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Posts Tagged ‘ESXi’

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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The issue mentioned in one of my previous blogposts (see ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue) now has a workaround! The problem is that the host profiles of vSphere mix up the vmk0 and vmk1 interfaces, after which the CLARiiON tries to communicate through the wrong VMkernel interface with ESXi.

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After a very long wait, at last the ESXi supporting version of PHDvirtual Backup is here! Version 5.1 just went GA.

Finally PHDvirtual has got ESXi support for their backup product. I keep admiring them for their efforts: Because they solved problems years ago when nobody else could, their solution got dated as VMware finally integrated some almost vital backup features to their vSphere product.

Now PHDvirtual has done an almost complete rewrite of their product in order to modernize up to the standards of the vStorage API in vSphere.

Be sure to check out their solution!

Today I got my hands on the new PHD Virtual Backup Appliance – version 5.1-ER. Following in the footsteps of its XenServer brother, this new version uses a single VBA (versus the previous versions where multiple VBA’s were used). Best of all: ESXi support at last!

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A collegue of mine, John Grinwis, pointed out a bug within a combination of ESXi, host profiles and an EMC CLARiiON: At some point the ESXi nodes swap their VMkernel ports and the CLARiiON then proceeds to register the wrong network as the management network

UPDATE: There now is a workaround available. Please visit Workaround: ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue

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