The penny pincher’s guide to virtualization: Virtualization Log

Server consolidation via virtualization can save an organization so much money that people sometimes forget about ways to stretch a virtualization budget further. Not so for Rick Vanover, a tip writer and systems administrator, who offers his thoughts on the most cost-effective servers, network cards, and host bus adapters (HBAs) to buy for a virtualization host.

Speaking of saving money, a local credit union avoided having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on extra disk space for its NetApp storage by running A-SIS data deduplication on its VMware Virtual Disk Infrastructure volumes. A-SIS comes “free” with NetApp NearStore arrays, although of course, NearStore isn’t free.

Got VMs running on SAN storage? In another tip, Rick Vanover details a technique for retrieving a logical unit number (LUN) when the presence of VMware native drivers prevents you from using normal techniques. He also describes the esxcfg-mpath command that you can use from the service console to reveal information about HBAs, multipathing, LUN configurations and the like. Read this; your storage administrator will love you for it.