Exploring Cloud Technology

vSphere 4.1, VMware HA New maximums and DRS integration will make our life easier : " I guess there are a couple of keypoints I will need to stress for those creating designs: New HA maximums 32 host clusters 320 virtual machines per host 3,000 virtual machines per cluster In other words: you can have 10 hosts with 300 VMs each or 20 hosts with 150 VMs each or 32 with 93 VMs…. as long as you don’t go beyond 320 per host or 3000 per cluster you are fine! DRS Integration HA integrates on multiple levels with DRS as of vSphere 4.1. It is a huge improvement and it is something in my opinion that everyone should know about. Resource Fragmentation As of vSphere 4.1 HA is closely integrated with DRS. When a failover occurs HA will first check if there are resources available on that host for the failover. If resources are not available HA will ask DRS to accommodate for these where possible. Think about a VM with a huge reservations and fragmented resou...

VLAN ID 4095 : " One of my colleagues today asked me if it was possible to use VLAN ID 4095 for the “management” network of ESXi. This VLAN ID is however reserved for a very specific purpose. This particular VLAN ID is only to be used for “Virtual Guest Tagging” (VGT). It basically means that the VLAN ID is stripped off at the Guest OS layer and not at the portgroup layer. In other words the VLAN trunk(multiple VLANs on a single wire) is extended to the virtual machine and the virtual machine will need to deal with it. When will you use this? To be honest there aren’t many use cases any more. In the past it was used to increase the number of VLANs for a VM. The limit of 4 NICs for VI3 meant a maximum of 4 portgroups / VLANs per VM. However with vSphere the maximum amount of NICs went up to 10 and as such the amount of VLANs for a single VM also went up to 10. Before people start to get excited about Virtual Guest Tagging, I personally prefer to stay away it. It heavily complicates...

DRS Sub Cluster? vSphere 4.next : " On the community forums a question was asked around Campus Clusters and pinning VMs to a specific set of hosts. In vSphere 4.0 that’s currently not possible unfortunately and it definitely is a feature that many customers would want to use. Banjot Chanana revealed during VMworld that it was an upcoming feature but did not go into much details . However on the community forums, thanks @lamw for point this out, Elisha just revealed the following: Controls will be available in the upcoming vSphere 4.1 release to enable this behavior. You’ll be able to set “soft” (ie. preferential) or “hard” (ie. strict) rules associating a set of vms with a set of hosts. HA will respect the hard rules and only failover vms to the appropriate hosts. Basically DRS Host Affinity rules which VMware HA adheres to. Can’t wait for the upcoming vSphere version to be released and to figure out how all these nice “little” enhancements change our designs. ' DRS Sub Clus...

VMware Memory Limits : "We had a discussion internally around memory limits and what the use case would be for using them. I got some great feedback on my reply and comments so I decided to turn the whole thing into a blog article.... "

150 New Features or Enhancements in VMware vSphere 4.1 : "The huge amount of new features in vSphere 4.1 are phenomenal. We thought that the 4.1 update of VMware vSphere we'll talk about Storage I/O, memory compression and few others?. but we would not imagine a such a long list of new features and improvements.... "

VMware vSphere 4.1: Not the Typical .1 Release : "On Monday VMware announced the release of vSphere 4.1. VMware published a document describing the new features, and I also recommend checking out VMware CTO Steve Herrod's post as well as Eric Siebert's great vSphere 4.1 links post. I was planning to link to several good perspectives on the vSphere 4.1 release, but Siebert's 'links' post has them all and I suggest you take a look.... "

How to install ESXi 4.1 inside of VMware Workstation 7.1 : "In this new video which is destined to people who do not know that with VMware there is the amazing possibility to Install and test and run the latest hypervisor as a Virtual Machine. By using VMware Workstation 7.1 I'll show you the install and configuration process. There are also some very advanced possibilities available such a snapshots, autoprotect, teams available in VMware Workstation 7.1, ?. the learning becomes very flexible. There is 600 different Operating systems supported in VMwar... "

Backup and recovery Advanced Server from Acronis integrates into VMware vCenter : "In one of my previous videos I showed you the utilization of Acronis for Exchange. This backup solution is suitable for backing up and restoring e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange. And the restore individual e-mail feature of this solution is just great.... "

