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Posts Tagged ‘VMware’

People are talking SO much about VMware View sizing these days. Everyone seems to have their own view on how much IOPS a vDesktop (virtual desktop) really uses. When you’re off by a few IOPS times a thousand desktops things can get pretty ugly. Everyone hammers on optimizing the templates, making sure the vDesktops do not swap themselves to death etc. But everyone seems to forget a very important aspect…

Where to look

People are measuring all the time. Looking, checking, seeing it fail in the field, go back to the drawing board, size things up, try again. This could happen in an environment where storage does not a 1-on-1 relation with disk drives (like when you use SSDs for caching etc). But even in straight RAID5/RAID10 configs I see it happen all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I decided to update my home lab from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 4.1u1. Updating vCenter went smoothly. Once I tried to update the first ESX node in the cluster using VMware Update Manager (VUM), it failed with the error “vim.fault.noHost”.

Say what? Googling the error did not give away too much detail; all posts on this were way back in the ESX 3.5 times. I hate when this happens. So what to do? Yes I still run ESX in my homelab (I like boot from SAN way too much ;). So off to the logging.

It had been some time since I looked at ESX logs in detail; the amount of “verbose errors” are enormous…. Anyway, it seemed to have something to do with the way vCenter talks (or rather fails in talking) to the node…

First I tried rebooting the node, then run VUM again to remediate the node agian… But again it failed. Finally I just removed the node from the cluster (via a hard “disconnect” followed by a remove), then re-added the node. After this, the node remediated without issue.

Just when I thought I had done a pretty complete tuneup on the storage path from Veeam backup to an Iomega IX2-200 NAS, two things came up I wanted to test. The first one (why didn’t I think of that) is to set compression to “low”, saving CPU cycles and hopefully getting more throughput. The second one was starting a second job on the same Veeam VM to the same target storage.

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In my quest to get the most out of my home lab setup when it comes to backup speeds to my IX2-200 (see Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds) today I will configure jumbo frames on my environment, and I will show how each of the possible connection options to the IX2-200 can be configured for jumbo frames.

A small history on network frames, and especially the Jumbo Ones

There are many stories going round about jumbo frames. Some say it is not worth while, others say it is the difference between day and night. But what are jumbo frames in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Veeam’s Happy Holidays gift, I now have a license for several Veeam products. The one I really wanted to try in my home lab was Veeam Backup and Replication.

In this blogpost, I will try various ways to connect the Veeam appliance to my Iomega IX2-200 NAS box. This setup is very tiny indeed, but it clearly shows the options you have and how they perform compared to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I see “top 10” lists appear everywhere, I decided to follow in line and produce my own top 10 posts of the year 2010:

1. Performance impact when using VMware snapshots
2. Throughput part 2: RAID types and segment sizes
3. Throughput part 3: Data alignment
4. Throughput part 1: The Basics
5. vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts!
6. VMware HA, slotsizes and constraints
7. Breaking VMware Views sound barrier with Sun Open Storage (part 1)
8. Ye Olde Snapshot
9. VMware Infrastructure Resource Settings Sagas
10. Scaling VMware hot-backups (using esXpress)

My view on things

It is great to see what interests people the most. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you (like me 🙂 ) who are dying to see… The first episode of Chad’s World is online! Check it out here: Chad’s World

EXCELLENT!!

From left to right – Duco Jaspars…. uhm forgot the rest, sorry! 😉

The VMUG 2010 surely was once again a great success. Here are some photos for you all to see:
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VMware’s VMmark (I have also read the name being VMark though?) has been around for a long time. It is software which creates “tiles” of workload on a physical server using several virtual machine workloads. It then adds tiles to the hardware platform, until its resources run out. Now version 2.0 is out!

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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 »