Plain Virtualization

Just some sharing that I chanced upon. This might be most useful for those who are building their demo labs when you try to nested environment or simulate your disk as Flash when it is actually magnetic disk (MD). It is also applicable where your Flash Disk/SSD is detected as a normal MD but you need to mark is as Flash disk or revert it when needed. This is typically very true in a Virtual SAN (VSAN) environment.  When you need for a disk group with a minimum of at least one SSD. If you refer to our KB , you might have to go through a list of commands.  However in vSphere 6.0, the web client has the function to do it via the GUI. Below is a screenshot taken from my home lab.  My ESXi server has a normal SATA disk and a SSD disk.  So upon selecting either of them the icon will change to allow you to change it.  Technically you can even build a all Flash VSAN without having to own a VSAN license only different is the read and write ratio remain the same...

With the announcement of vSphere 6.0, comes Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6.0 the next release of VSAN since 5.5. This makes several improvement and I will be listing them here and do note of the differen ces as there are some improvement with changes to existing VSAN 5.5. To start clear, we need to know the terms right.  You will often hear Hybrid VSAN and All-Flash VSAN.  Hybrid is not new.  Since VSAN 5.5, it is always in Hybrid VSAN.  What it means it's a mixed of Flash or Solid State Harddisk (SSD) for cache and Magnetic Disk (MD) for persistent data. What about All-Flash, this is new in VSAN 6.0.  There will be no MD but make of all Flash/SSD for flash and SSD for persistent. source: VMware, Inc In VSAN 5.5, the cache read/write ratio was 70/30.  This is fixed and cannot be changed.  Of course in a VDI environment, this will be less favorable though it is using flash/SDD for cache since only 30% of the cache is used for write cache in a ...

It has been some time since my last post.  Have been really busy however I always make a point to at least do a meaningful post a month.  Since VMworld is also round the corner, there will be many updates from all other bloggers around the world. Recently was doing a Proof of Concept (POC) for Horizon Mirage and was questioned on the time to centralize an end device was too long. Here's what happen: A simple centralize of endpoint took as long as 140mins in one setup and 52mins in another which could not have been shorter since the endpoint is plain OS image about 40GB in size. Setup 1 First setup that took 140mins where the Horizon Mirage Server is a VM on a standalone ESXi server with local disk with two 500GB 7.2RPM SATA disks extended into one datastore. Setup 2 The Horizon Mirage server was installed on a physical server with 500GB 7.2RPM SATA Disks on Raid 1.  This took 52mins. Separately, my colleague did a test as well in our office network which...