Plain Virtualization

Having working as a presales consultant, I have realize as virtualization gets more complex, more and more people are confused with the basic fundamental and have forgotten and felt uncertain.  Certain test are also perform wrongly or understand incorrectly. Here is a short video to demonstrate this on how VMware High Availability (HA) test is conducted and configured as stated in this KB .  Do note that only vSphere 5.x methods are shown in this video. Many I have spoken with is still unclear how HA really works.  You can refer to Duncan Epping's post here on more deep dive of HA. HA is enabled from vCenter with just a simple checked box.  Once that is enabled, the ESX servers will have a HA agent (FDM) running and this will communicate within the ESX servers in the cluster and with one of them as the Master role communicating with vCenter.  In vSphere 5.0, in the new HA architecture, there will be one Master node and rest as salves nodes. In vSphe...

Many have asked me whether if a cluster can be mixed with different versions of ESX/ESXi servers.  The answer is yes even down to ESX/ESXi 3.5, however for version 3.5, you would need to cater the legacy license server.  Please refer to the documentation here . Here is a demo of a setup I did with ESX 4.1 and ESXi 5.0 in the same cluster with HA and DRS enabled managed using a vCenter 5.0. Please note that upgrading VMware Tools to the latest version will still be supported on lower version of ESX/ESXi servers as it only update the OS drivers.  However, upgrading the virtual hardware will only allow it to be supported on the latest ESXi server. In such, that in consideration when doing your migration and upgrading of your vSphere environment and perform the virtual hardware upgrade last if possible unless you have enough resources to cater for your HA. Update 19th Apr 2013 Refresh the video as first half has missing audio.

I was doing my VCP5 studies and was reading the Installation and Setup Guide and came across the below on Page 62. The boot process proceeds as follows. 1 The administrator reboots the host. 2 As the host boots up, Auto Deploy provisions the host with its image and host profile, which are stored in vCenter Server. 3 Virtual machines are brought up or migrated to the host based on the settings of the host. n Standalone host. Virtual machines are powered on according to autostart rules defined on the host. n DRS cluster host. Virtual machines that were successfully migrated to other hosts stay there. Virtual machines for which no host had enough resources are registered to the rebooted host. If the vCenter Server system is unavailable, the host contacts the Auto Deploy server for image profiles and host profiles and the host reboots. However, Auto Deploy cannot set up vSphere distributed switches if vCenter Server is unavailable, and virtual machines are assigned to hosts only if they ...

I have got the chance to play with vSphere 5 RTM release and rather than going through all the new features that can be found on VMware TV in youTube, I shall find some common features that are on both release and see the differences. HA Admission Control Policy vSphere 4 The Admission Control Policy for vSphere 4 as shown on the left in the percentage of cluster resources is fixed and irregardless of CPU or Memory the percentage is applied for both. vSphere 5 In vSphere 5, notice that the percentage has be split out to memory and CPU. This updated percentage options, helps eliminate when you have like to specific different amount for CPU and memory with different tolerance. Virtual Machines Options vSphere 4 In the Virtual Machine Options, in was leave VM shutdown as the default value whenever Host Isolation is detected. Many of my customers actually thought this was the default value recommended by VMware and leave it as it is howeve...