Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware Consolidated Backup and deleted files

As most of you know, when VMware Consolidated Backup dumps image level backups VCB only dumps used diskspace. Unfortunately for us VCB does this by checking at block level if it contains only zero’s or not. If it contains only zero’s the block is considered empty, but an Operating System doesn’t zero out the disk space that contained the files when a file is deleted. An Operating System only clears the pointers to these files. This is why you could have a disk with only 4GB of used space and a 6GB VCB dump. As of ESX 3.0.2 update 1 VMware reintroduced the shrink option in VMware Tools. Kind of a weird name “shrink” cause the vmdk doesn’t actually shrink, the unused space is just zeroed out.

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Storage VMotion add-ons!

I’m not the only one who thinks that the Storage VMotion interface is a burden. A couple of scripting wizards started creating a decent interface for the Storage VMotion script, which definitely come in handy. Check them out:

  • Dominic of VMProfessional created an additional perl script to make storage vmotion a bit easier. It works very simple just edit the script to include your VC url, username, password, cluster and Datacenter, then you will be prompted with a list of VMs to choose from, and a list of target datastore to choose from. Check it out at his website, VMProfessional.
  • ASP24 created a PHP website with some easy to use dropdown boxes. It’s hosted on the VMware VMTN forum. I did not had the opportunity to test it by the way.

What about those Jumbo Frames?

Support for Jumbo Frames is one of the major new features for ESX 3.5. Especially for the people who are using an iSCSI SAN configuring jumbo frames could be very beneficial. Instead of having an MTU(maximum size of transmitted packet) of 1500 an MTU of 9000 would be possible. That would cut out a lot of the iSCSI overhead. But are jumbo frames supported for 3.5? Answer: Yes and no. [Read more…] about What about those Jumbo Frames?

Virtual Machine High Availability

I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly any evidence that HA did it’s job, in other words no events logged in VirtualCenter as far as I can see. [Read more…] about Virtual Machine High Availability