Eric Sloof

Mostafa Khalil haqs been working for two years on this new book which will be released before the VMworld 2017. You can pre-order Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 6: A Technology Deep Dive here.

• Planning and implementing Fibre Channel, FCoE, and iSCSI storage in vSphere virtualized environments
• Implementing vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture native multipathing, SATP, PSP, plug-ins, rules, registration, and more
• Working with Active/Passive and Pseudo-Active/Active ALUA SCSI-3 storage arrays
• Maximizing availability with multipathing and failover
• Improving efficiency and value by unifying and centrally managing heterogeneous storage configurations
• Understanding Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) and designing storage to take advantage of them
• Implementing VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) to maximize performance and resource utilization (versions 3, 5 and 6)
• Working with virtual disks and raw device mappings (RDMs)
• Managing snapshots in VMFS and Virtual Volumes environments
• Implementing and administering NFS (3.0 and 4.1), VAAI, Storage vMotion, VisorFS, and VASA
• Integrating VSAN core and advanced features (version 6.x including 6.6)
• Using Virtual Volumes to streamline storage operations and gain finer VM-level control over external storage

The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. A book that people can’t put down. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

This book shows that we can fundamentally and materially improve the systems we’re building. We can make the currently running ones consistently faster by deeply understanding and optimizing our systems.

The reality is that specifics of the infrastructure matter. Details matter. Especially for distributed platforms which abstract resource layers, such as NSX and vSAN. Knowing your systems inside and out is the only way to be sure you’ve properly handled those details. It’s about having a passion for these details. It’s about loving the systems we build. It’s about understanding them end-to-end.

This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, which enables you to:

• Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.
• Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.
• How the 3-DIMMs per Channel configuration results in a 10-20% performance drop.
• How TLB works and why it is bad to disable large pages in virtualized environments.
• Why 3D XPoint is perfect for the vSAN caching tier.
• What queues are and where they live inside the end-to-end storage data paths.
• Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.
• Why Intel's Data Plane Development Kit significantly boosts packet processing performance.

Underlying each release of VMware vSphere are many performance and scalability improvements. The VMware vSphere 6.5 platform continues to provide industry-leading performance and features to ensure the successful virtualization and management of your entire software-defined datacenter.


This paper describes new performance enhancements and features included in vSphere 6.5.

This video shows you how to create or modify a Virtual SAN storage policy, how to assign a policy to VMs and other objects, and how to check policy compliance.

In this three-day course, you will focus on deploying and managing a software-defined storage solution with VMware vSAN™ 6.6. You will learn how vSAN functions as an important component in the VMware software-defined data center. You will gain practical experience with vSAN concepts through the completion of hands-on lab exercises.

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

•  Describe the vSAN architecture
•  Identify vSAN features and use cases
•  Configure vSAN networking components
•  Configure a vSAN cluster
•  Deploy virtual machines on a vSAN datastore
•  Configure virtual machine storage policies
•  Perform ongoing vSAN management tasks
•  Outline the tasks for upgrading to vSAN 6.6
•  Configure vSAN encryption
•  Control vSAN resynchronization tasks
•  Create and manage nested fault domains
•  Use the vSAN health service to monitor health and performance
•  Configure a stretched cluster and observe failover scenarios
•  Describe vSAN interoperability with VMware vSphere features
•  Plan and design a vSAN cluster

Welcome to your lights-out datacenter! With vRealize Operation 6.6 automated workload balance is easier and more controllable than ever. This latest release of vRealize Operation gives you the ability to balance workloads across clusters and datastores, simple controls to govern how much balance you want based on your business needs, three ways to activate it (automated, scheduled or manual), and a powerful dashboard from which you can view and regulate everything related to balance.

Automated Workload Balance

Horizon 6 and Horizon 7 offer Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) features that address the scalability and availability of applications across data centers in different locations. This white paper provides best practices for using these new features.


This white paper is for administrators who want to provide end users with RDS- hosted Windows applications on a large scale with optimum availability.

Did you ever feel the need to push custom data to vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)? Did you wish, you could see that one parameter or metric specific to your environment in vROps? This post provides exactly that information. Here I demonstrate a script which pushes custom data into vROps. At the same time, I explained how you can customize it according to your requirement.

How to programmatically push data in vRealize Operations Manager

There are many options to configure routing with VMware NSX components. Especially when multiple sites come into play this can be challenging. This video created by Iwan Hoogendoorn will explain how to configure multi-site routing with eBGP and it uses the one primary site for all the north / south traffic and the secondary site is only used when the primary is down. 

Routing with NSX using multiple sites