VMTN Blog

Quite a busy week again for most of us. Yesterday vCenter 2.5 Update 5 was released and Jason Boche reported that the first vSphere updates have also been released. (Although not officially confirmed / published on the VMware website!) I will not keep you guys for long because you probably need to start patching. While you are waiting for Update Manager to complete enjoy these articles. Leave your thoughts/comments here or at any of the following articles to keep the conversation going!

• Christoph Dommermuth - Reset, Refresh, Recompose, Rebalance?
  Today I’ve found an question in the VMware Enterprise Desktop online community forums where a member asked if someone could explain the difference between the terms Reset, Refresh, Recompose and Rebalance in context of VMware View. Some of you are familiar with that but I think it’s worth to explain.
• Daniel Eason - Optimal VM Placement
  Storage virtualisation and natural decouplement within ESX architecture means that you can design and build a Virtual Machine that can have a Virtual disk drive such as the main OS or partition for flat file copies hosted on lower end SATA Storage or Networked storage, you can then run on the same VM other disks that require higher IO Log and DB disk volumes on more capable Fibre Channel or EFD media. This technical capability all ensures that you can achieve and obtain the dedicated IOP's needed for running the virtualised workload and more importantly allows organisations to reduce cost by not using higher end storage for lower end storage demands.
• Jason Boche - vSphere Virtual Machine Performance Counters Integration into Perfmon
  Observing some of the counter names, it’s interesting to see that VMware has given us direct insight into the hypervisor resource configuration settings via Performance Monitor from inside the guest VM. While this may be useful for VI Administrators who manage both the VI as well as the guest operating systems, it may be disservice to VI Administrators in environments where guest OS administration is delegated to another support group. The reason why I say this is that some of these new counters disclose an “over commit” or “thin provisioning” of virtual hardware resources which I’d rather not reveal to other supports groups.
• Duncan Epping - Max amount of VMs per VMFS volume
  So in other words, the max amount of virtual machines per volume multiplied by the average size of a virtual machine plus 20% for snaps and .vswp rounded up. (As pointed out in the comments if you have VMs with high amounts of memory you will need to adjust the % accordingly.) This should be your default VMFS size. Now a question that was asked in one of the comments, which I already expected, was “how do I determine what the maximum amount of VMs per volume is?”. There’s an excellent white paper on this topic.
• Hany Michael - vSphere in a Box: A “Virtual Private Cloud” Blueprint (Part 1 & Part 2)
  I need to build a complete private cloud! I need to have everything starting from ESX clusters to dvSwitches, Cisco NX1Vs, virtual appliances, VMsafe based solutions, and last but not least, a working SRM installation between two virtual DCs. I need to have the complete feel of this so-called “private cloud” before I even start an actual PoC, which will be way complicated & a bit challenging in the physical world. I need to go to the management with diagrams and videos and tell them why we need to be 100% virtualized, and why we should start planning for that. Show them where we are headed, and how our IT environment and datacenters will look like one year from now.