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. [...]
Archive for the ‘Server’ Category
Scale UP!
March 17th, 2010
16 Comments
Best training course in ages!
March 12th, 2010
7 Comments
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 [...]
Reclaiming idle memory
March 11th, 2010
7 Comments
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 [...]
Changing the directory of your vSphere vCenter log files
March 10th, 2010
8 Comments
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 [...]
VM powered on Alarm?
March 9th, 2010
No Comments
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 [...]
Adding NICs to your vSwitch on ESXi?
March 9th, 2010
5 Comments
I just finished installing vSphere ESXi 4.0 update 1, I used all the default settings. I expected that all my portgroups would inherit all their settings from the vSwitch that was configured during installation… unfortunately this is not the case as can be seen in the screenshots below.
Default install with no redundancy:
VM Network inherits from [...]
CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior
March 3rd, 2010
21 Comments
Again an interesting discussion we had amongst some colleagues (Thanks Frank, Andrew and Craig! Especially Craig as most text below comes from The Resource Master). The topic was CPU/Memory reservations and more specifically the difference in behavior of these two.
One would expect that both a CPU and Memory reservation would have the same behavior when [...]
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