Lately I am having a lot of discussions with customers around sizing of their hosts. Especially Cisco UCS(with the 384GB option) and the upcoming Intel Xeon 5600 series with six cores per CPU takes the “Scale Up” discussion to a new level. I guess we had this discussion in the past as well when 32GB became a commodity. The question I always [...]

Just a short article for today, or should I call it a tip. Take your memory configuration into account for Nehalem processors. There’s a sweet spot in terms of performance which might just make a difference. Read this article on Scott’s blog or this article on Anandtech where they did measure the difference in performance. Again it is not a [...]

I’ve been doing Citrix XenApp performance tests over the last couple of days. Our goal was simple: as many user sessions on a single ESX host as possible, not taking per VM cost in account. Reading the Project VRC performance tests we decided to give both 1 vCPU VM’s and 2 vCPU VM’s a try. Because the customer was using [...]

So you were used to labelling your hardware with the name of the System running on it. But when running everything virtual you can label your ESX hosts but never know which VM resides at which Server without checking your console and/or vCenter. Wouldn’t it be cool if you would have a magic Label that updated itself every once in [...]

VMware’s John Troyer revealed on Twitter a couple of hours ago a “search-able hardware compatibility guide” for VMware ESX and VMware View: This online Hardware Compatibility Guide web application was released on December 10, 2008. To learn more about benefits and usage of this tool, please see “Help on Searching”. This online Hardware Compatibility Guide replaces the former Hardware Compatibility [...]