When I was playing with ESXi 5.0 in my lab I noticed some changes during the installation process. Of course I had not bothered to read the documentation but when I watched the installer fail I figured it might make sense to start reading. I’ve documented the scripted installation procedure multiple times by now. But in short, when you would [...]

I guess Amazon and Createspace had enough of getting those phone calls three or four times from Frank every day since Tuesday as magically the book popped up on Amazon overnight. It took a while and our apologies for that, here are the links to all three books: Amazon: eBook (Kindle) – $ 9.99 Black & White Paperback – $ [...]

Storage has been my primary focus for the 5.0 launch. The question often asked when talking about the separate components is how it all fits together. Lets first list some of the new or enhanced features: VMFS-5 vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration aka VAAI vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness aka VASA Profile-Driven Storage (VM Storage Profiles in the [...]

Many of us have been logging in to the ESX console for ages and have (ab)used the esxcfg-* commands on a regular basis. We’ve used them in scripts and during troubleshooting and all of that is about to change… vSphere 5.0 introduces a new command line utility: esxcli. Some of you will say “Hey esxcli was already available before 5.0″, [...]

With vSphere 5.0 a brand new primitive has been introduced which is called Dead Space Reclamation as part of the overall thin provisioning primitive. Dead Space Reclamation is also sometimes referred to as unmap and it enables you to reclaim blocks of thin-provisioned LUNs by telling the array that specific blocks are obsolete, and yes that command used is the [...]

I was asked about this a couple of times over the last few days so I figured it might be an interesting topic. This is described in our book as well in the Datastore Cluster chapter but I decided to rewrite it and add some of it into a table to make it easier to digest. Lets start of with [...]

I was just playing around with vSphere 5.0 and noticed something cool which I hadn’t noticed before. I logged in to the ESXi Shell and typed a command I used a lot in the past, vmkfstools, and I noticed an option called -K. (Just been informed that 4.1 has it as well, I never noticed it though… ) -K –punchzero [...]