Plain Virtualization

With the announcement and also from the datasheet , it seems to be pretty lots of functionalities been added.  However there are some critical ones that are more appealing and wanting to see approvement or resolution to those who are already using since vSphere 4 and prior till today which are not make known to many. Storage There were many discussion over storage UNMAP via thin provisioning and many called it a "myth".  This was also discussed heavily in our Facebook VMUG - ASEAN group.  This was due to many changes since VMFS3 to till VMFS5.  Cody wrote a long history of what are the changes for those who have missed out here . A KB was also release and this create some discussion VMFS3 with different block size would benefit thin provision so to speak before vSphere 5.0 Update 1.  Sadly after which, all UNMAP was not possible via GUI or automatically other than via command line or script. I try to ask internally as well and luckily Cormac with his f...

Some you of you might come across when using openfiler like myself of non existing volumes however it is still mapped to the target. Or you wanted to remove those non existing volumes which keep showing in your volumes list. First, to unmap the volumes from your target you have to edit the following file and restart your iSCSI target service. iscsi_settings.xml in:  /opt/openfiler/etc/iscsi/targets remove all ghost target, only from sub tag to tag (included), not then main tag. Secondly, to remove the non existing volumes, my volumes.xml from /opt/openfiler/etc/ The file should look like the below, remove   ... /> for each of your non existing LUN.            

In the view of the new feature in vSphere 5 on VAAI, the reclaim of space from thin provision datastore whereby a file is deleted from datastore or when a storage vmotion is performed or even a snapshot consolidation.  Performance issue may arise and create error when the above are performed. Details can be found in this blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/vaai-thin-provisioning-block-reclaimunmap-issue.html Knowledge base: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007427