb-covered
servers from a previous generation were available for the POC. This
causes many problems.  Check out this slide from a talk on SQL Server at VMworld Europe 2009:

The slide points out a couple of things. First, the larger caches and  shorter pipelines on newer Intel processors results in a considerable  drops in performance overheads.  Second, the latency of the VMEXIT  instruction, which determines the amount of time it takes to transition  from the VM to the VMkernel, has shrunk by a large amount with  subsequent generations of hardware.  And don't forget the other  additions from Intel and AMD such as hardware assisted memory management  and IO virtualization.

Item 3: Follow SQL Server Best Practices

Microsoft has kindly provided a web page of best practices for SQL Storage configuration. These be practices should still be followed when configuring your virtual SQL deployments!

Item 4: Configure VM Identically to Native and Run The Right Test

For many SQL Server POCs the goal is to measure the VM's ability to  perform, with respect to the virtual platform. If this comparison is to  be performed, its critical that the VM be configured identically to the  physical hardware. Obviously this means that the VM should be run on the  same hardware using identically configured LUNs. Its also important to  ensure that the VM has the same number of vCPUs and amount of memory as  the physical baseline. This means restricting the number of pCPUs and  amount of memory with NUMPROC and MAXMEM, respectively, in boot.ini.

It also means that the test being applied should be understood.  If a  benchmark is chosen that uses a very small database, the content will be  cached and the storage system won't be used.  This can skew the results  and produce recommendations not consistent with production deployments.   Here is another slide from the same VMworld Europe 2009 presentation  detailing some of what we know about the SQL Server benchmarking  alternatives:

We at VMware prefer DVD Store.

Item 5: Use VMware's ESX Server

VMware's hosting products, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, and even  VMware Fusion, are all capable of running SQL Server. But if the  database is going to be run in production on enterprise-class hardware,  use VMware's enterprise-class hypervisor: ESX Server.  These products  are not often confused by the initiated but rogue members of large  companies often run off-the-books proof-of-concept experiments on  VMware's hosted products.  When they produce results they don't like,  the results get spread throughout the company which can slow the virtual  deployment.
Consider the following data, again from the VMworld Europe 2009 SQL Server presentation:

This information is getting a bit dated now, as it was performed years  ago on ESX Server 3.0.  But the point stands: before believing results  claiming that "VMware cannot run SQL Server" its worth investigating the  platform used to generate the results.

Item 6: Understand Memory Management and Configure Correctly

Database performance is heavily dependent on the amount of memory  available. Almost without exception, providing more memory to SQL Server  will improve performance. However, if that memory is coming from a host  that is already over-committed or is being provided through workarounds  to 32-bit limitations, performance may suffer. Here are a few keys for  SQL Server memory management:

1. If more than 3 GB is desired, use 64-bit versions of the OS and application.
2. If memory is over-committed on the box, set reservations for  performance-critical SQL Server VMs to guarantee that those VMs' memory  isn't ballooned or swapped out.
3. If SQL Server's "lock pages in memory" parameter has been set,  provide set the VM's reservations to the amount of memory in the VM.  This setting can adversely interfere with ESX Server's balloon driver.  Setting reservations will stop the balloon driver from inflating into  the VM's memory space.

Item 7: Align Disk Partitions

This item is really a special but very important case of item two,  follow best practices. Partition alignment can impact storage  performance which can be critical to some SQL Server VMs' performance.  See VMware's paper on partition alignment for more information on this.

Free tools for VMware

1. Veeam Backup & Recovery 6.5 free edition
2. UniTrends Enterprise Backup Free Edition (Protect 4 VMs For Free) or Unitrends NFR Edition (2 sockets and 2 application-enabled servers FREE)
3. Trilead VM Explorer Free VMware & Hyper-V backup (max 2 hosts)
4. NexentaStor Community Edition Free 18Tb ZFS Virtual Storage Appliance
5. VM Aware Database Performance
6. vSphere Plugin Wizard 2.0
7. VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) is a fully configured and ready to run virtual appliance that is required to manage your datacenter from mobile devices.
8. VMware Boomerang is a radically simple client application that allows you to use multiple vSphere servers simultaneously
9. VMware Guest Console (VGC)
10. Cloud Cleaner
11. Solarwinds VM to Could Calculator
12. Onyx proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. Monitors the network communication between the two and translates it into an executable PowerShell code.
13. vCenter XVP Manager and Converter
14. Veeam ONE Free Edition 24×7 real-time monitoring
15. RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts
16. VMTurbo Real-time monitoring and a library of 32 pre-defined historical reports
17. vAlarm Free Desktop Tool for Monitoring vCenter Alarms
18. vSphere 4 Client RDP Plug-in
19. Xangati for vSphere VMware visibility and troubleshooting tool!
20. vOPS™ Server Explorer
21. Powergui Graphical User Interface & Script Editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell
22. vGhetto Script Repository
23. UBERAlign free alignment of Virtual Machine disks (Nickapedia)
24. Thinware vBackup
25. PCoIP Log Viewer 2.0
26. Quest Workspace Assessment Tool
27. ESXi 5.0 / ESXi 5.1 Host Backup & Restore GUI Utility (PowerCLI based)

Unboxed voters Winner by VMware

Thanks to VMware that has chosen me as the winner of Unboxed voters.