Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere 5 Coverage

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I just read Eric’s article about all the topics he covered around vSphere 5 over the last couple of weeks and as I just published the last article I had prepared I figured it would make sense to post something similar. (Great job by  the way Eric, I always enjoy reading your articles and watching your videos!) Although I did hit roughly 10.000 unique views on average per day the first week after the launch and still 7000 a day currently I have the feeling that many were focused on the licensing changes rather then all the new and exciting features that were coming up, but now that the dust has somewhat settled it makes sense to re-emphasize them. Over the last 6 months I have been working with vSphere 5 and explored these features, my focus for most of those 6 months was to complete the book but of course I wrote a large amount of articles along the way, many of which ended up in the book in some shape or form. This is the list of articles I published. If you feel there is anything that I left out that should have been covered let me know and I will try to dive in to it. I can’t make any promises though as with VMworld coming up my time is limited.

  1. Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V
  2. 5 is the magic number
  3. Hot of the press: vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive
  4. vSphere 5.0: Storage DRS introduction
  5. vSphere 5.0: What has changed for VMFS?
  6. vSphere 5.0: Storage vMotion and the Mirror Driver
  7. Punch Zeros
  8. Storage DRS interoperability
  9. vSphere 5.0: UNMAP (vaai feature)
  10. vSphere 5.0: ESXCLI
  11. ESXi 5: Suppressing the local/remote shell warning
  12. Testing VM Monitoring with vSphere 5.0
  13. What’s new?
  14. vSphere 5:0 vMotion Enhancements
  15. vSphere 5.0: vMotion enhancement, tiny but very welcome!
  16. ESXi 5.0 and Scripted Installs
  17. vSphere 5.0: Storage initiatives
  18. Scale Up/Out and impact of vRAM?!? (part 2)
  19. HA Architecture Series – FDM (1/5)
  20. HA Architecture Series – Primary nodes? (2/5)
  21. HA Architecture Series – Datastore Heartbeating (3/5)
  22. HA Architecture Series – Restarting VMs (4/5)
  23. HA Architecture Series – Advanced Settings (5/5)
  24. VMFS-5 LUN  Sizing
  25. vSphere 5.0 HA: Changes in admission control
  26. vSphere 5 – Metro vMotion
  27. SDRS and Auto-Tiering solutions – The Injector

Once again if there it something you feel I should be covering let me know and I’ll try to dig in to it. Preferably something that none of the other blogs have published of course.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Nice overview! Suggestion for a new blogposting: some information on the application awareness API open to the public in vSphere 5.0 There is info in your excellent book on this subject. Maybe you can give some guidelines how to create a script which monitors the state of an application and if the application does not respond triggers HA to reboot the guest.

    • Let me see if I can do that. I know that William Lam is writing an article about the API and I bet he does a far better job than I even will be able to. I do think an overview would be useful. Added to my todo list, thanks!

  2. vSphere 5 now supports nested setups doesn’t it ? Are there any gotchas or does it just ‘work’ without further modifications (i.e. turning on VMs etc.) ? Probably not worth it’s own blog post though 🙂

    • It could be interesting, especially what kind of performance penalty you’d be looking at. I’m not sure of a real world use case apart from testing/lab usage. But lets say in theory you buy a couple of “fat” vm’s from a service provider and run your own virtual esxi hosts in them to keep from having to worry about hardware, but still have pretty much full control over your environment.

  3. Perhaps something about the new vCenter appliance?
    What you could do with it to extend its functionality for example.

  4. @ Mike, I have tested nested set up. It is same as in vsphere 4. You will still have to make some modifications.

  7. I think I have not seen anything published on best practices for vmotion across mutiple NICs. Should be useful..