Well there is just too much great content this past week to fit it all into a Top 5 again. This task seems to be consuming more and more of my time (which is a great thing!) as you guys are pushing out such great content. Here are the top 10 from this past week, enjoy!
Jason Boche – Configure a vCenter 5.0 integrated Syslog server – Now that VMware offers an ESXi only platform in vSphere 5.0, there are logging decisions to be considered which were a non-issue on the ESX platform. Particularly with boot from SAN, boot from flash, or stateless hosts where logs can’t be stored locally on the host with no scratch partition due to not having local storage. Some shops use Splunk as a Syslog server. Other bloggers such as Simon Long have identified in the past how to send logs to the vMA appliance.
Hany Michael – Publishing the vCloud Director portal on the Internet – One of the very frequent questions I see internally on the VMware mailing lists is how to publish a vCloud Director portal on the Internet. I’ve personally went through the dilemma of searching for such information and had no luck to find something documented in a clear way with configuration examples. In this post I will cover both the architecture considerations as well as the technical configuration from my experience in a real-world implementation.
Frank Denneman – Upgrading VMFS datastores and SDRS – Among many new cool features introduced by vSphere 5 is the new VMFS file system for block storage. Although vSphere 5 can use VMFS-3, VMFS-5 is the native VMFS level of vSphere 5 and it is recommended to migrate to the new VMFS level as soon as possible. Jason Boche wrote about the difference between VMFS-3 and VMFS-5.
William Lam – HBR (Host Based Replication) CLI for SRM 5 – Host based replication (HBR) is a new feature in the upcoming SRM 5.0 which gives user the ability to replicate VM’s between dissimilar storage. Traditionally, SRM mainly relied on array-based replication to backup and recover virtual machines residing on set of LUN(s). This required all virtual machines to be backed up to be in a set of protected and common LUN(s). With HBR, you now have the ability to target specific VM and their respective VMDK(s) and backup to different storage type at the destination such as local storage, iSCSI/FC LUN or NFS datastores.
Duncan Epping – Scale Up/Out and impact of vRAM?!? (part 2) – About a year ago I wrote an article about scaling up. I have been receiving multiple requests to update this article as with vRAM many seem to be under the impression that the world has changed but did it really? Yes I know I am about to burn myself but then again I am Dutch and we are known for our bluntness so let me be that Dutch guy again. Now before this turns into a “burn the witch who dares to speak about vRAM” thread let me be clear, this article is not about vRAM per se.
Eric Sloof – vSphere 5 Video – EFI the Extensible Firmware Interface – UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI). When you create a new virtual machine on an ESXi 5.0 host you have the option to choose for virtual machine version 8. This new version brings a lot of extra (scalability) features but there’s one other interesting new feature. The Extensible Firmware Interface can be selected to replace the BIOS of a virtual machine. EFI is the successor of the traditional BIOS which is used since the introduction of the IBM PC back in 1981. If you want to host Apple Mac OS X 10.6 in a virtual machine, you need EFI.
Andre Leibovici – vSphere 5.0 New .vswp file & Storage Tax on VDI – Virtual Machine swap files have been around since the early ESX days and overtime we have learnt how to play with Memory Reservations to constrain their maximum size and reduce storage footprint. This type of operation may not be as effective with server virtualization as it is with desktop virtualization.The size of a .vswp file is equal to the memory size allocated to the VM, minus any assigned memory reservation. As an example, assume a virtual desktop with Windows 7 with2GB RAM, and 1GB memory reservation. In this case the .vswp file is 1GB.
William Lam – Automating ESXi 5.x Kickstart Tips & Tricks – There are some minor changes with kickstarting ESXi 5.0 but the majority of your existing ESXi 4.1 kickstart configurations can be re-used with a few modifications. One of my goals during the vSphere 5.0 beta was to automate as much of the configurations of an ESXi host as possible within the kickstart process. I also converted as many of the legacy esxcfg-* commands as I could over to the enhanced esxcli namespaces as the esxcfg-* commands will eventually be deprecated in favor of esxcli.
Greg Mulholland – Introducing Virtual NUMA in vSphere 5 – There has been a lot of talk already about new features announced in vSphere 5 since the cloud launch last week. After being involved in the beta and doing some of my own discovery/testing in my home lab I stumbled across something that I thought was cool if not interesting. Virtual NUMA is now part of vSphere 5 and although it won’t get the attention of some of the highlight features like Storage DRS I thought it may deserve an introduction at the least.
Michael White – Failback? Where is the button!? – Are you one of the ones that cannot live with the manual nature of the failback operation in SRM 4? You need that Failback button that you have heard about in SRM 5? And you didn’t find it did you! I will help you with that in this blog and hopefully it all makes sense. You will be doing a simplified and automated failover back to the original site soon so no worries!
