To be honest and completely frank I really don’t have a clue. I have been reading all these so called best practices around changing the default behaviour of “1000″ to “1″ but none of these contain any justification. Just to give you an example take a look at the following guide: Configuration best practices for HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array [...]

I already knew this was coming up but wasn’t allowed to talk about it. As it is out in the open on the VMTN community I guess I can talk about it as well. One of the most common issues experienced with VMware HA is a split brain situation. Although currently undocumented, vSphere has a detection mechanism for these situations. Even more [...]

Just something I noticed today while testing an automated install from NFS. The arguments I pass to the installer are: initrd=initrd.img mem=512m ksdevice=vmnic1 ip=192.168.1.123 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1 ks=nfs://192.168.1.10:/nfs/install/ks.cfg quiet Let’s focus on the part that’s incorrect, with ESX 3 the following bit(part of the bootstrap above) would work: ks=nfs://192.168.1.10:/nfs/install/ks.cfg As of ESX 4 this doesn’t work anymore, and when I do [...]

I had a discussion with one of my readers last week and just read this post on the VMTN community which triggered this article. When you create a highly available environment take into account that you will need to have enough vSwitch ports available when a failover needs to occur. By default a vSwitch will be created with 56 ports [...]

I received a very valid question today around the command “esxcfg-boot -b”. In my article about increasing the Queue Depth “esxcfg-boot -b” is part of the procedure. However if you look at the following KB article it isn’t for ESX(i) 4. The question I received is “why?”. Well the answer is simple. As of ESX(i) 4 it is part of [...]

A week ago I posted about an upcoming class titled “managing for performance“. As many of you know Scott Drummonds, VMware’s performance guru was involved in crafting this excellent course. This is VMware’s new approach for developing new training material / courses. Course material will be developed with the help of the Subject Matter Experts within the company. I was [...]

During the VCDX Defense panels one of the candidates mentioned using lock down mode for ESXi to add an extra layer of security. It seems that there is a common misunderstanding about the lockdown mode. Here’s how our documentation describes it: Enabling lockdown mode disables all direct root access to ESXi machines. Any subsequent local changes to the host must be [...]