I had a lot of trouble finding the vSphere 5.0 What’s New whitepapers so I figured I would list all of them as I probably wouldn’t be the only one finding it challenging to get all of these. These are useful to quickly scan what has been introduced for a specific category. I would recommend reading these as it will [...]

**disclaimer: this article is an out-take of our book: vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive** There are some fundamental changes when it comes to vMotion scalability and performance in vSphere 5.0. Most of these changes have one common goal: being able to vMotion ANY type of workload. It doesn’t matter if you have a virtual machine with 32GB of memory that [...]

vSphere 5.0 has many new compelling features and enhancements. Sometimes though it is that little tiny enhancement that makes life easier. In this case I am talking about a tiny enhancements for vMotion which I know many of you will appreciate. It is something that both Frank Denneman and I have addressed multiple times with our engineers and finally made [...]

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″, [...]