- Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
- Assess change impact. Manage and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
- Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.
Tuesday, May 1. 2012
vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 - What's New
Tuesday, December 27. 2011
Troubleshooting ESX virtual machine performance issues
- ESX has performance issues due to IRQ sharing
- Enabling IOAT and Jumbo frames
- Troubleshooting network performance issues
- Analyzing SCSI Reservation conflicts on VMware Infrastructure 3.x and vSphere 4.x
- Determining if multiple virtual CPUs are causing performance issues
- Slow performance caused by misconfigured local storage or SAN array
- Slow performance caused by out of date firmware on a RAID controller or HBA
- Testing virtual machine storage I/O performance
- iSCSI and Jumbo Frames configuration on ESX 3.x, ESX 4.x and ESXi 5.x
- Using esxtop to identify storage performance issues
- Configuring Jumbo Frames on a vNetwork Distributed Switch
- Verifying correct storage settings on ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x
- Network I/O Resource Management in vSphere 4.1 with vDS
- Impact of virtual machine memory and CPU resource limits
- Checking your firmware and BIOS levels to ensure compatibility with ESX/ESXi
- Enabling Jumbo Frames for VMkernel ports in a virtual distributed switch
- Changing the Queue Depth for QLogic and Emulex HBAs
- High co-stop (%CSTP) values seen during virtual machine snapshot activities
- Balloon driver retains hold on memory causing virtual machine guest operating system performance issues
Source KB 2001003
Tuesday, November 1. 2011
Storage vMotion of a Virtualized SQL Server Database
Live storage migration is the missing piece in liberating VMs and their associated files completely from the physical hardware on which they reside. Predictable migration times—with minimal impact on the performance of the application accessing the virtual disk that is migrated—are expected from the vSphere’s storage vMotion feature. This paper offers a deeper look at the interaction of svMotion with a large, active SQL database workload. The study includes application behavior when migrating individual virtual disks used by the database and the impact application I/O traffic had on the svMotion of a particular virtual disk. The study showed consistent and predictable disk migration time that largely depended on the capabilities of the source and the destination arrays. svMotion increased the CPU consumption of the VM running the test workload from 5% to 22% depending on the load conditions. The I/O patterns of the SQL database workload had noticeable impact on svMotion throughput (and the disk migration time).
Storage vMotion of a Virtualized SQL Server Database
Thursday, August 18. 2011
ESXi 4.1 unattended install now possible to SD-CARD/USB
With this in the back of my mind the urge to solve it grew by the minute and it almost became an obsession to find a working solution. A few days ago we cracked it! And it works like a charm.
In a nutshell:
- USB targets are not supported by default (we fixed this by disabling the check for it)
- The minimal target size should be 5.1GB (we scaled it down to 3.7GB so SD-Cards are supported)
- The SCRATH partition of 4GB (also scaled that one down to 2 GB)
- VMFS grow partition (VMFS of USB?? Neah….. isn’t going to fly so we removed it completely)
Replace you ienviron.vgz with this file (http://www.screencast.com/t/pusv1KGq3) and happy installing. If your to curious and want to know the exact modification: Unpack the file and search/grep on “ernst” in /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/* and /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/scripted/
If you are using the “PXE manager”, modify the “kickstart” part so that you don’t use Local or Remote but instead use device driver. As device driver you enter usb-storage. Oh…. just one more thing: VMware support urged me to say that this hack is not supported by VMware! So this is a non-supported but very welcome hack. :-)
Monday, July 4. 2011
Webwereld interview - Gedwongen afscheid nemen van ESX
Last week I’ve been interviewed by Edmond Varwijk, he works as a journalist for the well know Dutch ICT-News website - Webwereld. Edmond has asked me what the impact of the vSphere 5 ESXi only hypervisor will be on customers who are still using ESX.
Eric Sloof, in het dagelijks leven VMware-consultant en bekend van de NTPRO.NL-weblog, begrijpt keuze van VMware. "VMware wil een mean and lean hypervisor en die hebben ze met ESXi in handen." Volgens Eric Sloof is de impact van het verlies van de Service Console ook voor beheerders die nog een ESX-omgeving managen, bescheiden.
Uit ervaring weet hij dat het meeste in het dagelijks beheer nu al vanuit de vCenter-managementomgeving gebeurt. Bovendien heeft VMware de VMware Management Assistant (vMA) ontwikkeld. "Daarin is een vSphere Command Line (vCLI) beschikbaar die je in staat stelt om door middel van vicfg-commando's specifieke taken uit te voeren."
The article is in Dutch and you can get it here.
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/107172/gedwongen-afscheid-nemen-van-esx.html
Sunday, June 19. 2011
New Technical Papers - vShield Edge Design Guide and vShield App Design Guide
VMware vShield is a suite of security virtual appliances built for VMware vSphere 4.1. It is a critical security component for protecting virtualized datacenters from attacks and misuse. vShield App and vShield Edge are the two products in the suite that address network security. The goal of this document is to provide details on the key security technologies implemented in the vShield App and vShield Edge products that enable administrators to build a multitenant virtualized datacenter environment that is flexible, agile, scalable and secure. The document first discusses the challenges in using physical security to protect virtual infrastructure and then describes in detail the key new technologies in vShield products that address those challenges.
The Technology Foundations of VMware vShield
VMware vShield Edge, part of the VMware vShield family of virtualization security products, provides perimeter security and network services such as DHCP, NAT, Load balancing, and VPN service. vShield Edge is a virtual firewall appliance that can be provisioned on-demand and its services enabled on the fly to meet the flexibility requirement of cloud deployments. The goal of this document is to help customers understand where and how a vShield Edge firewall can be deployed to secure and isolate tenants/organizations, while providing some reference designs along the way. This document will also help VI administrators and network administrators understand the deployment of security and other network services in virtual datacenters using a vShield Edge firewall.
VMware vShield App, part of the VMware vShield family of virtualization security products, protects applications in the virtual datacenter from network-based threats. vShield App gives organizations deep visibility into network communications between virtual machines and enables granular policy enforcement with security groups. This document helps VI administrators understand the deployment of security around the virtualized server infrastructure using VMware vShield App product. Two reference designs are provided to help customer understand the security deployment around the virtual infrastructure using vShield App product and advantages.