Setting Up Multi-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5.5

Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance ↗: Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 ↗ and has improved in v5.5 - so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because that’s what VMWare wants us to do nowadays…). I don’t have an Enterprise Plus license so no Distributed Switches for me - however, if you do have Distributed Switching licenses you should be able to extrapolate from my Standard Switching how to config yours...

June 7, 2014 Myles Gray

Using NginX as a load-balancer for VMware Horizon View security servers

Introduction I have been deploying a VDI solution recently based on the fantastic VMWare Horizon Suite ↗, one of the important points of deploying the Horizon View ↗ component of this is making it highly available and accessible from the outside for on-the-road users. The best way I have found to load-balance incoming connections (both internally and externally) is to set up a linux VM and run NginX ↗, which is a reverse caching proxy - it allows us to terminate the SSL connections and load-balance across our backend View Security Servers in a DMZ....

April 7, 2014 Myles Gray

Enabling disk logging on a FortiGate

Fortigate’s logging typically isn’t the best - but it’s bad when you have no logs at all, which seems to be the default. To enable logging on fortigate models with an internal SSD/HDD use the following command: config log disk setting set status enable You can now collect and view your logs in the Log & Report section. N.B. As of FortiOS 5.2 this has been disabled on all SMB class (100D and below) units....

December 2, 2013 Myles Gray

Teaming ReadyNAS Ultra NICs

Introduction Netgear for some reason believe that ReadyNAS models that aren’t the “Pro” line don’t require network teaming across both their ethernet ports, so you have 2 network ports on your NAS, you’ve got your jumbo frames on and you want to configure load balancing/failover via the 2 interfaces. Of course the ReadyNAS is based on Debian linux, you could SSH into the box and use /etc/network/interfaces to configure a networking bond using: mode=balance-rr or using aggregated link spec 802....

September 12, 2013 Myles Gray

Change MTU to support Jumbo Frames in FortiOS

This info is quite hard to come across and Fortigate don’t have it in their GUI from FortiOS v5.0+, SSH into your Fortigate’s CLI and enter the following (it can be done on both software aggregated and standard interfaces): config system interface edit [interfacename] set mtu-override enable set mtu 9208 end end Confirm your MTU size change has worked on the given interface by plugging directly into it (test MTU in accordance to my guide here)....

September 9, 2013 Myles Gray

How to test if 9000 MTU/Jumbo Frames are working

Introduction Fairly straight forward this time, you’ve configured your MTU/jumbo frames to be 9000 on your client and destination devices (say a laptop/desktop/server/san/nas) and on ALL your switching devices in between - you’ve done that right? ;) Testing So the next step is, we want to test if our new 9000 byte MTU is actually working and we can reap the benefits of a larger packet size (whether it’s on iSCSI, LAN, whatever) being of course a higher latency but also higher throughput....

September 9, 2013 Myles Gray