This week I upgraded a customer running vSphere 4.0 Update 1 to vSphere 5.1 when discovering a strange DRS behavior. My upgrade path was to first install a fresh vCenter 5.1 and then move the ESX 4.0 hosts into vCenter 5.1. Next step was to put the first host into maintenance mode, shutdown, remove from […]
drs
vCenter DRS rules bug when downgrading license
Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a […]
How to pin a VM to single host and still be able to enter maintenance mode
Today a customer asked me about a specific issue he has in his vSphere environment. They are running a VM that monitors network traffic and they want to make sure the VM is running on esx-1 unless esx-1 goes into maintenance mode. Easiest way to do this would be to place the VM on host-1 […]
Book review: VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive
Many of you probably already heard about the book written by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman on the ins and outs of HA and DRS. In December I received my copy and I finally finished it and must say I’m quite impressed by what these guys have written. The book has a nice clean layout […]
How to supply resources for Citrix XenApp on VMware?
I bet many of you that are virtualizing Citrix XenApp, have read the Project VRC whitepapers and want to implement their best practices. Especially in small environments however, it can be a headache creating the design. My biggest headache was and is, is the way I can guarantee no CPU over commit for the pCPU’s […]