Last few weeks a lot of talk has been about the new VMware licensing for vSphere 5. Many reported how this would work against VMware’s principle of running as many VMs on one host as possible. After the dust had settled, people started checking their own situations and found that things weren’t as bad as they looked in the first place but for some the new licensing policy would still mean a substantial cost impact.

When reading all the comments, people weren’t complaining about the vRAM model, but mostly about the entitlements. A vSphere 5 Enterprise license would give you a 32GB vRAM entitlement per CPU and 48GB vRAM on Enterprise Plus. Many thought this was much too low.

Well, there is some great news. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  39 Comments »

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.

When running ESXi stateless, the host will PXE boot and load an ESXi image into memory. There is no more need to have local disks, SD card or USB on your host. Another advantage is that you can now switch the ESXi version the host is running by just rebooting or refresh the host configuration with a reboot. Adding new ESXi hosts to your cluster has become a task of just a few minutes. Let’s have a look at how to configure auto deploy. This blog post will take you through the steps of setting up the required infrastructure and prepare an image and deploy it to a host. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  24 Comments »

I bet you all heard about the big news yesterday where VMware announced vSphere 5. Despite a lot of applauding for the great new features, there also a lot of noise on twitter about the new licensing for vSphere. VMware has decided to move to vRAM licensing without any maximums on the amount of RAM or the number of CPU cores. This PDF explains it all.

Biggest concern of the twitter community was that licenses would cost much much more for the new vSphere 5 than they did for the “old” vSphere 4. There are many theoretical scenario’s that can be thought of that show the new licensing model as much more expensive and existing customers wouldn’t upgrade to the new vSphere 5. I decided to call a number of my customers and ask them for the specs of their environment and then to a little math for them comparing the old and the new licenses. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  62 Comments »

When trying to update a number of hosts in the ESXi cluster of a customer I first ran into the issue that scanning the host for updates would result in the following error: “Could not scan esx12 for patches”. Searching through the VMware KB I learned that this is probably due to a corrupted scratch partition on the ESXi host, see: KB1020283. This scratch location is, amongst other things, used to store the staged updates for the ESXi host.

Diving into the ESXi host I noticed there was no scratch partition at all. This is strange in my case, since I was sure that after re-installing the hosts a few months ago, my colleague had set the scratch location of all ESXi hosts manually. When double checking this myself I noticed that the scratch location was empty. See: host – configuration tab – advanced settings – ScratchConfig. After kicking my colleague I set the scratch location manually and to double check if it was set correctly I noticed the setting was empty again. While setting the correct location I only got a “Completed successfully” message so it was very strange the setting was empty again. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  3 Comments »

Zerto http://www.Zerto.com/ (Zero RTO) is a startup company that I first heard about when they were presenting at the Techfield Day in Boston. All information was under embargo, which didn’t allow us delegates to publish about Zerto until June 22^nd and so I had to wait with this post until now. The presentation done by Chen Burshan – Director Product Management and Gil Levonai – VP Products got me really excited about the product and I started playing with the beta. Below is an explanation of what Zerto does and some of my own experiences with it.

(more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  20 Comments »