Archive for January, 2010

EMC, Uncategorized | 1 Comment | January 31st, 2010

Nominal capacity vs. Formated capacity

Nominal capacity, also know as the "advertised" capacity, is based on the standard base 10 numbers instead of the base 2 mathematics that disk drives use.  In bae 10 one Megabyte equals one million bytes while one Gigabyte equals one billion bytes. This isn't too much of a problem with small numbers such as a Kilobyte, but each level of increase in the prefix also increased the total discrepancy of the actual capacity compared to the nominal capacity.

Check out the table below which has some rough estimates of the formatted capacity of standard disk drives. 

Nominal Capacity Formatted Capacity
(520 bytes/sector, 1MB=1,048,576bytes)		 Rotational Speed Interface
73 GB 4 Gb/s  72.67 GB N/A—Solid State FibreChannel
400 GB 4 Gb/s 372.5 GB N/A—Solid State FibreChannel
146 GB 4 Gb/s 135 GB 15,000 rpm FibreChannel
200 GB 4 Gb/s 186.31GB N/A—Solid State FibreChannel
300 GB 4 Gb/s 272 GB 15,000 rpm FibreChannel
450 GB 4 Gb/s 408 GB 10,000 rpm FibreChannel
450 GB 4G FC 409 GB 15,000 rpm FibreChannel
600 GB 4 Gb/s 545 GB 10,000 rpm FibreChannel
600 GB 4G FC 545 GB 15,000 rpm FibreChannel
1 TB 4 Gb/s 932 GB 7,200rpm SATA
1 TB 4 Gb/s
Low Power		 932 GB 5,400 rpm SATA
2 TB 4 Gb/s
Low Power		 1,852 GB 5,400 rpm SATA 

VMware | 1 Comment | January 28th, 2010

List of ports used by VMware vCenter 4.0.x

  List of ports used by VMware vCenter 4.0.x:

 

Port
Description
80
vCenter Server requires port 80 for direct HTTP connections.
 
 
 
Port 80 redirects requests to HTTPS port 443. This is useful if you accidentally use http://serverinstead of https://server.
389
This is the LDAP port number for the Directory Services for the vCenter Server Group. This port must be open on the local instance and all remote instances of vCenter Server. The vCenter Server system needs to bind to port 389 even if you are not joining this vCenter Server instance to a Linked Mode group.
 
 
 
If another service is running on this port, you may want to remove it or install vCenter Server on a machine where port 389 is available. However, you can run the LDAP service on any port from 1025 through 65535 if necessary.
443
The default port that the vCenter Server system uses to listen for connections from the vSphere Client. Open port 443 in the firewall to enable the vCenter Server system to receive data from the vSphere Client.
 
 
 
The vCenter Server system also uses port 443 to listen for data transfer from the vSphere Web Access Client and other SDK clients. If you use another port number for HTTPS, you must use this format: <ip-address><port> when you log into the vCenter Server system.
636
This is the SSL port of the local instance for vCenter Linked Mode.
 
 
 
If another service is running on this port, you may want to remove it or install vCenter Server on a machine where port 636 is available. However, you can run the SSL service on any port from 1025 through 65535.
902
The default port that the vCenter Server system uses to send data to managed hosts. Managed hosts also send a regular heartbeat over UDP port 902 to the vCenter Server system.
 
 
 
This port must not be blocked by firewalls between the server and the hosts or between hosts.
902/903
Ports 902 and 903 must not be blocked between the vSphere Client and the hosts. These ports are used by the vSphere Client to display virtual machine consoles.
8080
Web Services HTTP
8443
Web Services HTTPS

VMware | No Comments | January 26th, 2010

VMware vSphere processor licensing

We get aksed alot about VMware's licensing in terms of processors vs. cores vs. sockets. Hopefully this short article will clear it up.

VMware vSphere is licensed based on the number of processors on the physical host.

Each processor in a socket may contain multiple cores. VMware customers may deploy VMware vSphere on physical processors that contain up to six processing cores at no additional charge.

VMware vSphere Advanced and VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus editions provide an expanded core entitlement and allow customers to deploy on processors that contain up to 12 processing cores.

Additional information may be found at http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html