vmotion

Retour d’expérience sur les NAS Iomega StorCenter px4-300d et ix4-200d, que les rédactions de NetMediaEurope (éditeur d’ITespresso.fr) utilisent depuis début 2012. Quelques mois ont passé depuis que la rédaction d’ITespresso.fr s’est dotée de NAS Iomega StorCenter, en l’occurrence les modèles px4-300d et ix4-200d. L’heure est au retour d’expérience, avec à la clé un constat : lestockage d’entreprise, et notamment des PME, a trouvé ses références ! Configuration béton en RAID5 avec partition iSCSI,... [Lire la suite]

n vSphere 5 we have support for using multiple Vmkernel ports enabled for vMotion. Having more than one physical network card for vMotion allows us to utilize them simultaneous, even when only transferring a single virtual machine. If having spare NICs we could use up to 16 Gigabit cards and four 10 Gbit NICs just for vMotion. Having 16 extra network ports might not be too common, but the performance increase can be great when just adding another vmnic for the vMotion traffic. --> Please see the rest on the blog... [Lire la suite]

In this article we will look in some detail at the new features for offloading storage workloads to the SAN array. This is called VAAI – vStorage APIs for Array Integration and enables the ESXi host to hand over some work to the SAN which the SAN array might be best at doing. VAAI was introduced in vSphere 4.1 and had three offload features, called primitives, and in 5.0 another option was added for VMFS. We access the VMFS file system by block based methods, i.e. Fibre Channel or iSCSI and as we shall see this... [Lire la suite]

There is a bug in the way the object buffer cache size is calculated for vMotion. This bug only appears with Hardware version 8 virtual desktops with large screen resolutions, however only if 3D is disabled. When 3D is enabled ESxi5 takes the necessary screen objects into account in the calculations and allocate sufficient buffer for vMotion to succeed. But with 3D disabled it doesn’t calculate the values correctly for the buffers. This is will impact any VM with large screen size. If you have a peek at my previous post you will be... [Lire la suite]

Une nouvelle de taille vient d’être annoncée par l’equipe d’Exchange ! L’extension du support Exchange 2010 sur une plateforme virtualisée. Jusqu’à maintenant si le DAG été utilisé sur une plateforme virtualisée, il fallait désactiver la partie HA (pour éviter de mixer les mécanismes de Haute Disponibilité). C’est maintenant corrigé et la liste des vendeurs officiellement supportés est disponible sur le site SVVP (Server Virtualization Validation Program). ... [Lire la suite]

There is something I always wanted to know and that is how VMotion(yes I am using the old school name on purpose) came to life. After some research on the internet and even on the internal websites I noticed that there are hardly any details to be found. Now this might be because the story isn’t as exciting as we hope it  will be or because no one took the time to document it. In my opinion however VMotion is still one of the key features VMware offers but even more important it is what revolutionized the IT world. I think it... [Lire la suite]

Zoom VMware vient, entre autres, de réduire de moitié le prix de départ de la solution vSphere Essentials pour les PME, passant ainsi à 83 $ par processeur. Nouvelle stratégie Il a souvent été critiqué pour ses prix élevés par rapport à ses concurrents. L’éditeur vient donc d’annoncer une série de mesure destinées à l’aider à reprendre des parts sur le marché des PME où Citrix et Microsoft continuent de gagner du terrain. Il change tout d’abord le nom de l’hyperviseur gratuit ESXi qui devient vSphere Hyperviser afin de creer... [Lire la suite]

I was just reading this article by Vladan about Storage VMotion. He explains how you can get your unused disk space back with Storage VMotion and moving to a Thin Provisioned disk at the same time. I agree that this is one of the best new features out there. It’s easy and effective. However, you will need to keep in mind that although it seems like disk space is not used according to the Guest OS it might have been used in the past. (An OS usually only removes the pointer to the data and not the actual data itself.) If you d0 not... [Lire la suite]

I was just reading this topic on the VMTN community. In short, a second vswp file gets created during a VMotion. As the starter of this topic noticed it could lead to not being able to VMotion VMs if you don’t have enough free disk space on your VMFS volume. One of my UK colleagues, David Burgess, jumped in and explained what is happening during the VMotion and why this temporary vswp file is being created. Read it, it’s useful info:It is only used if the target is under memory pressure. It is thin provisioned so even though it... [Lire la suite]

If you don’t have SAN/NAS storage box at home and you did not build an Openfiler NAS with for your lab without aditional physical machine as I did, you might be interested in SvSAN. With SvSAN you will be able to use the internal disks of your ESX Servers for a such an advanced features like vMotion or High Availability. Of course you cannot expect to have the same performance like in real SAN, but for home testing is just fine… So what SvSan is about? First of all it’s free. Not a demo, but you can download a free copy for your... [Lire la suite]