Customer called me to ask how they could easily migrate their existing vCenter to a new vCenter including all distributed vSwitches. They were moving from vCenter 4.0 to vCenter 4.1 and at the same time creating an AD intergrated vCenter and moving from physical to a virtual vCenter. The upgrade path would be a difficult […]
ESX
How to pin a VM to single host and still be able to enter maintenance mode
Today a customer asked me about a specific issue he has in his vSphere environment. They are running a VM that monitors network traffic and they want to make sure the VM is running on esx-1 unless esx-1 goes into maintenance mode. Easiest way to do this would be to place the VM on host-1 […]
Large Pages, Transparent Page Sharing and how they influence the consolidation ratio
Everybody talks about the benefits of Transparent Page Sharing in vSphere environments and how they reduce the amount of memory needed in your vSphere host. Thanks to Transparent Page Sharing memory overcommit in a production environment has become mainstream. Not long ago I’ve written these two posts: – “Memory overcommit in production” http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/memory-overcommit-in-production-yes-yes-yes/ which explains […]
Memory management and compression in vSphere 4.1
With vSphere 4.1, VMware released a great new feature called Memory compression. At first, after reading the release notes I thought memory compression was just one step before swapping to disk would occur. However, after reading the whitepaper “Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4” I learned some more details I want to share […]
Setting logfile location, swap file, SNMP and vmkcore partition in ESXi
With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1 it has become even more apparent that the next vSphere release will only have an ESXi version. This isn’t world shocking news since VMware had announce this already at VMworld 2009, but somehow many have been triggered to finally make the switch and install ESXi on their ESX […]