Virtualize Business Critical Applications

For Applications owners, database admins, Exchange admins, vSphere admins and application architects.

Category Archives: vMotion

To be “RDM for Oracle RAC”, or not to be, that is the question

Game Changing: Day 2 Enterprise Data Management Tasks with VMware NSX and vRealize Operations

As a Staff Partner Architect at VMware, I tend to look at our platform and products through a slightly different lens than some of my colleagues. Rather than focusing solely on our feature rich product sets and platform, I take a top down approach and identify which of these features are most interesting for mission/business critical deployments in a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC).

VMware NSX is one of those game changing technologies which should interest application owners, database architects, CIOs, and of course network IT professionals. You can think of NSX as a network hypervisor, as such NSX administrators now have the ability to abstract and reproduce a complete set of layer 2 to layer 7 networking services. The ability to abstract and reproduce layer 2 to layer 7 networking services is certainly meaningful to network operations but what does it mean to enterprise architects? Why should our customers care, and why should CIOs care? The answer is hair-pinning. Continue reading →

Now Updated: Microsoft Exchange Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide

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Microsoft Exchange Server is one of the mission critical applications most commonly virtualized on the vSphere platform. As customers become more comfortable and familiar with virtualization in general and the VMware vSphere virtualization platform in particular, they become more confident, enough to virtualize their Exchange Server environments. To help customers achieve success as they begin to virtualize their Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure, VMware provides guidance and recommendations for designing, configuring and managing the infrastructure.

The Microsoft_Exchange_Server_2016_on_VMware_vSphere_Best_Practices_Guide contains VMware’s official prescriptive guidance and recommended practices for successfully running Microsoft Exchange Server on the VMware vSphere platform.

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Completely Disable Time Synchronization for your VM

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Some administrative practices, like a bad habit, have more lives than the proverbial cat – they tend to stay around forever. It is, therefore, very comforting when one finds a problematic administrative practice that has not just been universally abandoned by administrators, but is also on the top of any junior administrator’s “configurations sure to get you dis-invited from the next user group meetup” list.

Take the case of the old practice of synchronizing a virtual machine’s clock with its host’s clock in a vSphere environment. That used to be “the thing to do” way back when. It was actually the default configuration option on the ESX platform in those days. Until everyone got wiser and the message went out to every admin far and wide that such configurations was no longer kosher. Even VMware got religious and stopped making that option the default behavior. Continue reading →

Say Hello to vMotion-compatible Shared-Disks Windows Clustering on vSphere

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As you dive into the inner-workings of the new version of VMware vSphere (aka ESXi), one of the gems you will discover to your delight is the enhanced virtual machine portability feature that allows you to vMotion a running pair of clustered Windows workloads that have been configured with shared disks.

I pause here now to let you complete the obligatory jiggy dance. No? You have no idea what I just talked about up there, do you? Let me break it down for you:

In vSphere 6.0, you can configure two or more VMs running Windows Server Failover Clustering (or MSCS for older Windows OSes), using common, shared virtual disks (RDM) among them AND still be able to successfully vMotion any of the clustered nodes without inducing failure in WSFC or the clustered application. What’s the big-deal about that? Well, it is the first time VMware has ever officially supported such configuration without any third-party solution, formal exception, or a number of caveats. Simply put, this is now an official, out-of-the-box feature that does not have any exception or special requirements other than the following:

The VMs must be in “Hardware 11” compatibility mode – which means that you are either creating and running the VMs on ESXi 6.0 hosts, or you have converted your old template to Hardware 11 and deployed it on ESXi 6.0
The disks must be connected to virtual SCSI controllers that have been configured for “Physical” SCSI Bus Sharing mode
And the disk type *MUST* be of the “Raw Device Mapping” type. VMDK disks are *NOT* supported for the configuration described in this document.

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