Luc Dekens – Orphaned files and folders – Spring cleaning – One of our readers asked if that function could be used to remove orphaned VMDK files from one or more datastores. Now unfortunately that is not the case since the function we presented in chapter 7 uses the ReconfigVM_Task method to remove the harddisk.
David Davis – Understanding Memory Compression in vSphere 4.1 – vSphere 4.1 comes with a new performance-enhancing feature called memory compression. It can give your system a performance boost when it starts running low on RAM. Just like swap memory, memory compression is not equal to real memory but can help to prevent degradation of performance when you’re running low on memory. For comparison, memory compression is faster than swap on disk but slower than real memory.
Eric Siebert – How to avoid VDI boot storm problems using SSD – Desktop virtualization, or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), can bring many benefits to an IT organization, including easier system management and centralized security and data protection. But the storage environment that supports VDI requires some careful planning to avoid the problem of VDI “boot storms” — big slowdowns that can occur when a lot of users log into the system at the same time. There are a few options for addressing the problem, but the one that makes the most sense relies on tactical placement of solid-state drives (SSDs).
Vladan Seget – How to backup ESXi 4.1 configuration – One of those questions you might be asking yourself is the one on How to backup ESXi configuration files. You might be saying why backup if the re-installation of an ESXi takes just few minutes, but wait. There is not only the installation of ESXi, but there are all the configuration files concerning virtual switches and their configuration, shared storage (datastores configurations), multipaths, local users and groups and also licensing informations.
Duncan Epping – Which metric to use for monitoring memory? – This question has come up several times over the last couple of weeks so I figured it was time to dedicate an article to it. People have always been used to monitoring memory usage in a specific way. This always worked fine until ESX(i) 3.5 introduced the aggressive usage of Large Pages. In the 3.5 timeframe that only worked for AMD processors that supported RVI and with vSphere 4.0 support for Intel’s EPT was added.
