Ran into some stupid issue today. Don’t know why but suddenly I lost the storage of my homelab and all VMs had frozen and eventually crashed. Since my vCenter is running as a VM, it had gone too and I couldn’t manage my hosts anymore. Therefore I wanted to make a direct connection to the […]
esxi
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 […]
To USB or not to USB, how do you boot your ESXi host?
To USB or not to USB? On Sunday evening there was a good discussion on twitter about booting ESXi from USB stick or not. A number of arguments pro and con were made and like many discussions there is no real right or wrong. I decided to write this post to give my arguments on […]
Large Pages, Transparent Page Sharing and how they influence the consolidation ratio
Everybody talks about the benefits of Transparent Page Sharing in vSphere environments and how they reduce the amount of memory needed in your vSphere host. Thanks to Transparent Page Sharing memory overcommit in a production environment has become mainstream. Not long ago I’ve written these two posts: – “Memory overcommit in production” https://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/memory-overcommit-in-production-yes-yes-yes/ which explains […]
Memory management and compression in vSphere 4.1
With vSphere 4.1, VMware released a great new feature called Memory compression. At first, after reading the release notes I thought memory compression was just one step before swapping to disk would occur. However, after reading the whitepaper “Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4” I learned some more details I want to share […]