Discover game changing replication for vSphere VMs
(Copied from the Veeam announcement) Need to change your disaster recovery practices? Join VMware vExpert Gabrie van Zanten, a principal consultant at Open Line for this LIVE webinar and discover how a strong replication strategy will improve your DR practices. Gabrie van Zanten is a VMware virtualization expert, the author on his ownweblog Rick Vanover, Veeam Product Strategy Specialist with extensive virtualization expertise Steven Duckaert, Veeam System Engineer with a focus on VMware and Microsoft technologies 22 May 2012 at 16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT / 15:00 BST Topics include: Your replication jobs Bandwidth throttling Replication in combination with backups Real-life replication challenges Veeam replication functionalities, such as replication mapping, replication seeding and more. … [Continue Reading]
VMware HA Admission Control and VM reservations
Did you know about VMware HA admission control coupled to VM reservations? To be honest I thought I knew, but recently I was pointed to some details that showed me I was wrong. What I’m talking about is the cluster setting of “HA Admission Control” and how “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity” and “Host failures the cluster tolerates” are related to the CPU and memory reservations at VM level. These settings will make sure that your HA cluster will reserve enough resources to recover from host failures, depending on how high you set the % of resources to be reserved, more host failures can be tolerated. Where did I go wrong? Well I thought vCenter made the calculations for the HA spare capacity based on real usage, using 5min interval. But I was wrong. These calculations are not based on real life numbers but on the reservations you set at the VM level. Same goes for the “Host failures the cluster tolerates” setting, the slot size is based on the reservations being used per VM. … [Continue Reading]
How too many vCPUs can negatively affect performance
Customer with small vSphere environment of just two hosts had performance issues and they asked me to investigate the situation. When looking at the technical specs at first glance, you would suspect that this configuration should work. With just two hosts, each dual Quad core CPU, the enivornment had a total of 16 CPU cores. In total there were only 9 VMs running using a total of 23 vCPUs. Usually you can easily run 5 vCPUs per core, if not more. Turned out there were a number of VMs with 4 vCPUs and 2 vCPUs that really didn’t need them. You can easily discover this by checking READY en CO-STOP value in the vCenter performance charts. Go to the performance tab of your vSphere host and select advanced. Then select “Chart options” go to the CPU section, choose the “realtime” section and then on the right deselect all counters and only select “Ready” and “Co-Stop”. Click OK. … [Continue Reading]
Adding ESXi host with dvSwitch through Auto Deploy fails
Been fighting some problems with VMware Auto Deploy lately which turned out to be an easy to solve issue. I installed the first host in the cluster, which would NOT be deployed with Auto Deploy but had a local hard disk in it. Configured it the way I like it, set all the logging and network coredump location to be the vCenter host and then created a host profile. The network configuration consisted of just two vmnics (10Gbps) in a dvSwitch. The vmkernel port was of course on the dvSwitch. After this host was working fine, I copied the host profile and used this copied profile as the reference profile for the hosts that WOULD be using Auto Deploy. … [Continue Reading]
Licensing VMware SRM 5.0
Had a small issue with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 today when performing a real failover of a single VM with a customer of mine. Nothing big, just using one VM one protection group, showing them that a failover would work. After recovery went fine, I started the reprotection and ran into a licensing error: “Not enough licenses”. This customer had bought a 25 VM license pack and received one license key for this. I had entered this key in vCenter on site-A but I hadn’t entered this on site-B, because I was under the impression that in a Linked-Clone scenario the license could be used by both sites. … [Continue Reading]
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Discover game changing replication for vSphere VMs
(Copied from the Veeam announcement) Need to change your disaster recovery practices? Join VMware vExpert Gabrie van Zanten, a principal consultant at Open Line for this LIVE webinar and discover how a strong replication strategy will improve your DR practices. Gabrie van Zanten is a … [Read More...]
VMware HA Admission Control and VM reservations
Did you know about VMware HA admission control coupled to VM reservations? To be honest I thought I knew, but recently I was pointed to some details that showed me I was wrong. What I’m talking about is the cluster setting of “HA Admission Control” and how “Percentage of … [Read More...]
How too many vCPUs can negatively affect performance
Customer with small vSphere environment of just two hosts had performance issues and they asked me to investigate the situation. When looking at the technical specs at first glance, you would suspect that this configuration should work. With just two hosts, each dual Quad core CPU, the enivornment … [Read More...]
Adding ESXi host with dvSwitch through Auto Deploy fails
Been fighting some problems with VMware Auto Deploy lately which turned out to be an easy to solve issue. I installed the first host in the cluster, which would NOT be deployed with Auto Deploy but had a local hard disk in it. Configured it the way I like it, set all the logging and network coredump … [Read More...]
Licensing VMware SRM 5.0
Had a small issue with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 today when performing a real failover of a single VM with a customer of mine. Nothing big, just using one VM one protection group, showing them that a failover would work. After recovery went fine, I started the reprotection and ran into … [Read More...]
Auto Deploy GUI – a new VMware Labs fling
On the VMware Labs pages you’ll find a number of great Lab projects, so called “Flings”. These are unsupported projects by VMware employees you can download and use. One of the latest VMware Lab Flings is the “Auto Deploy GUI” created by Massimiliano Daneri which makes auto deploy of … [Read More...]
My first Auto Deploy design for real production environment
Last week I was asked by a customer to build a new VMware vSphere 5 infrastructure in which they would like to use Auto Deploy for the ESXi 5 hosts. Of course I told them that Auto Deploy was a first release but I didn’t push that too hard, because designing and deploying it for real production … [Read More...]
Review: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0
Last week I received a copy of Mike Laverick's new book: "Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0". Just in time actually since I was finishing a project with a customer where I implemented VMware vSphere 5 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Gave me a great opportunity to check if the … [Read More...]
Reminder: Keep an eye on your vCenter SQL DB
Past two months I've received three calls from customers who's vCenter suddenly stopped working because their SQL database had stopped because the logs had filled up. Turns out few people regularly check the status of their SQL database. VMware has written some very good KB articles on what to do … [Read More...]
Open Line opens new datacenter in south of Limburg
MAASTRICHT AIRPORT – Februari 2012 Open Line will open the doors to their new datacenter in Landgraaf (Limburg, the Netherlands) as an extension to their current Cloud solutions portfolio. The mission statement of Open Line is: "To be your reliable and innovative partner for your technical ICT … [Read More...]
