The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy » vmotion

VMware ESXi 5.0 Release Features

Nathan Simon — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:17:58 +0000

I have the latest ESXi 5 features, check them out! There might be some additions closer to the release date but as of right now, it looks like there is a good number of improvements.

• Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
• vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
• Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
• Support for up to 1 TB of memory
• Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
• Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
• USB 3.0 device support
• UEFI virtual BIOS
• Host UEFI boot support
• New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
• Client-connected USB devices
• Smart card reader support for VMs
• Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
• Support for up to 512 VMs
• Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
• Improved SNMP support
• Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
• Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
• Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
• iSCSI user interface support
• Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
• Swap to SSD
• 2TB+ LUN support
• Storage vMotion snapshot support
• vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
• ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
• A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
• vCenter Server Appliance
• Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
• vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
• System message logging enhancements
• Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
• All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
• Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection

I am curious to see how the Adobe Flex Web front-end will fair compared to the web based interface, it can definitely only be better!

vSphere 4.1

Nathan Simon — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:39:05 +0000

VMware is to announce the official release of vSphere 4.1 tomorrow. One great option for SMB Clients is vSphere Essentials Plus.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus—This kit includes all the features of vSphere Essentials, plus High Availability and Data Recovery to automatically recover your data and restart your virtual machines in the event of system failures; with vMotion technology, now you can completely eliminate planned downtime during server maintenance.

I also mananged to find a list of features, a main one being support for passthrough USB, can it really be true? Anyways go here for the complete list of BETA features, its possible that not all will make it in the official release, I will post again after vSphere 4.1 is officially released.

-NS

Passed VCP-410!

Nathan Simon — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:38:00 +0000

Well I did it with 9 business days of studying I attained VCP vSphere4 Status! Since I am not a good studier as my buddy Raj, I found the exam a little more difficult. When I found out that they lowered the passing grade to 60% I was happy, and yet I knew that they made the exam quite a bit more difficult. Alot of the questions were based on the new features, like vSphere Backup,vSphere Orchestrator and, vApp to name a couple. There was also alot of questions on iSCSI, vSwitching, and vDistributed Switches. I suggest someone gets hands on experience with vCenter Server 4, wherein it contains multiple hosts, so you can practise DRS, HA, Fault Tolerance, Vmotion, and other enterprise applications. Either way, it was fun to study till I was blue in the face, but next time I hope to take my time. If you plan on writing it, make sure you check my earlier blog, take your time, and read all the bullet points from the vSphere PDF documents. Good Luck!

-NS VCP

DRS, Vmotion, and Snapshots

Nathan Simon — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:01:02 +0000

I think setting DRS(Distributed Resource Scheduling) to manual mode when removing snapshots, should be best practice, especially when you are only running two ESX servers and they are slightly taxed. Why? Mainly because when you remove a snapshot, especially a two tiered one, it can cause the hard disk to “thrash” and thus signaling DRS to Vmotion a Virtual Machine from one ESX Server to the other ESX Server automatically. This will of course cause more stress on the hardware and eventually the client may notice the decrease in performance. Hey I’m just speaking from personal experience. When the snapshot is removed, re-enable DRS. Comments?

-NS

VMFS and Block Sizes

Nathan Simon — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:35:09 +0000

Well i ran into this error today (4:30 am CST, don’t ask me why I am up right now!) “File too large” when trying to create a virtual machine with a 30GB drive and a 300GB drive. I tracked it down to the fact that the block size on my second LUN is 1MB which gives a max file size of 256GB. I will have to change the block size to 2MB which will let me create 512GB files, unfortunately I need to move a couple VMs off there to do so, I will just end up utilizing vmotion to move the VMs then reformat the LUN using a 2MB block size, then vmotion back. Sounds like fun! Well it isn’t, but its an interesting learning experience. Don’t make the same mistake, and you wont have to deal with this issue yourself.

The table below is the Block size in correspondence with the max file size

1MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 256GB
2MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 512GB
4MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 1024GB
8MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 2048GB