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Archive for August, 2011

For a long time VMware Fault Tolerance was only supported on a single vCPU VM. Today we witnessed a change: During the BCO2874 session we got a first look on the prototype of the SMP enabled Fault Tolerance. Cool!

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Welcome to the tuesday General Session. Steve Herrod is taking the stage with some cool new stuff. This blogpost is typed as-we-go, so bear with me if anything is misspelled or looks chaotic 🙂

Introduction

Steve is looking at three phases in VDI: Simplify, Manage and Connect. These three phases are important to distinguish: First you simplify, you need to manage your setup, and users need to connect. View 5 is built to accommodate this to the max.

Up next, the new goodness for small businesses and finally… Melvin the Monster VM!

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Today Paul Maritz is takes the stage for the VMworld 2011 general session in Las Vegas. In line with this years motto “Your Cloud. OWn IT” he laid out the direction things will be going according to VMware, starting today. This is definitely the bigger picture.

Introduction

I must say that I’m a bit sad about the deep techie stuff becoming less and less visible on VMworld. But that is what is neccesary for the next phase in “IT life”. Ever seen a Star Trek movie where they needed to debug their wapr drive? Nope. As technology develops, the “simple things” just vanish into the background. The cloud is here.

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After the official announcement of vSphere 5 by VMware on the 22nd, the binaries are finally available for download!

VMware vSphere, the industry-leading virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures, enables you to run business critical applications with confidence and respond to the business faster. (4:15 mins.)


The build number of ESXi5 is 469512, while both vCenter5 and the VI client are build number 456005.

I would encourage everyone to at least play around with vSphere5; there are too many cool features not to be! My homelab has been running vSphere5 now for some time, and I haven’t encountered too many bizarre things to regret my decision. VMware did it again!

Get it while it’s hot:

Download vSphere 5 (free ESXi version)

Download vSphere 5 (registered versions)

I often see virtual machines that perform poorly. There can be many many reasons. I thought it was time to post a few “top 5 things to check in any given VMware ESX(i) environment” that might help you solve any issues.

Things to check on storage

Storage is often considered the bad guy when it comes to bad performance of virtual machines. As it turns out, this is not very often the case at all. Still, some storage-related things to check if you encounter a poor performing VM:

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Recently I got an email from a dear ex-colleague of mine Simon Huizenga with a question: “would this help speed up our homelab environment?”. Since his homelab setup is very similar to mine, he pointed me towards an interesting VMware KB article: “Tuning ESX/ESXi for better storage performance by modifying the maximum I/O block size” (KB:1003469). What this article basically describes, is that some arrays may experience a performance impact when very large storage I/O’s are performed, and how limiting the maximum sizes of I/O blocks might improve performance in specific cases.

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In part 1 of this series I posted the way I selected hardware for my ultimate whitebox server. A whitebox server is a cheap server you can use to run VMware vSphere without it being on the VMware HCL. Never supported, but working nonetheless. Now that the hardware to use was selected and ordered from my local computer components dealer, the next step is to assemble and test the setup, which is the focus of this post.

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