The next version of ESX has a totally different architecture for storage. The new architecture is called “Pluggable Storage Architecture”. For my own understanding I wanted to write down how this actually works and what all the different abbreviations/acronyms mean: PSA = Pluggable Storage Architecture NMP = Native Multipathing MPP = Multipathing Plugin PSP = Path Selection Plugin SATP = [...]

In the “Multivendor post to iSCSI” article by Chad Sakac and others(Netapp, EMC, Dell, HP, VMware) a new multi-pathing method for iSCSI on the next version of ESX(vSphere) had already been revealed. Read the full article for in depth information on how this works in the current version and how it will work in the next version. I guess the [...]

Whenever I do a beta test of a product / OS the first thing I do is check if all the features / commands that I used with the previous version still exist. When I did an “esxcfg- tab tab” on the next version of ESX one thing stood out, esxcfg-vmhbadevs was gone. I use this command a lot when [...]

It seems to be performance week this week at VMware. It started out with Eric Horschman’s reply to Virtualization Review’s hypervisor performance comparisson. What amazed me the most, besides the results, is the fact that Keith Ward writes that the methodology was discussed with VMware and VMware agreed that it was fair. Reading Eric’s response this certainly isn’t the case. [...]

Your VMFS has been recognized as a snapshot, what are you going to do? Hopefully most of you have read my previous post on this topic by now. If you didn’t, be very ashamed and start reading my EnableResignature post before you continue. I was just playing with a VMworld Europe lab manual, which was about the next version of [...]

One of the most promising blogs of this moment is definitely Frank Denneman‘s blog. Frank is a freelance consultant with a focus on virtualization and storage. His latest addition “Increasing the queue depth” is an excellent article and really shows that Frank knows what he’s talking about! When it comes to IO performance in the virtual infrastructure one of the [...]

Last week the well known powershell guru Alan Renouf helped me out with a script for enabling virtualized MMU. This week I needed to set Disk.UseDeviceReset to “0″ on at least 60 hosts. (Check the link for more info on why!) No point in doing it all by hand when the VI Toolkit can help you out and set this [...]