Kenon Ewing

VTL
THe storage team has been evaluating the EMC EDL Virtual Tape Library solution for a little over a month. It has seemed to fill the void ITS has been expericencing in the backup environment for the past few years. The EDL will give us growth capacity for one year, which allows us to begin to take on new backup clients. The EDL also speeds up read operations, so we can do multiple cloning sessions much faster than previous technologies would allow. We also increased the throughput with the EDL because we went from 12 target devices to 96 target devices which allows ITS to do more work in the same amount of time.

Backup Reporting
ITS is developing tools to allow us to get better information on the data we are backing up. For example, there are numerous backup clients with databases. The databases running cannot be backup up live without networker modules. Thus clinets without the networker module do not need to have thier hot databases backed up as theses will be corrupt upon restore. This application provides this granular visibaility, as well as additional data such as largest backup client, largest files, and the prevalent extension types.

Virtual Desktop
ITS has made big strides of improvement in our Virtual Desktop project. We have successfully configured pools to allow the automatic creation of windows XP VM’s and joining them to the domain. THe team is now looking into the phase 2 and phase 3 implementations of this project which will starts to reveals the cost savings capabilities of a service such as this. We are looking into a “one-to-many” configuration which means that we are only using one actual virtual machine stored on disk, that no user accesses (this is our golden image we use to create the VM’s for virtual desktop). THe next steps to achieve this goal is to create 8K snapshots of the golden image, therefore every copy of the golden image only uses 8K of additional disk space for overhead. Since these are snapshots and will get destroyed with some frequency, we do not encourage users to store data on the virtual machine. Instead we are looking into “roaming profiles” at an OU level, that would allow user settings to move with the user, but limited to the current organizational unit in active directory. Once we get this configuration we will look into phase 3 which is on demand application streaming. This allows us to install / manage software independently of the virtual machine itself. When users need an application on the application streaming server, it will be delivered to the VM on demand.

VTL
We have been evaluating the EMC EDL Virtual Tape Library Solution for two weeks now. It has been performing well, and has increased our ability to clone savesets as reads from disk are significantly faster than reads from tape. We did have some configurations difficulties as our Legato Networker client and media pool configurations would not work for restores as clients believed that they could restore from any storage node rather than only being able to restore from the storage node that backed up that client. SO essentially configured our clients to ensure that they would backup to a specific storage node and that storage node would be the only location to try to restore from.

We did have a significant fail over test due to a GBIC that went bad on our Cisco 6509 SAN switch. This caused an engine to fail within the VTL. The failover was not handled well at all, and after EMC investigated realized that our EDL configuration was incorrect for fail over. We have since corrected the mis-configuration and are set to test fail over again.

Training
I had a training session with EMC for Clariion management. We learned about provisioning raid group and luns in the Navisphere management GUI. I am now complete with 80% of the mandatory training needed for my new position within ITS. I am quickly getting ramped up in this role and now I am very confident in my capabilities within this role. I have Navisphere Analyzer performance class, NAS operations with the Celerra class, and finally SNIA to finish off the required training.

VDT
I have been assisting with the Virtual Desktop project which has made significant progress in the last two weeks. We have successfully configured our VDI implementation to auto provision VM’s so the administrators will not have to perform multiple manual tasks to entitle a new user for a Virtual Desktop. The process has been isolated down to adding users to an group in Active Directory. We also have successfully tested a “direct connect” configuration where clients use the Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol to connect directly to the VM as opposed to using a SSL tunnel over HTTPS. However, SSL tunneling looks to be a supoerior solution from a security and performance stand point. I also did some research and got information about a one-to-many implementation which could be very beneficial to the University.

Dashboard Scripting
We have been working on automating our monthly dashboard report to minimize the amount of time spent gathering data for reports. This will allow the data to be programatically gathered, and we can spend more time on the presentation of the data. It also makes it easier for us to expand our reporting capabilities in the future.