What a week again. I guess besides the fact that my twitter account was suspended, I booked my flights to VMworld and a VCDX Panel is scheduled the week before VMworld in Palo Alto the most exciting thing for me personal was the debate between Scott Drummonds and Simon Crosby. I don't know about you but for me it was obvious who won the debate. That's not what this post is all about of course, it's about the five top article this week. Here we go:
- Duncan Epping – High Availability Deepdive, the update
A VMware HA Cluster consists of nodes, primary and secondary
nodes. Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all “node states” which
are synchronized between primaries. Node states hold for instance
resource usage information. In case that vCenter is not available the
primary nodes will have a rough estimate of the resource occupation and
can take this into account when a fail-over needs to occur. Secondary
nodes send their state info to the primary nodes. - Arnim van Lieshout – How big is my VM?
To make things more complicated, these files can be stored on
different datastores. So if you want to know how much storage is
occupied by your vm, you have to add up all these file’s sizes. I created a little Powershell function to help me out on this one.
In its simplest form a vm consists of one or more directories. This
script first creates an array with all directories occupied by the vm
and then adds up all the file’s sizes in these directories. Just feed
the function with a vm object and it will return the vm’s total size in
bytes. - Steve Chambers – Drummonds vs Crosby on virtualization performance
This week, Scott delivered another great performance at the Burton
Conference where he provides the hard data in contrast with Simon
Crosby’s conjecture. If you haven’t seen Scott present yet and
your work involves virtualization, well that’s like being a blues fan
and never seeing B.B. King live. - Rich Brambley – Detailed P2V Analysis Flowchart for the “Fruit in the Canopy”
Virtualization can be credited for popularizing the phrase “low hanging
fruit” as a referral to the set of physical servers so underutilized
they are easy virtualization candidates. Now, as virtual
infrastructures (VI) mature and larger, more resource intensive
applications are being considered for physical to virtual (p2V)
migrations, administrators and application owners need to figure out
how to adapt existing VI designs to accommodate the “fruit” still left
in the “tree canopy”. - Richard Garsthagen – vAudit 1.00
Thanks to Jeff and Sudharsan for your feedback! I just made a new version available of vAudit with 3 new improvements:
– vAudit now also checks for login failures, so you can detect if people are trying to hack into your system
– You can now resize the username column, so you can actually read the username if you have long domain names
– When you MouseOver a session, it will display the machine name and time information