Additional NIC’s installed

During the SAN migration we placed an extra dual port NIC in the servers to make a total of eight Gigabit ports per server so we can build a virtual DMZ on two separate ports from the six ports that we use for the Service Console, VMotion and data center traffic.

It’s not essential to bring a DMZ into your VI this way (I guess you could put it on a VLAN and just make a vSwitch that only does that specific VLAN traffic) but it’s just something where we feel more comfortable having this traffic physically separated. A side effect is that it’s easier to explain to someone with less knowledge about virtualization which helps in certain situations (audits for example).

New host delivery confirmed

I received a short update from our supplier to let us know that the hosts that we ordered in November will be delivered this week. Kudos go to them for securing a replacement DL585 G2 chassis within a matter of days when one of the servers was diagnosed as being DOA (Dead On Arrival). The replacement unit was flown in today from the States so they could still hold their prognosed delivery date.

Because of the holiday season we’ll probably not be able to work on them next week so we’ll kick off the New Year with the completion of our planned cluster. Because the experiences are so good we have also decided to include an expansion of the cluster with another two hosts in next year’s budget as we are expecting our business growth of this year to continue and accelerate next year as well.