It's a heavy weight top 5 this week with three well known community members; Ron Oglesby, Chad Sakac and Scott Drummonds. Yes Scott Drummonds… he started blogging this week on his new blog Pivot Point. Ron Oglesby unfortunately did not start blogging but did a guest post on virtualization.info. Well we don't need Ron to start blogging we need Ron, Scott and Mike to rewrite the Advanced Technical Design Guide for vSphere. Chances of that happening are slim though, but I can still hope can't I? (Both Ron and Scott are flooded with work and Mike is working on a new vSphere book and a SRM book.)
- Ron Oglesby – Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?
The second item we need to dispose of (or create a new assumption about) is the idea that everything cannot run in a VM… Yes you heard me. Everything can run in a VM today. Does that mean you will run out and virtualize everything starting tomorrow? No. But for 5+ years I have been doing virtualization assessments, and in each one I have generally recommended candidates that utilize less than 1 processor, less than 2GB of memory, and equally low disk and network utilization. Using this type of criteria I consistently find that 80+% of any customer’s environment can be virtualized.
So, since 2004 I have been telling customers that 80% of their environment could be virtualized, yet most of these companies (5 years later) are nowhere near that. Why? - Joshua Townsend – vCenter Database Stats Rollup Troubleshooting
I recently migrated an environment from vCenter 2.5 to 4.0 and in the
process switched from a Windows 2003 32-bit vCenter host and a SQL 2005
server (remote to vCenter) to a Windows 2008 64-bit vCenter server with
a SQL 2008 server (again, a remote SQL server). I experienced a few
issues during the migration and thought I had worked through them all
(I’ll post on those at a later date). However, after a bit of time I
found that performance statistics for objects in the vCenter were
missing of not rendering at an acceptable pace. - Chad Sakac – A couple important (ALUA and SRM) notes
The answer is that vSphere supports Aysmmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) – note that there is no support for this in VI3.x. ALUA is a SCSI standard, and is widely implemented across mid-range storage arrays – including the CLARiiON. with ALUA, the LUN is reachable across both storage processors at the same time. Paths for the “non-owning” storage processor take IO and transit it across the internal interconnect architecture of the mid-range arrays (bandwidth and behavior varies). in the example in the diagram below, the paths on SPA advertise as “active (non-optimized)”, and aren’t used for I/O unless the active I/O paths are not working. - Sean Clark – Killing a hung VM with /proc-FU
Other VMs opened perfectly fine on this same ESX server, just this one
VM was hosed. Couldn’t ping it’s IP either. Tried restarting
mgmt-vmware from the service console, and that removed the VMname from
the ESX servers inventory the next time we logged in. Just some weird
placeholder VM instead, which I ended up removing from inventory. Next
tried to re-add the vCenter VM to inventory by browsing to the
datastore. No luck, this process hung. So restarted mgmt-vmware
again. And this time decided to look at esxtop to see if this VM was
still running or something. And it was..or at least something was
running with its name. So now I set out to restart it with vmware-cmd. - Scott Drummonds – Performance Troubleshooting: No PhD Required!
VMware now boasts over 150,000 customers, and I only interact with a
relative handful a year. If I count the experts in our small
performance community I can conclude that our performance experts touch
a very small percentage of our customer base each year. That means
that the great majority of our customers are solving their performance
problems without engaging us.
