mbraling in ESX Host Utilities 5.1

First of all, I'd like to apologize since I haven't posted in over a month but it's been a pretty tough couple of months for me and my family.

My mother was diagnosed with NHL lymphoma on April 18 and then within 30 days, she passed away. Very rapid and shocking developments that forced me to fly back and forth some 8,000 miles away. What makes it even harder was the fact that she was only 69 years old. 

On a happier note, over the past 4-5 mos I've gotten more that 40 requests from partners and customers asking for access to the mbralign utility. For those who don't know what it does, you may want to take a look at  this post.

As of May 21, 2009, NetApp released a new version of the ESX Host Utilities (HUK), 5.1, which now contains both the mbrscan and mbraling utilities. Both utilities are now fully supported by NetApp and documentation is provided as part of the ESX HUK 5.1 Install and Configuration Guide available in the Download section of the Now Site

New Additions to the HUK

Support for vSphere.

Support for role-based access control (RBAC) user names so that root access to storage controllers is not required.

The mbralign program that fixes misaligned VMDK partitions.

New timeout values added to config_hba to support software iSCSI initiators using 10 Gb Ethernet. 

Updated SNIA API libraries for Emulex and QLogic adapters.

An -expert option for the Host Utilities install command that installs the Host Utilities components but does not set timeouts or paths.

 

Technorati Tags: NetApp Host Utilities,VMware VDI,vSphere

Comments

[Aaron Delp]

Hey Nick - I have been playing around with the 5.1 tools for an article I'm going to write for Scott Lowe's site. I was wondering a few things.

1. Windows Dynamic disks aren't supported. I did a couple in our lab and they seemed to work OK. Can you elaborate on why they aren't supported?

2. I know you can not have a VMWare Snapshot in place for an align, what are the ramifications if you take a manual NetApp snapshot before you perform the align. Is this recommended and/or necessary? Since we now have the backup files I doubt it but I wanted to get your take. Thank you!

[Aaron Delp]

Scratch my first comment - The disk will convert fine, but Windows will show it offline and I wasn't able to reactivate it. Yikes! Glad I tested it!

[Nick Triantos]

Ok I will scratch it. :-)

I'd suggest you take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_disk
Couple of interesting findings:

1. Dynamic disks do have an MBR. In general terms, this is a "protective
MBR", one of the main purposes of which is to tell legacy partition tools to leave it alone. I don't know if the starting offset is really meaningful though.

2. The LDM metadata is stored at the end of the disk, in the last megabyte.

There's a Microsoft Technet article linked from Wikipedia that's interesting, and may provide the information needed to examine Dyanmic Disks better.

2) There's no harm in taking a NetApp snapshot prior to doing the alignment as an extra precaution, although as you may noticed, mbralign, prior to performing any operation, makes a backup copy of the *-flat.vmdk file.

[Aaron Delp]

Nick - Great information! Thank you! So, is there no way to fix a dynamic disk? We have a customer who has a bunch of D:'s and they are all dynamic. They also have a few LVM's. mbrscan shows them as not aligned.

Thanks!

[Nick Triantos]

Frankly, I don't know if there's a way to accomplish this with Dynamic Disks and I don't know of any tools that currently support this functionality today.

mbralign will not work on LVM type partitions. There's a list of enhancements for mbralign, i'm not sure if this is one of them, however, I just made it one in any case.

[Aaron Delp]

Thank you again Nick! I left a message over on the Communities site and Eric has responded. It looks like you may be able to align Windows Dynamic disks with vOptimizerPro but that may be the only way.

Thanks again!

[Jack Lyons]

I don't use dynamic disks often, but can't you create a new vmdk use diskpart to align it and then convert it to dynamic and move the data over?