Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

partitioning your esx

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So I talked about using /var instead of /var/log for you standard ESX deployment… Still I see people do lots of weird things, these are my recommendation for esx partitioning:

Primary:
/boot   - 250MB
/       - 5120MB
Swap    - 1600MB
Extended Partition:
/var    - 4096MB
/home   - 2048MB
/opt    - 2048MB
/tmp    - 2048MB
VMKcore - 100MB
VMFS    - Fillup, but leave atleast 5GB for additional partitions in the future as Bouke and Eric suggest below!

This will take up around 18GB of the 36GB you have these days as a minimum. And you’ll avoid filling up your root file system with log files, core dumps or temporary files. Start using it if you’re not doing it…

And if you did manage to fill up your root file system use this command from the COS to find any files larger than 10MB:

find –type f –size +10240k

das.failuredetectiontime for active/standby COS vswitch

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It used to be a best practice to increase the “das.failuredetectiontime” to 30000 for an active/standby setup. This way when a failover to another nic occurs one would have atleast 30 seconds to switch over before HA starts shutting down VM’s. The default value is 15000 by the way.

If it’s not really clear I’m talking about a setup like this:

  • vSwitch0 – 2 Physical nics(vmnic0 & vmnic2) – 2 Portgroups (Service Console & VMkernel)
    Service Console active on vmnic0 and standby on vmnic2
    VMkernel active on vmnic2 and standby on vmnic0
    Each portgroup has a VLAN assigned and runs dedicated on its own nic, only in the case of a fault it’s switched over to the standby nic, but it will return to the original nic when the connection is up again. 

I just noticed in the Resource Management Guide pdf that the best practice is to increase it to 60000. In other words, it can take up to 60 seconds before your HA starts restarting machines. For a secondary service console you only need to  increase by 5 seconds cause of the fact that an additional isolation address needs to be checked. In other words a secondary service console saves you 30 seconds when isolation occurs which can be a lot in a 7×24 environment.

So like I blogged three months ago, going for a secondary service console is definitely the best option you have for service console redundancy today! Keep in mind though that your secondary service console needs to be in a different subnet than the primary!

Virtualization Continues to See Strong Growth in Second Quarter, According to IDC

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It’s funny to read reports like the one IDC just produced. It makes you wonder, who writes them and where they get their information from… especially when you read the following:

VMware grew its x86 server virtualization software business 27% year over year and maintained the number 1 position in the market with 78% revenue share in 2Q08. When looking at new x86 virtualization licenses, VMware continues to hold on to its strong position in the x86 market with a combined market share of VMware ESX and VMware Server at 44%. However, in its first quarter of general availability Microsoft Hyper-V delivered a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft’s market share is 23% of new shipments.

As I expected Microsoft jumped right on it and had their marketing department come up with some great statements:

Microsoft’s server virtualization software already has half of VMware’s share in the market.

But usual there’s a guy called Mike, and Mike well… Mike should start working for myth busters cause that’s what he does best… busting the Virtualization Marketing Myths:

First of all Microsoft didn’t all of a sudden grab market share. Last year was the first year of this report and Microsoft was reported as having 20% market share at the time by shipments. In Q1 2008 they dropped to 18% and now they’re back to 23%. In the course of a year they climbed 3%. This is probably just normal survey error at work. To back that up VMware showed a similar trend going from 51% in 2007 to 42% in Q1 2008 and now back up to 44% in Q2 2008.

Well, just continue to read Mike D’s response to the IDC report and MS article here…

a new blog in town: VCritical

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There’s a new blog in town and it’s called VCritical! The blog is by Eric Gray a VMware employee and he describes his jobrole as follows: “virtualization management in general, VMware as well as competitors”.

Anyway, he’s been at it for about a month and posted some cool blogs already, so add him to your favorites or RSS reader. Start with reading the following posts:

VMware product overview

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I just watched the vForum keynote by Richard Garsthagen. If you haven’t seen it be sure to check it out cause Richard put a great presentation together which outlines the current and future products of VMware. I’m not gonna repost his video. Just click on the link below.

Hi Everyone,

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while, but have been really busy with all the virtualization events that are going on, from VMworld to the European VForum show we are doing at this current moment. So at least I wanted to share with you a bit of these shows. We recorded the keynote session last week in sweden, so if you would like to listen to me explaining what VMware is about and what our future developments are, enjoy the video…