Recently I had a discussion around Layer 2 adjacency for the vMotion(vmkernel interface) network. With that meaning that all vMotion interfaces, aka vmkernel interfaces, are required to be on the same subnet as otherwise vMotion would not function correctly. Now I remember when this used to be part of the VMware documentation but that requirement is nowhere to be found [...]

Yesterday I posted the DRS Deepdive. One of the questions still left open was how DRS decides which VM to move to create a balance cluster. After a lot of digging for non-NDA info I found this “procedure” in a VMworld presentation(TA16) amongst some other cool info. The following procedure is used to form a set of recommendations to correct [...]

Last week I mentioned which metrics DRS used for load balancing VMs across a cluster. Of course the obvious question was when the DRS Deepdive would be posted. I must admit I’m not an expert on this topic as like most of you I always took for granted that it worked out of the box. I can’t remember that there [...]

I received a question a while back about DRS initiated VMotions. One of my customers wanted to know which metrics were used by DRS for deciding if a VM needs to be VMotioned to a different host or not. These metrics are: Host CPU: Active (includes run and ready Mhz) Host Memory: Active Just a little something that’s nice to [...]

As you might have noticed last week I’m still digesting all the info from VMworld. One of the coolest new supported technologies is Long Distance VMotion. A couple of people already wrote a whole article on this session so I will not be doing this. (Chad Sakac, Joep Piscaer) However I do want to stress some of the best practices [...]

I was just reading this topic on the VMTN community. In short, a second vswp file gets created during a VMotion. As the starter of this topic noticed it could lead to not being able to VMotion VMs if you don’t have enough free disk space on your VMFS volume. One of my UK colleagues, David Burgess, jumped in and [...]

I was just reading this article by Vladan about Storage VMotion. He explains how you can get your unused disk space back with Storage VMotion and moving to a Thin Provisioned disk at the same time. I agree that this is one of the best new features out there. It’s easy and effective. However, you will need to keep in [...]