Eric Sloof

My virtualization friend Remon Lam who works as a VMware Consultant  in the Netherlands and is running VirtualClouds.info has recorded my complete VMUG 2010 session on video. Besides that he converted it and did an upload to vimeo last night. Kudos and many thanks go out to Remon. For the attendees who want to see it again because I was talking pretty fast or people that were not able to attend it’s available online, the full 45 minutes. If you want to run through the slides while I’m presenting, you can get your copy here. I hope you will enjoy it and don’t fall asleep. :-)

iPad: http://player.vimeo.com/video/17711772?color=24ff95

This year’s Dutch VMUG Event 2010 video contains a lot of awesome impressions I’ve captured during the day. I want to thank all the 750 attendees for visiting this great event. The video is a compilation of the start-up, some sessions I attended, the workshops, the food and drinks and at the end of the day all the lucky prize winners.

Here's the link to the Dutch VMUG Event 2010 Video for iPad users http://bit.ly/gHV0Ej

This paper describes best practices and guidance for properly deploying VMware HA in VMware vSphere 4.1.  These include discussions on proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10166

This year’s Dutch VMUG event 2010 is massive! The number of attendees is over 750 and there are loads of great sessions and workshops. Right before lunch, I had the honour to present my session which deals with virtual machine advanced troubleshooting in a vSphere environment. When you are interested in  the metrics you can find in esxtop and prepared to go beyond the point where you’re just looking at CPU ready times then this slide deck will give you a better insight. You can also get a grip on things like memory limits and reservation, storage bottlenecks and finding the reason for dropped network packets.

This presentation has cost me a lot of time to prepare but it was a joy to build it. I’ve been working on it for two months. Besides delivering training on a daily basis, I’ve spent every free minute on doing research, gathering screenshots and creating awesome graphics. Two valued virtualization colleagues have reviewed the presentation so I want to thank Rawlinson Rivera and Harold Schoofs for their great feedback. vSphere  Advanced Troubleshooting has been presented during my VMware training courses for five times, so from this place many thanks to all my students for their great feedback in the past weeks. I’ve uploaded the presentation to SlideShare but you can also get a copy here: AdvancedTroubleshooting.pdf - 50 slides of awesomeness from start to end, I hope you enjoy it.

The VCAP4-DCD is directed toward IT and Consulting Architects capable of designing VMware solutions in a multi-site, large enterprise environment. Successful candidates possess a deep understanding of datacenter design methodologies and VMware core components - and their relation to storage and networking. In addition, successful candidates will have a broad knowledge of applications and physical infrastructure, as well as their relationship to virtual infrastructure.

To help prepare for the exam, attend the new VMware vSphere design courses that cover topics from the VCAP4-DCD exam blueprint:

• VMware vSphere - Design Workshop
• DRBC Design – Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Fundamentals

Prerequisite

You must be a VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 (VCP4) in order to take the advanced certification exam.

How to register

Candidates will need to obtain VMware authorization before registering with a Pearson VUE test center. Please complete the Registration Request to get authorized. You will need to know your VCP number.

Sign up to take the VCAP4-DCD exam

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a "how to" guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and host affinity rules. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.

Coverage includes

- HA node types
- HA isolation detection and response
- HA admission control
- VM Monitoring
- HA and DRS integration
- DRS imbalance algorithm
- Resource Pools
- Impact of reservations and limits
- CPU Resource Scheduling
- Memory Scheduler
- DPM

The video

Last week I already received a proof copy of the new book by Duncan and Frank and I must say that I’m impressed. When you think - you know everything there is to know about HA and DRS, you should definitely read it. You will be amazed with the amount of detailed information about vSphere 4.1 DRS and HA clustering. Two other great takeaways are the “clear timelines” and “best practices”.  I’ve recorded a video in which I’ll dive into some of the stuff I’ve seen in “VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive”. I hope you enjoy it.

About the authors

Duncan Epping (VCDX 007) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Cloud Practice. Duncan works primarily with Service Providers and large Enterprise customers. He is focused on designing Public Cloud Infrastructures and specializes in vCloud Director, VMware HA and vSphere in general. Duncan is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com, the leading Virtualization/VMware blog.

Frank Denneman (VCDX 029) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Professional Services Organization. Frank works primarily with large Enterprise customers and Service Providers. He specializes in Resource Management, DRS and storage. Frank is the owner of frankdenneman.nl which has recently been voted number 6 worldwide on vsphere-land.com.

How to order?

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (ISBN 1456301446) is available for order at createspace, Amazon and comcol.

Finally, with Transparent Memory Compression, 4.1 will compress memory on the fly to increase the amount of memory that appears to be available to a given VM. The new Transparent Memory Compression is of interest in the workload cases where memory -- rather than CPU cycles -- has limitations. ESX/ESXi provides a Memory Compression cache to improve virtual machine performance when using memory over-commitment. Memory Compression is enabled by default when a host's memory becomes overcommitted; ESX/ESXi compresses virtual pages and stores them in memory.  

Since accessing compressed memory is faster than accessing memory swapped to disk, Memory Compression in ESX/ESXi allows memory over-commits without significantly hindering performance. When a virtual page needs to be swapped, ESX/ESXi first attempts to compress the page. Pages that can be compressed to 2 KB or smaller are stored in the virtual machine's compression cache, increasing the capacity of the host. The maximum size can be set for the Compression Cache and disable Memory Compression using the Advanced Settings dialog box in the vSphere Client.

VM performance  is ultimately determined by  the underlying physical hardware  that  serves as  the  foundation  for  your  virtual infrastructure.   The  construction of  this  foundation has become  simpler over  the  years, but  there are  still  several areas  that should be  fine-tuned  in order  to maximize  the VM performance  in your environment. While some of  the content of  this writing will be generic toward any hypervisor, this document focuses on VMware ESX(i) 4.1. This is an introduction to performance tuning and not intended to cover everything in detail. Most topics have links to sites that contains deep-dive information if you wish to learn more.

Whitepaper - Maximizing Virtual Machine Performance

Next week Veeam's Ricky El-Qasem is going back into trainer mode. Some of you may know that he used to be a VMware instructor and so it was a logical move for him when invited by Veeam to develop an education services program. On 10th December He will be delivering a workshop where he will be teaching some lucky attendees of the Dutch VMUG how to use Veeam Backup’s Instant VM recovery and Exchange Item level restore features which is part of vPower engine. In some way this is Veeam’s first official classroom training course and to mark this special occasion they have a great raffle prize. So some lucky attendee of Ricky's workshop gets yes that’s right a brand new xBox 360 with kinect. Only people attending the Veeam workshop are eligible for the raffle, so register today.

http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/?p=331

With the latest release of PowerCLI (4.1.1)  VMware has introduced a real cool new commandlet.

Get-EsxTop exposes esxtop functionality. The default parameter set is CounterValues. The Counter parameter filters the specified statistics. To retrieve all available counters, use the CounterInfo parameter set. The properties of each counter are returned through the Fields property (an array) of the CounterInfo output object. You can also retrieve stats topologies using the TopogyInfo parameter set. This information contains either inventory data that does not change or a counter instance structure describing the relationship between different counter instances.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/