Great to see this past week a lot of the vExperts gave a shout out to John Troyer for his birthday. For those of you that don’t know him, John Troyer is a VMware employee that leads a lot of the social media activities for VMware and the community. He is also responsible for maintaining this site, and recruited me to help out in highlighting some of the top blog posts every week. It wasn’t so much his birthday but an official “thanks for all you do for the VMware community”.
I second that notion in tipping my hat in honor of Mr. Troyer. For all your valiant efforts, hours of community podcasts, devotion to Twitter, leading the vExpert program, acting as the catalyst for the VMware community, and in general making this a fun experience. Thanks John!
Ok on with this weeks top 5!
Gabrie van Zanten – vSphere 5 – How to run ESXi stateless with vSphere Auto Deploy – A great new feature of vSphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3.0 was hip, we would all install ESX on the local harddisk (or SAN disk). With ESX 3.5, the first ESXi version was released but only few were using it. With 4.x ESXi really got a large install base and more and more people were moving to installing ESXi on USB or SD card. Now with vSphere 5 and ESXi as the only hypervisor (no more ESX), we don’t need to install ESXi at all.
William Lam – New vSphere Health Check 5.0 & ghettoVCB Script – The vSphere Health Check script has now been updated to support vSphere 5.0 and includes the following new features, vCenter Server Instance UUID, vCenter hostname, Storage DRS Configuration (Maintenance Mode, Stats Aggregation, Stats Collection for Datastores), FDM/HA Heartbeat Policy + Datastore, FDM/HA State, Host Agent Settings, Host New iSCSI Configuration/Information…
Eric Sloof – vSphere 5 Video – Storage DRS – So what’s the fuzz about this new vSphere 5 Storage DRS feature? This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes VMDK placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster.
Chad Sakac – Even MORE reasons to run Oracle on VMware – If I told you that I could do something to make your most mission critical app, perform better, cost less, have higher overall availaiblity, you would either: A) assume I’m a vendor trying to sell you something and write it off as such; b) assume I’ve made an error – and ignore my advice; c) investigate, and if you agree, you would consider that deployment model for the app. Or, you’d be a person who likes “just keep it the way it is” SO much that you are willing to pay more, for less performance, and suffer more downtime.
Vladan Seget – VMware vSphere 5 performance enhancements whitepaper – After reading this whitepaper, I really started to like some of the new features introduced in vSphere 5. Besides the CPU enhancements which can now scale up to 32 vCPU per VM, which I will implement less likely immediately, or the possibility to configure 1TB of vMem in one single VM, the paper discuss the interesting SSD Swap Cache, which is new feature in ESXi 5.0 and which permits to configure the redirection of those swapped-out memory pages rather on SSD local drive instead of SATA/SAS.
