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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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So you’ve decided: You want to build yourself an ESX(i) environment while minimizing cost. But how do you choose between available hardware? In this blogpost I will be focussing on my recent Whitebox server selecgtion and how I got to my configuration out of all available components.

Different ways of getting to a successful Whitebox config

There are several different ways of getting to a cheap Whitebox configuration. So far I’ve been seeing four approaches:

1. Build one big Windows/Linux server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on VMware Workstation);
2. Build one big ESX(i) server and run everything virtual (so virtual ESX nodes on the physical ESX node);
3. Build two smaller ESX(i) servers (surprise suprise… this can actually be cheaper over one big node!);
4. Buy a complete (supported) system (Like Dell or HP).

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So the big news is out: vSphere 5 is here! With a lot of exciting new features, of which I will be posting several deepdives I’m sure.

For now, let’s just look at the new and exciting features vSphere 5 brings to the table.

VMware’s clear messaging

With the coming of vSphere, VMware has a very clear messaging around this new release which raises the bar once again:

• Deploy Business Critical Applications with Confidence;
• Respond to the Needs of the Business Faster with Cloud Agility;
• Move to Cloud Computing with Trust.

Some great point to strive for I think. vSphere 5 will enable even bigger VMs to run. That is the ESX part of the game. Next, agility is on the agenda. Where competing hypervisors may deliver the same performance, VMware is aiming on their toolset to further improve their agility. Cloud computing is a very important step I think.
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Yesterday I received an email stating I am now officially vExpert 2011 ! I am very honored that I was awarded for the year 2011. I will try to continue and even improve on filling this blog with useful deepdives. Also, I will continue to evangelize VMware like I have been doing the past years.

Thanks to all for your support!

Every single year has been a treat when is comes to VMworld sessions you can attend. This year VMware takes it one step further: Now YOU can take a vote on what you want sessions you want to see.

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In a previous blogpost I covered the general issue of misalignment on a disk segment level. This is the most occurring and the most obvious misalignment, where several spindles in a RAID set perform random I/O and misalignment causes more spindles need to seek for a single I/O than would be required when properly aligned.

Next in the series there is another misalignment issue which is rare, but can have a much bigger impact on tuned storage: Full stripe misalignment.

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