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Posts Tagged ‘virtual disk’

Some people have asked me how to actually create the 3D graphs from the vcsiStats tool. I use a simple Excel sheet for this. Using the script I described in vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts! , you can import the files outputted into excel and see the Excel chart instantaneously.

The vscsiStats tool is a very powerfull vSphere utility. It allows you to see virtual disk performance (such as latency, IOPS block sizes etc). The script I used in part 1 and in part 2 of this series will shoot multiple samples of these values right after each other, which you can then import into Excel to produce surface charts, like this one:

How to create graphs like this is described in detail below. Read the rest of this entry »

I just spotted something that had not occurred to me yet… A small new detail in vSphere 4.1 (or I just missed out on it previously)… VMware has had this “problem” for a long time: If you added a second virtual disk to a virtual machine on a datastore different from the location of the first virtual disk, vSphere used to name that new virtual disk the same as the base disk. Well not any more!

I noticed in vSphere 4.1 that this is no longer true. A second disk created on a separate datastore gets its name from the virtual machine (like it used to be), but with a trailing “_1” in the filename.

For a long time backup vendors have been battling with this “issue” because the backup software ended up with two virtual disks that were both named the same… In a lot of environments that meant manual renaming and remounting second and third disks to VMs in order to get proper backups without having to guess which disk goes where.

Amazing that these things all of a sudden get fixed now that VMware has its own backup solution 😉