Yesterday I posted the DRS Deepdive. One of the questions still left open was how DRS decides which VM to move to create a balance cluster. After a lot of digging for non-NDA info I found this “procedure” in a VMworld presentation(TA16) amongst some other cool info. The following procedure is used to form a set of recommendations to correct [...]

Last week I mentioned which metrics DRS used for load balancing VMs across a cluster. Of course the obvious question was when the DRS Deepdive would be posted. I must admit I’m not an expert on this topic as like most of you I always took for granted that it worked out of the box. I can’t remember that there [...]

The vSphere Quick Start Guide has not even been officially published yet(But it will be within 3 weeks, that’s a promise!) and I am already working on a “new” book. Well “new” it’s not actually brand new, it’s an update of “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” published in 2008 by SAGE/Usenix. I wrote a short article about it back in 2008 [...]

I received a question a while back about DRS initiated VMotions. One of my customers wanted to know which metrics were used by DRS for deciding if a VM needs to be VMotioned to a different host or not. These metrics are: Host CPU: Active (includes run and ready Mhz) Host Memory: Active Just a little something that’s nice to [...]

I’ve seen this a couple of times already and just had a very long phone call with a customer who created the following set up: So basically the first two nics are active with load balancing set to IP-Hash and configured as an Etherchannel on the stacked Cisco 3750′s. The second pair are “standby”. Also with load balancing set to [...]

One of my colleagues, Cormac Hogan, posted some excellent guides for SRM 4.0: Steps to setup VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 with IBM SVC VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a disater recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another. This particular document looks at one particular vendor (IBM) and one particular [...]

Yesterday we had a discussion on running vCenter virtual on one of the internal mailinglists. One of the gaps identified was the lack of a best practices document. Although there are multiple for VI3 and there are some KB articles these do need seem to be easy to find or complete. This is one of the reasons I wrote this [...]