Breaking news:
As of the first of July I will start as a PSO Consultant at VMware! I’m very happy that VMware provided me with this opportunity. I want to thank Ictivity BV for understanding my decision and making this transition possible and easy. So the next couple of weeks I will be extremely busy finishing my house and finishing projects and transferring accounts/customers to colleagues.
Good read: how many vm’s on 1 ESX host
Check out this topic on the VMTN forum by Gabrie. It’s a good read about how many vm’s one would dare to run on an ESX host.
TexiWill:
This really depends. I know companies that are doing no more than a 10:1 or 20:1 compression, but there are other companies with 50+ VMs running on one box (at the time it was a DL760 with 8 CPUs and 64GBs of memory. I do know that the max vCPUs you can put on a system is still 8 * pCores and the larget box I have seen is the DL580G4 with 4 quad cores (16 cores) and 512GBs of memory….. So maximally 128 vCPUs…..
Ken.Cline:
I make this decision based on a couple things:* – How important are the VMs in questions?
* If they’re truly “mission critical”, then I keep the number small – on the order of 10:1
* If they’re “important”, then let’s look at 20:1
* If they’re “who cares if they’re up”, then load ’em up!* – How large is the environment? I like to deploy a minimum of two hosts (three makes me happier)
* 20 systems @ 2 hosts = 10:1, @ 3 hosts = 7:1
* 100 systems @ 2 hosts = I wouldn’t do it, @ 3 hosts = 34:1
* 1,000 systems – now you’re talking! @ 20 hosts = 50:1, @ 30 hosts = 34:1, @ 20 hosts = 50:1, @ 10 hosts = 100:1
* 10,000 systems – you can bet I’m going to have a few hosts with 50 to 60 (or more) VMs and some hosts with 10 (or less) VMs!So, there’s not single “right” answer (other than “it depends”)
What a cool gadget
The current OLPC is an okay gadget, it’s decent and pretty cool. The new design of the second generation isn’t cool… it’s outrages! Take a look at this blog, it’s a combination of a laptop, e-ink and a Nintendo DS. All I can say is, send me a prototype and I’ll be happy to test it and write a review.
VC 2.5 HA constraints
VMTN user “ian4563” recently posted a thread about problems with the HA constraints. The error that was pulled from the log files:
Das admission check failed. Configured failover: 2, Expected new failover: 0
And the solution according to VMTN user “eziskind”, who also is a VMware employee:
Looks like you have some 4-cpu vms in the clusters too. That will really skew things. You’re being hit by the combination of 2 new things in the HA admission control for VC 2.5:
1) If no reservation is set for a vm (or it is set to 0), use default of 256MHz, 256MB. (these values can be changed using HA advanced options: das.vmMemoryMinMB, das.vmCpuMinMHz)
2) For the cpu component of the slot, use (max MHz per virtual cpu) * (max number of vcpu’s per vm)The HA admission control algorithm is overly conservative in non-homogenous clusters, ie. ones with vms which have different reservations and/or vcpu number. #2 above makes it more conservative. Given these limitations, its best to try to keep the cluster as homogenous as possible. Is it possible to put the 4-cpu vms in a separate cluster? If not, you can try setting the default vm resources to 0 (using the advanced options in #1). This is how things worked in VC 2.0.
Thanks goes out to my colleague Remco for pointing this topic out.
Microsoft’s Virtualization ROI/TCO Calculator gets a failing grade
Microsoft’s marketing department is definitely the king when it comes to twisting the facts in such a way that the average reader doesn’t notice it. It’s nice to see that VMware pointed MS out to a couple of their screw ups. Funny thing is that I’ve been trying to find out what Hyper-V + management tools was gonna cost me and compare this to VMware, which was hard because you can’t find the right prices on their website that easily.
Anyway, I think the document definitely is a good read which clears up a lot of unanswered questions. Check it out.