I was checking out VMware’s new online search-able HCL and I noticed that the new Sun Unified Storage Systems were on the HCL. That was fast - and now I’m really curious as to how the systems with flash drives perform as storage for ESX.
Paul Manning, from VMware, in response to a question I asked in the VI:OPS forums:
The current best practice for NFS is to not seperate the VM swap space from the VMhome directory on a NFS datastore. The reason for the originial recommendation was just good old fashioned conservitiveness.
More at the forum post, including more on [...]
Timekeeping best practices for Linux - “This article presents best practices for Linux timekeeping. These recommendations include specifics on the particular kernel command line options to use for the Linux operating system of interest. There is also a description of the recommended settings and usage for NTP time sync, configuration of VMware Tools time synchronization, [...]
Your Usable Capacity May Vary - Chuck conducts a thought deployment comparing EMC, HP and NetApp usable space for a 120 disk Exchange deployment. And while he glosses over a couple perhaps non-minor issues (RAID-5 vs RAID-DP and whether EMC’s snapshots are adequately performant), he does hit one of NetApp’s weak spots dead on: [...]
Performance Report: Multiprotocol Performance Test of VMware® ESX 3.5 on NetApp Storage Systems: A complementary whitepaper to VMware’s own work comparing Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS as storage protocols for VMware ESX. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
On the ESX console, do the following:
Read the documentation for each patch.
Group patches that can be installed together into a directory, possibly an NFS mount available on all your ESX hosts.
Cd into the patch directory and untar the patches:
for i in `ls *.tgz`; do
tar -xvzf $i
done
Install the patches:
for i in `ls`; do
if [ -d [...]
File Level Recovery from within a VMDK backup - Nick Triantos of NetApp covers file-level recovery from VMware (Windows) VMDK files again, in more depth than he has before. Nick notes that it can be a “a point-and-click process.”
VMware to release ESX 3i for free next week - Yeah, the title pretty much says it all; I guess that’s one way to compete with the price of Hyper-V. Now what were those 3i vs 3.5 limitations?
VM HA - service console networking, isolation behavior - and other “under the covers stuff” - An overview of how VMware ESX’s High Availability works under the hood - making it much more apparent to me how important file locking is to HA’s functioning. (I’d love to see an overview of how file locking [...]
Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM. - Lengthy speculation about the future of Xen now that Hyper-V is out. If this turns out to be correct, I think it leaves Sun in a particularly awkward spot, given that [...]