Last week VMware officially released an official paper around Deployment Best Practices for HA. I was one of the authors of the document. Together with several people from the Technical Marketing Team we gathered all best practices that we could find, validated and simplified them to make it rock solid. I think it is a good read. It is short [...]

After attending Irfan Ahmad’s session on Storage IO Control at VMworld I had the pleasure to sit down with Irfan and discuss SIOC. Irfan was so kind to review my SIOC articles(1, 2) and we discussed a couple of other things as well. The discussion and the Storage IO Control session contained some real gems and before my brain resets [...]

I was preparing a post on Storage I/O Control (SIOC) when I noticed this article by Alex Bakman. Alex managed to capture the essence of SIOC in just two sentences. Without setting the shares you can simply enable Storage I/O controls on each datastore. This will prevent any one VM from monopolizing the datatore by leveling out all requests for I/O that [...]

In response to Gabes article on default installation settings there are some things I personally almost always do different and I wanted to point them out. Consider them my recommendations / best practices and not necessary VMware’s. I’ve added two (*) and have a different opinion on some of Gabe’s best practices (-) COS Memory: Although COS memory is “dynamic” I [...]

A question we receive a lot is what kind of zoning should be implemented for our storage solution? The answer is usually really short and simple: at least single initiator zoning. Single initiator zoning is something we have always recommend in the field (VMware PSO Consultants/Architects) and something that is clearly mentioned in our documentation… at least that’s what I [...]

When designing your VMware vSphere / VI3 environment there are so many variables you need to take into account that it is easy to get lost. Something hardly anyone seem to be taking into account when creating VMFS volumes is that the metadata will also take up a specific amount of disk space. You might think that everyone has at [...]

I wrote about block sizes a couple of times already but I had the same discussion twice over the last couple of weeks at a customer site and on Twitter(@VirtualKenneth) so lets recap. First the three articles that started these discussions: vSphere VM Snapshots and block size, That’s why I love blogging… and Block sizes and growing your VMFS. I [...]