I received a whole bunch of questions around my two latest posts on HA admission control. I added all the info to my HA Deepdive page but just in case you don’t regularly read that section I will post them here as well: The default of 256Mhz when no reservations are set is too conservative in my environment. What happens [...]

Can I avoid large HA slot sizes due to reservations without resorting to advanced settings? That’s the question I get almost daily. The answer used to be NO. HA uses reservations to calculate the slot size and there’s no way to tell HA to ignore them without using advanced settings pre-vSphere. So there is your answer: pre-vSphere. With vSphere VMware [...]

Yesterday we had a discussion on running vCenter virtual on one of the internal mailinglists. One of the gaps identified was the lack of a best practices document. Although there are multiple for VI3 and there are some KB articles these do need seem to be easy to find or complete. This is one of the reasons I wrote this [...]

While going through my email folders I noticed an email chain about disabling your USB controller to avoid avoid the well known IRQ sharing situation. This has been extensively described in KB Article 1003710. In short: IRQ Sharing limits interrupts to a single CPU. Normally this isn’t a problem but the Service Console is locked to CPU 0 which thus [...]

So I’ve been collecting some HA best practices lately. I just wanted to have them all in one place so I can use them myself for the VMTN forum and/or customers. The first two are obvious in my opinion but still often overlooked: Your ESX host-names should be in lowercase and use fqdn’s Provide Service Console redundancy If you add [...]