Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

whitepaper

VMware HA Implementation notes update!

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A few weeks ago I posted a document which contains valuable information on implementing VMware HA. I just received an update on this document and uploaded it. I’ve also changed the link in the original post.

As most of you know I work for VMware which means I receive a huge amount of email and documents with excellent technical info. Some I can’t blog about but some I can. Last week I received this VMware HA implementations notes document by Seva Semouchin. Seva is a Technical Account Manager based in Germany!

This document deals about VMware HA clusters and all the advanced options you have with the use cases for these options. And that’s what makes this document very useful, the use cases! So everyone dealing with HA clusters should definitely read this document. Thanks Seva for letting me distribute it, and thanks for a great document!

HA best practices

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So I’ve been collecting some HA best practices lately. I just wanted to have them all in one place so I can use them myself for the VMTN forum and/or customers. The first two are obvious in my opinion but still often overlooked:

  1. Your ESX host-names should be in lowercase and use fqdn’s
  2. Provide Service Console redundancy
  3. If you add an isolation validation address with “das.isolationaddress”, add an additional 5000 to “das.failuredetectiontime”
  4. If your Service Console network is setup with “active / standby” redundancy then your “das.failuredetectiontime” needs to be set to 60000
  5. If you ensured Service Console redundancy by adding a secondary service console then “das.failuredetectiontime” needs to be set to 20000 and you need to setup an additional “das.isolationaddress”
  6. If you setup a secondary Service Console use a different subnet and vSwitch then your primary has
  7. If you don’t want to use your default gateway as an isolation validation address or can’t use it because it’s a non-pingable device then disable the usage by setting das.usedefaultisolationaddress to false and add a pingable “das.isolationaddress”
  8. Change default isolation response to “power off vm” and set restart priorities for your AD/DNS/VC/SQL servers
So if you’ve got more, add them into the comments and I will update the list!

VMware HA implementations notes

· ·

As most of you know I work for VMware which means I receive a huge amount of email and documents with excellent technical info. Some I can’t blog about but some I can. Last week I received this VMware HA implementations notes document by Seva Semouchin. Seva is a Technical Account Manager based in Germany!

This document deals about VMware HA clusters and all the advanced options you have with the use cases for these options. And that’s what makes this document very useful, the use cases! So everyone dealing with HA clusters should definitely read this document. Thanks Seva for letting me distribute it, and thanks for a great document!

VirtualCenter Memory Statistic Definitions

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I just received a great PDF on memory statistic defintions for VirtualCenter:

It is important to note that some definitions refer to guest physical memory while others talk about machine memory. “Guest physical memory” is really virtual-hardware “physical” memory presented to the VM. “Machine memory” is the actual physical RAM in the ESX host. Each definition below will explicitly specify the type of memory to which it applies. See [2] pages 139 – 141 for more information about guest physical memory versus machine memory.

This distinction plays out in interesting and potentially confusing ways. The final section, “Differences between Memory Granted/Consumed and Memory Shared/Shared Common”, expands on the differences between guest physical memory and machine memory metrics.

Read this document, it really contains a lot of useful information!!!

ESX vs ESXi

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I’ve had this question about a kazillion times by now, what’s the difference between ESX and ESXi. How do they compare… Can I do this with ESX, can I do that with ESXi.

Here’s the answer! This KB article contains a table with features and a description of what you can and can’t do in VirtualCenter. Check it out, it’s definitely worth reading.

And in addition to that, it is possible to do most configurations post installation via powershell. Check this topic on the VMTN forum by Lance!