I just read on twitter that the VMworld Schedule Builder is online. So if you are going to VMworld make sure to plan your sessions cause it will make your life a lot easier!
Now start scheduling, and of course don’t forget to add TA2259 :-).
by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
I just read on twitter that the VMworld Schedule Builder is online. So if you are going to VMworld make sure to plan your sessions cause it will make your life a lot easier!
Now start scheduling, and of course don’t forget to add TA2259 :-).
Duncan Epping · ·
The floor is still open, so take your chance and ask a question. We’ve already got some great questions about current designs and new designs but we, Rick Scherer, Tom Howarth, Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and myself, are up for the challenge. Ask anything you like as long as it is virtualization related of course. Don’t limit yourself, if you would like to send us a Visio diagram to explain a situation that’s even possible. Also make sure to add TA2259 to your schedule builder as soon as it comes online!
Duncan Epping · ·
I was so sick and tired of waiting for Twitter.com to give a decent reply to my support requested I decided to open up a new account. From what I’ve been told unsuspending accounts can take up to 30 days. I guess their focus is on suspending accounts cause that only takes them seconds. Well I’m not going to wait anymore, I will delete my @depping account if and when it ever comes back and just continue to use my new account: http://www.twitter.com/DuncanYB
Please start following @DuncanYB instead of @depping and thanks all for your support and retweets. And if you don’t mind spreading the word about my new account I would appreciate it, cause I was down to 0 followers instead of the +800 I used to have.
I also decided not to auto tweet new blog articles anymore as it floods my and your time-line and most of you probably also use a RSS reader. Besides that PlanetV12n is already auto tweeting my articles, so I will probably retweet those once in a while.
Now lets just hope twitter doesn’t close down this account…
Duncan Epping · ·
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 explained what is happening during the VMotion and why this temporary vswp file is being created. Read it, it’s useful info:
- It is only used if the target is under memory pressure. It is thin provisioned so even though it looks the size of the memory it should have very little impact on the free space of the VMFS.
- The other thing is that the temp swap will only be used for activity as the machine transitions so should not grow to the size of the memory. If you “du” the file systems you should see the the blocks being consumed. Engineers think this should be tops 400M, if it is used at all. By pressured we mean the amount of memory free is low. That will not deny the VM to VMotion unless we can’t allocate enough reserved memory (this is zero by default). Once the transition is complete the VM reverts to the original swap file and the temp is deleted.
Take a look at the screenshot David uploaded, the bottom two vswp files are the ones created during the VMotion and as you can see are consuming 0 blocks.
Duncan Epping · ·
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 mind that although it seems like disk space is not used according to the Guest OS it might have been used in the past. (An OS usually only removes the pointer to the data and not the actual data itself.) If you d0 not zero out your disk before you do the Storage VMotion and migration to a thin provisioned disk you will be copying all the “filled” blocks. This is actually the same concept as for instance a VCB full image dump, which I addressed in the beginning of 2008.
So for optimizing migrations to Thin Provisioned disks either use sdelete by Microsoft/Sysinternals or use the “shrink” option within VMware tools. Both work fine, but keep in mind they can be time consuming. You could use sdelete to script the solution and actually zero-out every disk once a week.