Plain Virtualization

Looking at the trend of data referencing from here . We can see that data has been growing phenomenally. In actual fact, looking at the trend, the boom started in 2020 and has not stop ever since. Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day  In today infrastructure, we have two major solutions for data management. One is our traditional storage array and the other is HyperConverge Infrastructure (HCI). The latter only started picking up in early 2011 where some of the known names such as pivot3 and the major players after such as Nutanix and VMware vSAN which exist most commonly in most data center infrastructure. As data volume increases and the the adoption of AI, capacity and performance for data management become a crucial requirement. Taking example from the like on virtualization, you can have all the compute resources for your virtual machine, but if your workload data IO and capacity cannot be serve, the bottleneck still exist.  In the wor...

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase for new order starting 10th April 2025.  What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand. While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change. So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site , with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper. For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted....

Recently the most talk about security measurement against the two discovered vulnerabilities has raised a lot of talks. This all started and revealed by  Google Project Zero . I have also recently shared advice from VMware support and KBs to our Singapore VMUG users during our event yesterday. Below is a summary of questions and the approach you should be doing for patching your VMware environment. Details on Spectre and Meltdown https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/01/what-are-spectre-and-meltdown-and-why-should-you-care/ https://blog.barkly.com/meltdown-spectre-patches-list-windows-update-help Technical explanation:   http://frankdenneman.nl/2018/01/05/explainer-spectre-meltdown-graham-sutherland/ Side Notes ESXi is only affected by Spectre and all patches for ESXi 5.5. and above has been released. Removed due to retracting of code instructed by Intel. Check update below. ESXi is NOT affected by Meltdown as it does not have untrusted user ac...

NUMA is always a very interesting topic when in design and operation in virtualization space.  We need to understand it so we can size a proper VM more effectively and efficiently for application to perform at its optimum. To understand what is NUMA and how it works, a very good article to read will be from here .  Mathias has explained this in a very simple terms with good pictures that I do not have to reinvent.  How I wish I have this article back then. Starting from ESX 3.5, NUMA was made aware to ESX servers.  Allowing for memory locality via a NUMA node concept.  This helps address memory locality performance. In vSphere 4.1, wide-VM was introduce this was due to VM been allocating more vCPUs than the physical cores per CPU (larger than a NUMA node).  Check out Frank's post . In vSphere 5.0, vNUMA was introduced to improve the performance of the CPU scheduling having VM to be exposed to the physical NUMA architecture.  Understanding ho...

Last month of the year and today have a some talk over lunch with a colleague and decide to pen this down which I see lacking on the market. I have spoken to customers and also spoken to some colleagues and realize the IT paradigm as changed quite substantial.  However many are still operating the wrong way which end up even with virtualization, cloud or Software Defined Data Center, etc. it is still not helping them achieve in a big scale. Recently I did a session on BC/DR: Implementing a Holistic Strategy with VMware Solutions session at APJ vForum in Singapore.  I mentioned a few things that was abstracted from VCDX Design Defense Blueprint page 11.  This diagram has helped me in a lot of discussion and I see many are still not aware.  The five things: Availability, Recovery, Security, Manageability, Performance. Taking an example today, when a Application owner request a machine with certain specification in terms of CPU, Memory and space from an Infra p...

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...

With the introduction of vSphere 5.1.  There would be many questions on the new features and enhancements been made.  So here are the breakdown of all the new and enhancement documents. What's New in vSphere 5.1 Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Performance Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Storage Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Platform Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Networking Hope these will give you a good idea on the changes. As for the editions and add on,  the same editions that are in vSphere 5 are still here which includes Essential, Essential Plus, Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. What has been added is Standard with Operations Management.  This edition adds in vCenter Operations Suite Advanced for active monitoring and capacity monitoring and vCenter Protect Standard for patching.  This edition is very useful for customer starting on a small virtuali...

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...

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...