Plain Virtualization

If you have not heard of Dell VxRaill appliance, you might just want to check it out. Just giving a short summary, this is a purposeful engineered appliance between Dell and VMware. Optimized to run vSphere, and vSAN which is VMware hypervisor and HCI solution. It comes with its own lifecycle management deeply integrated with VMware vCenter Server for lifecycle management as well. Such a beast of all appliance definitely comes with some design and best practices which will help you get the most out of it. So the right guy who have it al written down would be, Victor Wu . Victor is no stranger to Dell and VMware. He has been a great advocate on the two and more. This is not his first and won't be his last book I suppose.  I was fortunate to have received a copy from him. Definitely worth a read if you are trying to get updated and understand more why some of the design and best practice. Some of it could also be used on other systems.  Do check it out  Dell VxRail System D...

One of my customer brought sent this this to me and I thought I should share this. Start----------------- After the installation of vSphere5.1 and the setup of vCenter, we started migrating machines onto this new ESX Cluster (we have a 12 node 4.1 Cluster) What we noticed was that when vMotion the VMs from one host to another, we got inconsistent CPU values.  These VMs have clean windows install. The spike in CPU is after it has migrated to ESX hosts 3,4,5 or 6 and when we moved it back to 1 and 2 it went back down.  We were thinking it was doing some work but after one hour, the CPU stays at a constant 20-30% with these processes.  Also the Hosts had only 1 machine running on it so it could not be a lack of resources. Automatically we assumed that it was VMware Tools but the issue still persisted after we uninstalled VMware tools. After much troubleshooting, we found out the cause and it is the power settings of the HP server which has to be set in...

View 5 has just launched and there are many who are concern on the performance tuning and various enhancements which are not really mentioned. I will not go into details but rather place some of the good white papers that most of us might be interested in. Will not be listing those applicable  only to View 4.x but those will apply to View 5.x will be listed and will overwrite those that are updated to View 5.x. Performance & Best Practice VMware View 5 Performance and Best Practices VMware View Backup Best Practices Others Validating Adobe Connect Client on VMware® View Desktops VMware View Optimization Guide for Windows 7 PCoIP Display Protocol: Information and Scenario-Based Network Sizing Guide How to Optmize the Master Desktop Image for VMware View

vSphere 5 has just launched and there are many who are concern on the performance tuning and various enhancements which are not really mentioned. I will not go into details but rather place some of the good white papers that most of us might be interested in. Do note of this WARNING when managing Hybrid environment ESXi 4.0 U2 not compatible with vCenter Server 5.0 When attempting to manage an ESXi 4.0 Update 2 host with vCenter Server 5.0, a purple diagnostics screen appears. To workaround the issue, upgrade ESXi 4.0 Update 2 hosts to ESXi 4.0 Update 3 or later, prior to upgrading vCenter Server to 5.0. For more information, see the article linked below. Article 2007269 Performance vSphere High Availability Deployment Best Practices Storage vMotion of a Virtualized SQL Server Database Best Practices for Performance Tuning of Latency-Sens...

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 reading through this article vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5 . I was not aware (perhaps only myself) that ESXi 5 introduces virtual NUMA (vNUMA).  What this means that in terms of performance, the ESXi is able to know which is the most efficient way to access the memory.  This was not possible in ESXi 4.x. On reading further, this brought something to me especially for environment who enable EVC with mixed of hardware differences. ESXi 5 introduces virtual NUMA (vNUMA), which exposes the ESXi host’s NUMA topology to the guest operating systems. When using this feature, apply vMotion to move virtual machines between clusters that are composed of hosts with matching NUMA architectures. This is because the very first time a vNUMA-enabled virtual machine is powered on, its vNUMA topology is set, based in part on the NUMA topology of the underlying physical host on which it is running. After a virtual machine’s vNUMA topology is...