Evan M.'s questions

We're getting some intriguing performance with our new FCoE environment, and I was hoping that people could let me know if what we're seeing is expected behaviour.

Our switching environment consists of 2 x Cisco Nexus 5672 switches, each having a Nexus 2348 UPQ FEX hanging off of them, single homed. On the FEX's, we have our ESX hosts (Dell R630) with Emulex CNAs in them. Our SAN is an EMC VNX 5300 that has a 10g FCoE card in it.

Regardless of whether the SAN is connected to the 2348 or 5672, write performance from VMs on the ESX hosts remains constant. However, read performance changes dramatically. When the SAN is connected to the 5672's, our average response times for 4k reads is around 0.25ms. However, connecting the SAN to the 2348 instead causes read response times to jump up to ~2.5ms. Looking at the stats in ESXTOP, all the additional response time is coming from the QAVG.

I understand that the FEX doesn't have local switching, thus requiring all packets to flow through the 5672 switches, but this additional 2ms of latency seems exceptionally high (especially considering I can ping between servers in < 0.02ms). All the reference architectures I've seen have the SAN / SAN switching fabric connected directly to the "core" Nexus switches, but no where have I read any reason why. I'm not opposed to connecting the SAN that way, I just want to understand why.

Long story short: Is this performance gap normal?

I've got 4 Cisco UCS C210 M2 servers, each with a Broadcom NetXtreame II BCM5709 Quad-port adapter in it. They are all running vSphere 5.1 U1.

On one the servers, the Broadcom ports show up as both vmnics, as well as iSCSI HBAs. On the other 3, I only see the vmnics lists.

Anyone have a clue why they may be missing from the other servers, or how to turn it off on the first server? Don't really have a need to use the hardware offload functions, have been using the software iSCSI adapter without issue.

Thanks.

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing issue?

Here's my situation: I have 1 VM that is running SharePoint 2010 SP1. I have a different physical server that is running SQL Server 2008 R2 that hosts all the configuration and content database for SharePoint.

Now, we want to start providing BI capabilities to our users with SharePoint and SQL Server. With it's new features, 2012 is the obvious way to go. To support this, I'm looking to build a new VM that will have SQL Server 2012 installed w/ Analysis services and SSIS, which will be the platform that gets our data from our Oracle databases, puts it in a warehouse hosted by the SQL 2012 instance, and is put into cubes.

What's getting me about the platform is licensing for Reporting Services and PowerPivot. My plan was to install SSRS and PowerPivot on the current SharePoint server. But my understanding of the licensing means that instead of the new SQL server being licensed, I'd have to license both new server, and the SharePoint server. Conversely, I could install SharePoint onto the SQL server, and only have to get a second SP license, but then I'd have the added complexity of deploying a separated application server, and combines my data and application servers.

Is my licensing understanding correct, or can I have SSRS and PowerPivot installed separately without incurring additional licensing costs?

I know it's not supported, and won't be officially supported, but has anyone had success getting a Windows Server 2012 VM running on a vSphere 4.1 box?

Thanks for the help.

Is it possible to create a PowerShell script that will go into a mailbox (specifically for a meeting room), find all it's meeting requests and accept them?

We've implemented a new mechanism in our exchange environment so that requests sent to meeting rooms will be auto-accepted if the room is available, but there are a lot of old requests (especially recurring meetings) that were sent before this change that are marked as tentative. This is a problem because when a new request is sent for a time that is marked as tentative, it will accept the request, which is leading to some conflicts.

So I'm having some really weird problems with SharePoint 2010 and viewing document libraries in Windows Explorer with WebDAV.

I've got two separate farms setup, one for dev/testing and the other for production. On my dev/testing farm, explorer view works fine. Click the button and it opens up nicely. I can also map drive letters to the document library.

However, it doesn't work with my production farm. Trying to open explorer view from an XP client, I get an error message saying "\\ is not accessible. blah blah. Logon Failure: The target account name is incorrect" As far as I can tell, they are configured identically. The only major difference is the two servers are hosted in different data centers.

Anyone have any hints as to how I can go about troubleshooting this?

I'm looking for a simple virtual appliance that I can deploy to my ESX environment to use as a virtual NAT router / firewall to create an isolated network that I can easily give internet access too.

Basic setup: ESX Host, has 2 vswitches configured: 1 is connected to the physical LAN, the other is isolated. I need an appliance that I can add 2 vNICs to, and attach one to the isolated vSwitch, the other to the LAN, to give the isolated network outbound access (so it can reach the internet).

Anyone have an appliance that I can setup quickly to do so?

Thanks.

We're currently in the process of re-evaluating our server backup process. Currently we're using Backup Exec 11d to backup all our server as though they are all physical servers, performing Full/incremental jobs directly to our Adic Faststor 2 Autoloader.

What we're looking at is upgrading to Backup Exec 12.5, and moving to a backup-to-disk-to-tape solution where we have an online copy of the data on disk, and offload to tape at the end of the month for off-site storage.

As part of this, we want to virtualize our backup server. Using an iSCSI target as the location for our online backup is easy enough, but I'm having trouble getting info about iSCSI solutions for the tape offload. As a way to try and keep costs down, I was curious if we'd be able to use a SCSI-to-iSCSI bridge to convert our existing tape autoloader until a later date when we can get additional budget. i.e. Would something like this (http://www.quantum.com/Products/Connectivity/Index.aspx) work for us?

Has anyone else tried to use a bridge in this type of scenario?

We're looking at deploying SharePoint within our company, and there's one question that I haven't been able to find any advice on. The enterprise is currently setup with a single root domain that is essentially empty, and several child domains for each of our major locations.

Our SharePoint deployment will only consist of a single SP server for the enterprise as the initial usage will be kept relatively small. A separate SQL Server used for the database.

What I haven't been able to figure out is what domain should the server be setup in? Does it matter? What about all the various service accounts? Do they need to be in the same domain as the server?

Thanks