It is finally released… PXE Manager for vCenter. My former Cloud colleague Max Daneri of VMTS fame has worked very  very hard on this and actually demoed it at VMworld in 2009. I know Max is already working on the next release which of course will work with the upcoming vSphere version as well. So if you’ve tested it and [...]

I just wanted to point to this article on the ESXi Chronicles blog about a free training and free book on ESXi. I actually wrote an article about the book a while back and it is most definitely worth the effort of doing the training and survey! You might wonder how much a person can write about ESXi, but Dave [...]

We had a discussion internally about ESX/ESXi caching I/Os. In particular this discussion was around caching of writes  as a customer was concerned about consistency of their data. I fully understand that they are concerned and I know in the past some vendors were doing write caching however VMware does not do this for obvious reasons. Although performance is important [...]

When we wrote the HA/DRS book both Frank and I were still very much in an “ESX Classic” mindset. Over the last weeks I had questions around resilient network configurations for ESXi. I referred people back to the book but the comments that I got were that the examples were very much ESX Classic instead of ESXi. Now in my [...]

Today I was fooling around with my new Lab environment when I noticed my Path Selection Policy (PSP) was set to fixed while the array (Clariion CX4-120) most definitely supports Round Robin (RR). I wrote about it in the past(1, 2) but as with vSphere 4.1 the commands slightly changed I figured it wouldn’t hurt to write it down again: [...]

Back in the days when Servers still had 8GB or 16GB memory at most a setting was introduced that guaranteed the hypervisor had a certain amount of free memory to its disposal. The main purpose of this being of course stability of the system. As with any Operating System free memory is desirable to ensure it is available whenever a [...]

I’ve seen this myth floating around from time to time and as I never publicly wrote about it I figured it was time to write an article to debunk this myth. The question that is often posed is if thin disks will hurt performance due to fragmentation of the blocks allocated on the VMFS volume. I guess we need to [...]