This was probably one of the toughest Top-5's to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that half of the blogs on PlanetV12n enabled "content summary only". Yes I know you will have a couple of extra visits, but isn't blogging about getting people to read your content instead of being "numbers"(visits) focused? Now that I got that off my chest lets move on to what this article is about. It's about the 5 top articles this week:
- Vaugn Stewart – VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics & VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
Like the thick format, thin VMDKs are not formatted at the time of
deployment. This also means that data that needs to be written must
pause while the blocks required to store the data are formatted. The
formatting operation only occurs on demand at anytime an area of the
virtual disk, which has never been written to, is required to store
data. - Chad Sakac – Solid State Disk will change the storage world…
But surely, if you were looking for performance, you wouldn’t use the SATA disk, right? You would probably use a 15K RPM FC disk. Those cost about $1000. They do about 200 random write IOPs. So, you would need 20 of them to do what that $115 SSD could do. That’s 0.2 IOps per dollar – or 170x more expensive than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. Oh, you think SAS 15K drives are a better deal? They are – than FC disks. A 15K SAS disk on Pricewatch costs about $210, and they also do about 200 IOps. that’s 0.95 IOps per dollar – or 37x more expense than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. - Luc Dekens – dvSwitch scripting – Part 4 – NIC teaming
The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going.
To increase the availability of the dvSwitch, I will show how to add two pNics and how to activate and configure NIC Teaming.
When I created the dvSwitch I configured it for two uplink ports (per host). Since I’m adding two pNics, I will first have to change the maximum number of dvUplink ports. - Gabrie van Zanten – Design tips for VMware vSphere 4
Recently at the Belgium VMUG I gave a presentation in which I covered some design tips for VMware vSphere 4. I talked about some business decisions that, how boring they may seem, are crucial for your design. I covered some security requirements you should check with the security department of the organisation and of course advised good capacity planning which also is very important for your design.
What the average geek found most interesting where topics like: “What size of ESX host will you buy?”, “How to run vCenter in a VM”, “VMFS best practises”, “Understanding queue depth and lun size” and more…. - Simon Gallagher – iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much 🙂
Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took..
You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks
