**disclaimer: Some of the content has been taken from the vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive book** The first time I was playing around with 5.0 and particularly HA I noticed a new section in the UI called Datastore Heartbeating. Those familiar with HA prior to vSphere 5.0 probably know that virtual machine restarts were always initiated, even if only the [...]

**disclaimer: Some of the content has been taken from the vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive book** As mentioned in an earlier post vSphere High Availability has been completely overhauled… This means some of the historical constraints have been lifted and that means you can / should / might need to change your design or implementation. What I want to discuss [...]

With vSphere 5.0 comes a new HA architecture. HA has been rewritten from the ground up to shed some of those constraints that were enforced by AAM. HA as part of 5.0, also referred to as FDM (fault domain manager), introduces less complexity and higher resiliency. From a UI perspective not a lot has changed, but there is a lot [...]

I had a question this week from one of my colleagues which had me dazzled for a while. A customer had an HA enabled cluster and used “Host Failures Cluster Tolerates” as the admission control policy. As you hopefully all know it uses a slot algorithm, in short: HA uses the highest CPU reservation of any given VM and the [...]

I was testing VM Monitoring and needed to trigger a Blue Screen of Death. Unfortunately the “CrashOnCtrlScroll” solution did not work so I needed a different solution. I finally managed to get it sorted by doing the following: Add the following key to your registry by doing a copy and paste of the following line, note that I had to [...]

** Update: Available now: paperback full |paperback black & white ** I’ve seen a lot of crazy things, but when I clicked the amazon link for our book yesterday I literally jumped up and started cheering… Number 1 in “Computers & Internet”. These are the kind of things that make it all worth it! PS: We asked amazon/createspace to get [...]

** Update: Available now: paperback full |paperback black & white ** After months of hard work the moment is finally there, the release of our new book: vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive! When we started working, or better said, planning an update of the book we never realized the amount of work required. Be aware that this is not a [...]