Tag Archives: ESXi

Thin Expansion (vSphere5)

Posted on February 9, 2012 by josh@sostechblog.com

Here’s a curious one. The max size of a thin-provisioned VMDK on a VMFS5 datastore is 2TB. If you create a new VMDK you’re allowed to create it at 2048GB/2TB.   However when you go to expand an existing VMDK … Continue reading →

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ESXi no management network redundancy

Posted on January 15, 2012 by josh@sostechblog.com

After configuring a vSphere cluster for High Availability you might see this message on the summary page of your hosts. It’s a nice reminder that your VMkernel Port carrying management traffic only has one NIC available, and is flagged by … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, VMware | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Jumbo vs Flow Control

Posted on January 8, 2012 by josh@sostechblog.com

Don’t forget to check your Ethernet switches for Jumbo vs Flow Control support and recommendations – and double check your config to make sure it matches. Some switches support both, some prefer one over the other – or you might … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, NetApp, Storage, Virtualization, VMware | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

VMware vSphere Fast Track v5

Posted on December 12, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

A new infrastructure class has been added to the current list, “VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.0]” vSphere FastTrack V5 Datasheet While it shares the same name as a 4.1 class it seems to be closer to a 5.0 version of … Continue reading →

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vSphere Licensing: Part 8 ESXi Free = 32GB Hard limit?

Posted on November 29, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

In the mix of licensing specifics around ESXi/vSphere 5 is the idea that for a paid license you have a soft limit – the vRAM entitelment is a high-water mark over a period of time that you can exceed briefly … Continue reading →

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Changing VM reservations on the fly

Posted on October 21, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

Heard a question the other day in regards to changing virtual machine reservations on the fly and the resulting impact on the size of the swap (.vswp) file. Every running virtual machine on a VMware ESX/i host has a .vswp … Continue reading →

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VMDK alignment (Free p2v / v2v)

Posted on September 27, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

Disk alignment is a known problem in virtual environments. Older guest OS (primarily Windows before 2008 tho *nix has the same issue) would start their partitions slightly off the boundary which could cause an increased amount of IOPS. You can … Continue reading →

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VMware iSCSI Multipath (set all PSPs)

Posted on September 8, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

iSCSI Multipath Post 1 (basic) iSCSI Multipath Post 2 (Equallogic script) iSCSI Multipath Post 3 (vSphere5) I found a script at VMware’s PowerShell blog about setting all your LUN Path Selection Policy’s to Round Robin. This is a great trick … Continue reading →

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Best Practices for all Occasions (incl vSphere 5)

Posted on September 7, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

VMware has published several “Best Practices” guides for vSphere5 so I thought I’d collect many of them (see below) as well as add my own summary/best practice guide. This has lots of VMware-specific entries but the essence can apply to … Continue reading →

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vSphere5: My favorite feature

Posted on August 25, 2011 by josh@sostechblog.com

Get-AlarmDefinition | New-AlarmAction -Email -To ‘jandrews@inflexionllc.com’ -CC @(‘test1@inflexionllc.com’, ‘test2@inflexionllc.com.com’) -Body ‘Test body’ -Subject ‘Test subject’ Drop that line into a PowerCLI windows and poof all alarms will be updated to send an email when they go off (change warning (yellow) … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, PowerShell, Scripting, Virtualization, VMware | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments