vFrank
Essense of virtualization
Design best practises
Apr 6th
Just going through the vSphere Design Workshop before delivering it tomorrow. Two Best Practises I want to bring out to everyone:
Choice of hypervisor: ESX or ESXi ?
ESXi
Choise of Physical or Virtual vCenter server?
Virtual
Hyper-Threading on vSphere
Mar 30th
One of my favorite bloggers and performance guru Scott Drummonds has posted some info on Hyper-Threading and vSphere.
On earlier Intel Processors it was best practise to disable Hyper-Threading. But with the I7/Nehalem/x5xx processors from Intel you should be adviced to ENABLE it. In many use cases it can give a 10-30% performance boost. Check out Scotts blog for all the goodies.
Windows 2008 R2 and vmware tools svga
Mar 29th
Just stumbled over this great article by Jason Boche. There have been a lot of issues regarding the svga driver and Windows 2008 R2. Basicly before 4.0 update 1 you had to disable the vmware tools svga driver and use the generic windows. From Update 1 you can use the driver provided by vmware tools. Unfortunately it is not automatically installed so you must go to device manager and upgrade driver. The driver path is:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video
After driver installation your mouse will be smooth when using the Remote Console from your vSphere client.
vSphere Design Workshop
Mar 23rd
A course I am looking forward to deliver is the new vSphere Design Course. It is primarly for the vmware partners, but end-users can also attend this course. I am in a Train the Trainer session right now. I will update later.
UPDATE: great course, all labs are design labs. All you use is pen and paper. This course requires that you are experienced with vSphere.
Upgrade Virtual Hardware blue screen 07b
Mar 13th
Recently two customers contacted me about virtual machines blue screening upon boot after they upgraded their virtual hardware from version 4 to 7. Both had the same 07b blue screen which means no driver for the disk controller could be found.
The steps for updating the virtual hardware is: 1. install latest vmware tools 2. shut down the vm and select “upgrade virtual hardware”
The problem here was that both customers allready had installed the latest vmware tools, but the machine still bluescreened on boot.
The fix to get your machine back online:
1. Remove the disks from the virtual machines you just upgraded.
2. Create a new virtual machine (version 4) and attach the original disks. Attach the disk in the right order and use
the same disk controller used for the machine before the upgrade.
This should get your machine back online. Then try to reinstall vmware tools in the machine and upgrade the driver for the disk controller. Before doing the next virtual hardware upgrade take a snapshot of the machine, so you can easily revert if it blue screens again.
Memory Compression
Mar 3rd
Today we have TPS (transparent page sharing) vmmenctl (ballooning) and esx hosts swapping. But a new technology is coming: Memory Compression
I am not allowed to say anything about this technology because of NDA, but Scott Drummonds has written an interesting article about the future feature memory compression. You can check out Scotts article: here
The good thing about this technology is that Vmware will be even better at overcommitting memory. Every customer/partner/student I ask the same question: “What is the limiting resource on your ESX hosts?” and almost everyone answers MEMORY.
This will give us the option to run more on less.
New Vmware Performance Course scheduled
Feb 26th
We have scheduled our first “vSphere Manage for Performance” course in Denmark (Copenhagen). It is a 3-day course and will start April 27th and end April 29th.
The course looks very promising and I am really psyched about running this course. The performance guru Scott Drummonds has helped develop the course content!
If you are interessted write an e-mail to training@arrowecs.dk
VCB is not supported on the next vSphere Release!
Feb 25th
According do this document from vmware VCB is not going to be compatible with the next vShpere release. This means your backup product must utilize the “new” vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP).
vRanger 5 – CBT, ABM, Dedup
Feb 18th
I just came back from a two hour session with Vizioncore about their future products and the direction they are taking. Interessting stuff. What I wanted to bring back to you guys is three features we will see in the upcoming vRanger version 5 release.
- Dedup
- CBT (Change Block Tracking)
- ABM (Active Block Mapping)
These features will all help in their own way to dramatically reduce the backup window.
Dedup will make sure that only unique blocks will be transfered to our backup location.
CBT (A vSphere ESX(i) kernel feature) will make incremental backups highly effiecient.
ABM will make sure that we only backup the active data in the VMDK and not data that has been deleted from within the guest operating system.
I will try to get signed up on the version 5 beta program. I will keep you updated on this.
Bulk Update tools – no reboot powershell
Feb 17th
The “-NoReboot” only works from vSphere update 1.
Connect-VIServer “vc.fqdn”
Get-Cluster ClusterName
Get-VM | Update-Tools -NoReboot
Disconnect-VIServer
