VMworld 2011 is only a week away, so get ready for the best vendor IT tradeshow in the industry! If you think VMware has made all our announcements with our cloud infrastructure launch (vSphere 5, vCD, vShield…) think again! I can’t disclose any information, but just make sure you make it to the key notes for some very exciting announcements and ground breaking technologies from our executive management team.
On with the top 5!
Andre Leibovici – The biggest Linked Clone “IO” Split Study – Part 2/2 – In the first part of this article I discussed how Linked Clone tiering architecture works and how the IO is distributed across different storage tiers. For each tier and disk type I analyzed the IO impact during the creation of a Replica disk, and the customization and boot processes; including persistent disk and user profile behavior. This study is aiming to find out how much of the IO pattern change overtime as virtual desktops gets utilized and Linked Clone disks grow in size.
Eric Sloof – Video – How to setup a vSphere 5 Port Mirror – Port mirroring is the capability on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on a switch port to a network monitoring device connected to another switch port. Port mirroring is also referred to as Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) on Cisco switches. In VMware vSphere 5.0, a Distributed Switch provides a similar port mirroring capability to that available on a physical network switch. After a port mirror session is configured with a destination—a virtual machine, a vmknic or an uplink port—the Distributed Switch copies packets to the destination.
Duncan Epping – Swap to host cache aka swap to SSD? – I’ve seen multiple people mentioning this feature and saw William posting a hack on how to fool vSphere (feature is part of vSphere 5 to be clear) into thinking it has access to SSD disks while this might not be the case. One thing I noticed is that there seems to be a misunderstanding of what this swap to host cache actually is / does and that is probably due to the fact that some tend to call it swap to SSD. Yes it is true, ultimately your VM would be swapping to SSD but it is not just a swap file on SSD or better said it is NOT a regular virtual machine swap file on SSD.
Vladan Seget – The Official vSphere Licensing Advisor Tool is out – At first, when the new licensing of vSphere 5 has been announced, there was Alan Renouf’s PowerCLI script available about checking on about the vRAM compliance. It’s because the Official vSphere Licensing Advisor Tool was still under development. It was an independent company which was contracted by VMware for the development of the tool and which did not make it for the deadline.
Ivo Beerens – Upgrading to VMware ESXi 5 – It is not supported to directly upgrade ESX(i) 3.x to ESXi 5. You must first upgrade ESX(i) 3 to ESX(i) 4 before upgrading to ESXi 5. Another option is to do an fresh installation. When upgrading to vSphere ESXi 5 there are a couple of things to think about before starting. It is now possible to upgrade VMware ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x to VMware ESXi 5. Prior ESXi 5 the upgrade from ESX to ESXi was not supported (fresh installation needed).
