I have been behind on my blog reading, so here are a few posts that I thought were worth the read.
VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning
by http://www.virtualpro.co.uk/
“I’ve recently been evaluating some of the new features in VMware vSphere to see what use they would be to my current employer. One of the areas that I touched upon in my “what’s new in vSphere Storage” blog post was thin provisioning. I wanted to come back and cover this particular topic in more detail as it’s a key feature and it’s available throughout all versions of vSphere so I’m sure everyone will be interested in it.”
How much RAM for an ESX server – a.k.a. Lego Blocks
by http://technodrone.blogspot.com/
“
I started to read the sample chapters that Scott Lowe released from his upcoming book, and one of the parts were about the subject of scaling up vs. scaling out.
A slight bit more of an explanation as to what I mean by this. Should I buy bigger more monstrous servers, or a greater number of smaller servers? “
FT Problem Decoder Chart
“Receiving errors while trying to configure FT (Fault Tolerance) on a VM and stumped as to the reason why? This may help.”
Not All FT Compatible CPUs Are Created Equal
“Hopefully you are aware that to enable VMware vSphere’s FT (Fault Tolerance), you need FT compatible CPUs from Intel or AMD. VMware KB article 1008027 Processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance outlines both the Intel and AMD CPU requirements to use FT. I had read this article months ago and on that basis I purchased FT compatible AMD Opteron 2356 Barcelona Quad Core processor upgrades for the HP DL385 G2 servers in my lab.”
Max amount of VMs per VMFS volume
by http://www.yellow-bricks.com
“Two weeks ago I discussed how to determine the correct LUN/VMFS size. In short it boils down to the following formula:
round((maxVMs * avgSize) + 20% )
So in other words, the max amount of virtual machines per volume multiplied by the average size of a virtual machine plus 20% for snaps and .vswp rounded up. (As pointed out in the comments if you have VMs with high amounts of memory you will need to adjust the % accordingly.) This should be your default VMFS size. Now a question that was asked in one of the comments, which I already expected, was “how do I determine what the maximum amount of VMs per volume is?”. There’s an excellent white paper on this topic. Of course there’s more than meets the eye but based on this white paper and especially the following table I decided to give it a shot:”
Xen : Bridging on bonded & trunked interfaces
by http://unixfoo.blogspot.com
"When you deploy some critical stuffs like Oracle DB, Oracle RAC DB etc on the Xen or Oracle virtual machine, you’ll have to use bonded network interfaces and the vlan trunks. By default, Xen and Oracle VM doesn’t support the xen bridges created on bonded-vlaned-interfaces. The below document gives you a clear idea on how to create and configure xen bridges on bonded and vlan trunked interfaces.”