Four Memory Optimization Techniques Available in VMware vSphere 4.1 : "With the recent release of VMware vSphere 4.1 there has been a new feature announced ? memory compression. This fourth memory optimization technique adds itself to the list of present memory optimisation process ? Transparent page sharing (TPS), Memory ballooning and Host Swap.... "

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 5/1/2010 : " Desktop The SandboxNetworkDrives Parameter in Package.ini in ThinApp (1021149) Date Published: 5/1/2010 VMware Consolidated Backup VMware Consolidated Backup fails with the error: Exit code:16 (1012296) Date Published: 4/28/2010 VMware ESX Unable to upgrade an ESX/ESXi host using the Host Update Utility (1019133) Date Published: 4/30/2010 Unable to install Windows 2008 R2 64bit as a virtual machine (1019787) Date Published: 4/30/2010 Connecting to an ESX host using a SSH client (1019852) Date Published: 4/28/2010 The iSCSI target name appears blank in the path view of the Storage Adapters panel (1020775) Date Published: 4/26/2010 Recommended configuration maximums for NIC ports on ESX/ESXi 4.0 and 4.0 U1 (1020808) Date Published: 4/29/2010 vMotion without EVC enabled fails on Opteron 61xx processors (1020958) Date Published: 4/29/2010 Migrating an ESX 3.x virtual machine with snapshots in powe...

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: Top 20 Articles for April 2010 : " Here is our Top 20 KB list for the past month. The list is ranked by the number of times a Technical Support case was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article. Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039) FAQ: Supported/Unsupported Devices and Configurations (1184) FAQ: VMware Product Features and Functionality (1168) Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESX host (1004340) Troubleshooting Email Issues (1001628) Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212) Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466) Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA) (1001596) Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) header/descriptor file (1002511) Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490) Virtual machine does not power on because of missing or locked files (10051) Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x a...

Use NIC teaming feature to share load and get passive failover : " NIC teaming with VMware vSphere 4 With VMware vSphere 4 you have the possibility to team your NICs and benefit redundancy and share the network load of traffic between physical and virtual networks among the members of the network. The configuration is easy via GUI even if its possible use CLI (command line interface) for doing it. To be able to use NIC teaming you’ll need at least 2 physical nics configured as an uplinks to your vswitch. I found video on VMware KB to show you that configure NIC team is very easy. The association of multiple NICs with a single virtual switch to form a team. Such teams can provide passive failover and share traffic loads between members of physical and virtual networks. Some reads: Configure the virtual port group NIC teaming and fail-over policy (p. 41) Simplify VMware vSphere * 4 Networking with Intel® Ethernet 10 … (doc from Intel about 10Giga LAN cards) And a great post I ...

Backup and DR with Acronis True Image Home 2010 : " Easy setup of Acronis 2010 home. Acronis is one of my preferred products when it comes to backup and disaster recovery for physical PCs or Servers. I tested recently the new Acronis 2010 home edition called Acronis True Image Home 2010 . You can get free trial if you follow this link to test this nice piece of software. There has been quite a few changes in this new version of Acronis. I’ve been using Acronis since several years for internal usage and also for some of our clients. The new Acronis True image Home 2010 is much more intuitive. This version is destined for the home user which only wants to protect his PC or laptop. I haven’t tested a server version. There is quite a few versions and it depends of your needs…. I made a short video showing the first necessary steps you must do after the installation to backup your PC with Acronis. Those steps are very easy and after your first full backup you are protected. Not to w...

Free vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Utility To Help Check Patch Readiness For vSphere : " VMware made upgrading to vSphere 4 easy enough, but there are still a few things that can go wrong. One example is that admins must consider the patch and version levels of VirtualCenter and ESX to begin. After the vCenter upgrade specific compatibilities between vCenter 4 and ESX 3.x must be understood if a mixed mode environment will exist during the span of the upgrade. vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Check Although the Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Utility was introduced last Fall when VMware released vCenter 4 Update 1, I had not come across a situation where using the tool identified problems with ESX upgrades. Judging by several other blog posts that demonstrated the utility on the web already, most all of these bloggers showed “pass” scenarios as well. For me that was the same result until this week. In fact, the vCenter Pre-Upgrade Check proved it’s worth to me in a huge way. For those not familiar h...