Posts Tagged ‘vSphere’

Scale UP!

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. [...]

Reclaiming idle memory

In the “CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior” article there was a lively discussion going on between Chris Huss(vmtrainers.com) and myself. I think the following comment by Chris more or less summarizes the discussion
I wasn’t aware that the balloon driver was involved with the Mem.IdleTax. I haven’t seen any documentation stating this…and assumed that the VMkernel just stopped [...]

Changing the directory of your vSphere vCenter log files

Something that a lot of people haven’t looked in to or just don’t think about is relocating the log files of vCenter, I wrote a short article 2 years ago and thought it was time to reiterate it. By default (Windows 2003) log files are stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs”, and for [...]

VM powered on Alarm?

One of my readers(Thanks Andrzej!) emailed me something that I thought might be interesting for those who are closely monitoring their environment.
Did you know that there are two similar VM event triggers in Alarms in vCenter?

VM powered on
DRS – VM powered on

The first only works for VMs outside of DRS enabled clusters. The second only [...]

Adding NICs to your vSwitch on ESXi?

I just finished installing vSphere ESXi 4.0 update 1, I used all the default settings. I expected that all my portgroups would inherit all their settings from the vSwitch that was configured during installation… unfortunately this is not the case as can be seen in the screenshots below.
Default install with no redundancy:

VM Network inherits from [...]

Single Initiator Zoning, recommended or not?

A question we receive a lot is what kind of zoning should be implemented for our storage solution? The answer is usually really short and simple: at least single initiator zoning.
Single initiator zoning is something we have always recommend in the field (VMware PSO Consultants/Architects) and something that is clearly mentioned in our documentation… at [...]

CPU/MEM Reservation Behavior

Again an interesting discussion we had amongst some colleagues (Thanks Frank, Andrew and Craig! Especially Craig as most text below comes from The Resource Master). The topic was CPU/Memory reservations and more specifically the difference in behavior of these two.
One would expect that both a CPU and Memory reservation would have the same behavior when [...]

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