vmfs

Ever wonder why VMware View would support more than eight hosts in an ESX cluster? Wonder no more. VMware View 5.1 now supports up to 32 hosts in an ESX cluster! That is provided a NFS data store is specified for linked clone replica creation. Since more than eight hosts can now be used in an ESX cluster, VMware View 5.1 makes desktop consolidation even more efficient than ever before. I recently reviewed a technical white paper that discusses VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1 and the number of hosts it can support... [Lire la suite]

Bonjour, Une fois n'est pas coutume je prends la plume numérique pour noter des informations importantes (à mes yeux ;) ) lors de l'utilisation de VMFS locaux sur des serveurs ESX(i) 4 et 4.1 En effet lors de l'installation d'un ESX 3.X, l'on pouvait formatter les VMFS locaux en sélectionnant la taille des blocs et ainsi influer sur la taille maximale des VMDKs : 1Mo --> 256Go (taille de bloc par défaut à l'installation) 2Mo --> 512Go 4Mo --> 1To 8Mo --> 2To Ces valeurs sont approchées, car en fait il faut retirer... [Lire la suite]

I’ve seen this myth floating around from time to time and as I never publicly wrote about it I figured it was time to write an article to debunk this myth. The question that is often posed is if thin disks will hurt performance due to fragmentation of the blocks allocated on the VMFS volume. I guess we need to rehash (do a search on VMFS for more info)  some basics first around Think Disks and VMFS volumes… When you format a VMFS volume you can select the blocksize (1MB, 2MB, 4MB or 8MB). This blocksize is used when the... [Lire la suite]

As part of my role I very often review design documents that other consultants/architect have written, and not only those of VMware employees but also from external people. On top of that of course I also see a lot of VCDX application packages pass by. Something struck me the other day when I was doing the 3rd review in just a couple of hours and I started thinking about the designs I had reviewed so far and noticed there was a common theme. Before I get started I want to make sure everyone understands that I believe there’s a very... [Lire la suite]

Un petit aperçu de la future version d'ESX/vCenter... Aujourd'hui: comment agrandir un VMFS sans Extent! I’ve been playing around with my vSphere/Next gen ESX lab. I was replaying the VMworld lab and one of the assignments was to  resize a VMFS volume. Yes that’s correct, resize not extent. Extents have been discussed by many and the general consensus is avoid them if/when possible. But when running out of diskspace you don’t always have the option to avoid them. Some can’t afford the downtime that comes with a “cold... [Lire la suite]

Whenever I do a beta test of a product / OS the first thing I do is check if all the features / commands that I used with the previous version still exist. When I did an “esxcfg- tab tab” on the next version of ESX one thing stood out, esxcfg-vmhbadevs was gone. I use this command a lot when investigating SAN problems, same goes for esxcfg-mpath by the way. Both print really valuable information that I usually copy & paste for keeping track of changes. With the upcoming version of ESX(vSphere) a new command will be introduced... [Lire la suite]