vSphere

The Synology DS1010+ runs on the renewned system firmware, Synology DSM 2.3 offering comprehensive applications and features designed specifically for SMBs. Comprehensive network protocol support assures seamless file sharing across Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Windows ADS integration allows the Synology DS1010+ to quickly and easily fit in an existing business network environment with no need to recreate users accounts on the Synology DS1010+. The User Home feature minimizes the administrator’s effort in creating a private shared folder for a large amount of users. The sub-folder privilege settings further extend the flexibility to allocate permissions for different workgroups.

Using the NFS protocol or with iSCSI target support, within Synology DSM 2.3, the Synology DS1010+ is a storage asset when serving VMware.

•CPU Frequency: 1.67GHz, Dual Core
•Floating Point
•Memory Bus: 64bit@DDR800
•Memory: 1GB10
•Internal HDD1: 3.5" SATA(II) X5 or 2.5" SATA/SSD X5
•Max Internal Capacity: 10TB (5x 2TB hard drives)9
•Hot Swappable HDD
•Size (HxWxD): 157mm X 248mm X 233mm
•External HDD Interface: USB 2.0 port X4, eSATA port X1
•Weight: 4.25kg
•LAN: Gigabit X2
•Wireless Support11

"We are pleased that the Synology DS1010+ qualifies for the VMware Ready™ logo, signifying to customers that it has passed specific VMware testing and interoperability criteria and is ready to run their mission-critical business applications and operations," said Bernie Mills, senior director, alliance programs, VMware.

Although VMware’s website still has a landing page for VMware vCenter ConfigControl, the rumour goes that this product will be rebranded into vCenter Change Insight. This soon to be released new product is able to track, analyze, assess and take corrective actions to maintain configuration integrity.  It’s also able to setup policies to invoke workflows on a selected set of entities, upon a schedule or an event.

The preliminary feature list looks very promising

• Auto-documents environment, all entities, relationships, dependencies
• Tracks and alerts on configuration and relationship changes real time
• Assesses configurations against past, peers and best practices
• Takes corrective actions via policies (e.g. call out to Orchestrator)

Benefits

• Risk mitigation through improved visibility into ripple through effects
• Improve opex through visibility and streamlined remediation
• Integrates with existing products and processes
• Track, analyze, assess & take corrective actions to maintain configuration integrity

With the integration of vCenter Change Insight and Orchestrator you’re able to make custom mass configuration changes and corrections.

You better keep a close watch on the new vSphere Team blog "vThink IT", were David Friedlander and Bogomil Balkansky already have posted their first articles.

I think everyone knows the three admissions control policies which can be enforced on a VMware HA Cluster.  If you are using the default “Host Failures Allowed” policy, you must keep in mind that the largest virtual machine reservation will decide how big your cluster slot size is going to be. In most cases when you are using reservations that differ, I would prefer to use the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity”. But be careful, I’ve pulled two quotes which warn us for scattered resources and the need to set restart priority on large virtual machines. Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks has written a real great HA-Deepdive article and says :

Basic design principle: Do the math, verify that a single host has enough resources to boot your largest VM. Also take restart priority into account for this/these VM(s). Make sure you select the highest restart priority for this VM to ensure it will be able to boot.

When looking at the slides from the VMware Design Workshop I’ve found a similar suggestion.

To avoid not being able to access a large portion of host resources in a smaller cluster, you can configure the Percentage of Cluster Resources Reserved policy. However, due to the way resources are divided across hosts, this policy cannot always guarantee that all virtual machines can be restarted.

So what does it mean? I’ve created a PowerPoint slideshow with heavy animation :-) which shows the three policies and explains the caveat of using the “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity” policy.

In this article I will explain the hidden dangers when adding a resource pool with default settings to a DRS cluster, but first off all kudos to my famous virtualization friends Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman and Bouke Groenescheij. They already have written several great articles about resource pools, shares and reservations. You could ask yourself is there anymore to say about using resource pools? Well there is. I often see production environments where people have added two or three resource pools just for fun saying; there’s no reservation or limit on it so it doesn’t matter. Well they’re just plain wrong! On top of that, they even use resource pools as folders to group their virtual machines. Let’s look at an example.

In my home environment I’ve created two resource pools and one vApp. I didn’t adjust the settings and left everything default. I’ve added 8 virtual machines to recourse pool “test 1”. The two resource pools and the vApp are sibling with three virtual machines in the root resource pool. Take a close look at the ”% Shares” column in the “Resource allocation tab”. The sibling virtual machines will get 18% of the resources when there’s contention. The  vApp will get 26%, so that’s 13% for vCenter and 13% for SQL2008. The virtual machines within resource pool “test 1” will have to divide 26% among 8 virtual machines so that’s 3,25% per virtual machine. The sibling root resource pool virtual machines will get 6% each. So don’t use resource pools for cosmetic reasons, you better use virtual machine folders instead. As long as there’s no contention, there’s no problem. But as soon as you reach the max the resources might be divided in a way you didn’t expect.