I was reading Scott’s article about using dedicate clusters for management applications. Which was quickly followed by a bunch of quotes turned into an article by Beth P. from Techtarget. Scott mentions that he had posed the original question on twitter if people were doing dedicated management clusters and if so why. As he mentioned only a few responded and [...]

I love blogging because of the discussions you some times get into. One of the bloggers I highly respect and closely follow is EMC’s vSpecialist Scott Drummonds (former VMware Performance Guru). Scott posted a question on his blog about what the size of a cluster should be. Scott discussed this with Dave Korsunksy and Dan Anderson, both VMware employee, and [...]

** for vSphere 5.0 check this update! ** Today I received a very valid question around a full cluster failure. What happens when all the hosts in a cluster go down and at some point return? Will the VMs be restarted and what do I need to have in place to ensure they will? It seems to be an urban [...]

I was reading an excellent article on NetApp metroclusters and vm-host affinity rules Larry Touchette the other day. That article is based on the tech report TR-3788 which covers the full solution but did not include the 4.1 enhancements. The main focus of the article is on VM-Host Affinity Rules. Great stuff and it will “ensure” you will keep your IO [...]

Lately I have been seeing more and more people recommending to limit clusters to eight hosts. I guess I might be more or less responsible for this “myth“, unintentionally of course as I would never make a recommendation like that. My article was based on the maximum amount of VMs per host in a HA cluster with 9 hosts or [...]