Monday, July 29. 2013
Full VMworld 2012 Session - Architecting and Operating a VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster
In this session, Lee Dilworth and Duncan Epping will discuss the design and operational considerations for VMware vSphere® Metro Storage Cluster environments, also commonly referred to as stretched cluster environments. Best practices for implementation and design will be shared. Various failure scenarios that can occur in a stretched storage environment will also be discussed in depth, including how vSphere 5.x responds to these failures. We will cover the implications for your vSphere High Availability, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ and VMware vSphere Storage DRS™ configuration and provide recommendations on increasing availability and simplifying operations.
Thursday, July 25. 2013
Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) with ESXi/ESX and Cisco/HP switches
This VMware KB article provides information on the concepts, limitations, and some sample configurations of link aggregation, NIC Teaming, Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), and EtherChannel connectivity between ESXi/ESX and Physical Network Switches, particularly for Cisco and HP.
Tuesday, July 23. 2013
Cool Mac Tool - ClamXav
ClamXav can be setup up as passive or active: scan only the files you tell it to or your entire hard drive, whichever you prefer; you can also choose to activate Sentry to monitor your hard drive and scan new files as they arrive.
View In iTunes - ClamXav: The Free Anti-Virus Solution for Mac OS X
VMware Knowledge Base (KB) - Linux 2.6 kernel-based virtual machines experience slow disk I/O performance (2011861)
If you're using Linux 2.6 kernel-based virtual machines and you're experiencing slow storage performance as compared to physical hosts, the might be a problem with the I/O Scheduler. As of the Linux 2.6 kernel, the default I/O Scheduler is Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ).
The default scheduler will affect all disk I/O for VMDK and RDM-based virtual storage solutions. In virtualized environments, it is often not beneficial to schedule I/O at both the host and guest layers.
If multiple guests use storage on a filesystem or block device managed by the host operating system, the host may be able to schedule I/O more efficiently because it is aware of requests from all guests and knows the physical layout of storage, which may not map linearly to the guests' virtual storage.
Video - Snapshot Best Practices
A snapshot is reproduction of the virtual machine just as it was when you took the snapshot. The snapshot includes the state of the data on all virtual machine disks and the virtual machine power state (on, off, or suspended).
You can take a snapshot when a virtual machine is powered on, powered off, or suspended. When you create a snapshot, the system creates a delta disk file for that snapshot in the datastore and writes any changes to that delta disk. You can later revert to the previous state of the virtual machine.
Snapshot hierarchies can become fairly complex. For example, assume that, in the example in Virtual Machine Snapshots, you revert to snapshot_a. You might then work with and make changes to the snapshot_a virtual machine, and create a new snapshot, creating, in effect, a branching tree.
In the following videos, VMware Certified Instructor, Joe Desmond, details the best practices in using Snapshot functionality including:
- vSphere Snapshot Overview
- vSphere Anatomy of Snapshot
- vSphere Power Tools Come with Big Warning Labels
- vSphere Snapshots in Action
- vSphere Snapshots in Non Production Environments
- vSphere Snapshot Consolidation
Cool Mac Tool - muCommander
If you're not a big fan of the Finder in MacOS, you definitely have to take a look at muCommander, it's a free lightweight, cross-platform file manager with a dual-pane interface. It runs on any operating system with Java support (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris...). Here's a non-exhaustive list of what you'll find:
- Virtual filesystem with support for local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP, Amazon S3, Hadoop HDFS and Bonjour
- Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files...
- Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives check ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive
- Tabbed navigation
- Universal bookmarks and credentials manager
- Multiple windows support
- Full keyboard access check Highly configurable
- Available in 27 languages : American & British English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Slovak, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Turkish, Catalan, Belarusian and Norwegian.
- Free Software (GPL)
Download muCommander