VMware VSA and Local Storage - RAID configuration

When deploying and configuring VMware Virtual Storage Appliance you have to make a decision about built-in RAID layout at the physical ESXi hosts which will be later part of the VSA cluster. VMware supports up to three hosts in the VSA cluster and it is very important to keep the same storage configuration on all of them.

All steps required to install VSA can be found in the official installation docs:
VSA Installation Guide

At the Page 27 you will find details about HP servers and two important recommendations:

• Create a RAID logical volume that uses ALL physical disks on a server.
• VMware recommends that you use RAID5 for SAS drives and RAID6 for SATA drives.

The funny thing is that the VMware still uses configuration steps for HP iLO v.2 which is outdated for at least 2 years. Worth mentioning that all HP Gen. 7 servers were shipped with iLO v.3 and HP Gen. 8 boxes with iLO v.4 where Local RAID Configuration process looks completely different.

Difference between IPoIB and Native Infiniband

Great, short and "straight to the point" explanation of the main differences between Native Infiniband and IPoIB protocol:

• http://stackoverflow.com/a/6079696

For some detailed resources you should definitely check(you wouldn't be surprised that two of the top three Google results are here,would you...??):

• Ali Ayoub's presentation: click me
• IPoIB Linux Implementation: click me

BPDU Filter in vSphere 5.1 explained

Very good article about BPDU Filter was posted at the VMware vSphere Networking blog.
It explains configuration and some use case scenarios:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/vsphere-5-1-vds-new-features-bpdu-filter.html

Have you ever faced Denial of Service caused by Spanning Tree Protocol(STP)...??
The KB posted in that article can help you to understand why it happens and how to avoid it:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2017193