After the VCDX defenses last week in Munich and the defense sessions we had during VMware PEX I want to stress the following from my VCDX Defense blog article: Next two are role-play based. The panel is the customer and you are the architect. By asking questions, white boarding, discussions you will need to solve an issue or come to [...]

William Lam just released version 4 of his Health Check Report. I guess I can talk about it for hours but the sample report that William provides says more in just a few clicks than I can in 1000 words. Below you can find an outtake from the release notes. I clipped it as it was too long, but you [...]

Lately I am having a lot of discussions with customers around sizing of their hosts. Especially Cisco UCS(with the 384GB option) and the upcoming Intel Xeon 5600 series with six cores per CPU takes the “Scale Up” discussion to a new level. I guess we had this discussion in the past as well when 32GB became a commodity. The question I always [...]

I’ve done a lot of training courses in my career. A lot of them were disappointing as they never met my expectations. I guess the ones that did meet my expectations, or even exceeded them, were mainly VMware related. Especially the DSA course rocked. But there’s a new training in town, and it just claimed the crown… VMware vSphere: Manage [...]

In the “CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior” article there was a lively discussion going on between Chris Huss(vmtrainers.com) and myself. I think the following comment by Chris more or less summarizes the discussion I wasn’t aware that the balloon driver was involved with the Mem.IdleTax. I haven’t seen any documentation stating this…and assumed that the VMkernel just stopped mapping idle memory for [...]

Something that a lot of people haven’t looked in to or just don’t think about is relocating the log files of vCenter, I wrote a short article 2 years ago and thought it was time to reiterate it. By default (Windows 2003) log files are stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs”, and for Windows 2008 log files are [...]

One of my readers(Thanks Andrzej!) emailed me something that I thought might be interesting for those who are closely monitoring their environment. Did you know that there are two similar VM event triggers in Alarms in vCenter? VM powered on DRS – VM powered on The first only works for VMs outside of DRS enabled clusters. The second only works [...]