I was just building a vCD Lab and thought I would document the process. I know Hany has done something similar recently but mine is slightly different. I wanted to have a slim config from a memory perspective and virtual machine count perspective. Before I start, let’s give a warning… ***this is totally unsupported*** Pre-requisites: CentOS 5 – 64 Bit [...]

I play around in my home lab with VMware vCloud Director(vCD) a lot. I usually end up rebuilding it once in a while. Sometimes however you do it in the incorrect order and you end up with vCD Agents installed on your ESXi host without having vCD to unprepare the host. In that situation you can either rebuild the ESXi [...]

I was just browsing the vsinodes/procnodes. I noticed the following: Free memory state thresholds { soft:64 pct hard:32 pct low:16 pct } As explained in Frank’s excellent article on memory reservations, ESX/ESXi uses memory states to determine what type of memory reclamation technique to use. Techniques that can be used are TPS, ballooning and swapping. Of course you will always [...]

I was reading about Storage Filters last week and wanted to do a short write up. I totally forgot about it until I noticed this new KB article. The KB article only discusses the LUN filters though and not the other filters that are available today. Currently 4 filters have been made public: config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter config.vpxd.filter.vmfsFilter config.vpxd.filter.rdmFilter config.vpxd.filter.SameHostAndTransportsFilter The first filter [...]

I was reviewing a document today and noticed something that I’ve seen a couple of times already. I already wrote about Active/Standby set ups for etherchannels a year ago but this is a slight different variant. Frank also wrote a more extensive article on it a while and I just want to re-stress this. Scenario: Two NICs 1 Etherchannel of 2 links [...]

One of my customers experienced high CPU load on their physical switch. After some investigation they noticed broadcasts packets being sent every two seconds. The first reaction was Beacon Probing is probably enabled. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. But VMware GSS came to the rescue and pointed us towards a KB article. Apparently a bug has been identified in 4.0 which [...]

I was just playing around with the HA Cli and noticed that when you give an “ln” (listNodes) that the failover coordinator (aka master primary) is also listed. I have never noticed this before, but don’t have a pre-vSphere 4.1 environment to test it on to see if this existed before 4.1. If you want to test it in your [...]