It was a normal week again. No exciting announcements just business as usual. Luckily there are always bloggers who publish articles with refreshing views, new technical details or old technical details overhauled. It wasn't difficult to pick this weeks top-5, each article I selected stands out for a specific reason, read them and you know what I mean:
- Frank Denneman – NFS and IP-HASH loadbalancing
The result of this calculation is 1 (one) The VMkernel chooses the second uplink because it has the same binary representation of the Hash. Hereby balancing outbound NFS traffic across the two uplinks.
Using IP-Hash to load-balance is a excellent choice, but you do need to fulfill certain technical requirements to get it supported by VMware and plan your IP-address scheme accordingly to get the most out of this load-balancing Policy. - Steve Chambers – The end is nigh for Protocol Passionistas
In the IT world you meet professionals (small p) who have grasped hold of technologies and defend them like their (professional) life depended on it. You don’t have to look far for this in virtualization with VDI desktop protocols (ICA vs. RDP vs. PCoIP etc) or storage protocols (NFS vs. iSCSI vs. FC). Just walk around any data center with one of these professionals and ask them “Why did you choose ” and it’s like you are asking why they chose their wife, like there’s some kind of inferred criticism, like questions and inquisitiveness are bad. Why is this? When the defensive attitude is related to protocols, I negatively refer to these professionals as Protocol Passionistas. - Jason Boche – Tame Electrical and Heating Costs with CPU Power Management
A casual Twitter tweet about my power savings through the use of VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) found its way to VMware Senior Product Manager for DPM, Ulana Legedza, and Andrei Dorofeev. Ulana was interested in learning more about my situation. I explained how VMware DPM had evaluated workloads between two clustered vSphere hosts in my home lab, and proceeded to shut down one of the hosts for most of the month of October, saving me more than $50 on my energy bill.
Ulana and Andrei took the conversation to the next level and asked me if I was using vSphere’s Advanced CPU Power Management feature (See vSphere Resource Management Guide page 22). I was not, in fact I was unaware of its existence. Power Management is a new feature in ESX(i)4 available to processors supporting Enhanced Intel SpeedStep or Enhanced AMD PowerNow! power management technologies. - Maish Saidel-Keesing – Patching your ESXi Host – Without vCenter
VMware Update Manager is the Enterprise tool for Patching your ESX Hosts and for some also the tool used to patch your Windows / Linux Guests as well.
This is all fine and dandy, but what is you do not have all of your ESXi hosts connected to your vCenter?
Why would you so that – you may ask? Well in my environment, we have several labs that are running their Environment on a ESXi Whitebox,with the free ESXi License. - Simon Long – Testing Network throughput between VMware ESX Hosts
Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s.
Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the Windows version. I’m not great with Linux, and as this is an open source application, documentation is a little hard to come by. So for me, this post is also to remind me how on IPerf works should i need to use it again.
