I’ve been doing VMware Design Reviews lately and so are my colleagues of the PSO department. A Design Review is quick scan of your design documentation by a VMware consultant. The consultant will hold your docs against best practices and propose changes to the design.
One of the things we encounter on a regular base is [...]

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So you’ve heard this probably from a few dozens of people by now when you don’t hit the expected SAN performance: Set your queuedepth to a larger size.
So how do you set this queuedepth? Find out for which module you’ll need to set this option:
vmkload_mod -l | grep qla
Now set it to a depth of [...]

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So I’ve been collecting some HA best practices lately. I just wanted to have them all in one place so I can use them myself for the VMTN forum and/or customers. The first two are obvious in my opinion but still often overlooked:

Your ESX host-names should be in lowercase and use fqdn’s
Provide Service Console redundancy
If [...]

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I used to be a Windows Administrator and have been using Windows since version 2.0. During my career for some weird reason when teams where formed I was always matched with Unix, Linux or Novell Admins. You can imagine I had a lot of discussions around Microsoft Windows. Some fair, some and probably most were [...]

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Sometimes you wished you hadn’t invested all of your 50.000 dollars on an employee who will be doing “migrations” for you. So what am I talking about? Well imagine yourself in a 24×7 environment, or anyother environment for that matter and you just received an email about this patch. Yeah this patch NEEDS to be [...]

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So I talked about using /var instead of /var/log for you standard ESX deployment… Still I see people do lots of weird things, these are my recommendation for esx partitioning:
Primary:
/boot   - 250MB
/       - 5120MB
Swap    - 1600MB
Extended Partition:
/var    - 4096MB
/home   - 2048MB
/opt [...]

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It used to be a best practice to increase the “das.failuredetectiontime” to 30000 for an active/standby setup. This way when a failover to another nic occurs one would have atleast 30 seconds to switch over before HA starts shutting down VM’s. The default value is 15000 by the way.
If it’s not really clear I’m talking [...]

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