Clearing up confusion regarding HA/vMotion support for Exchange 2010
As I discussed last week, Microsoft has updated their guidance and support regarding hypervisor high availability and live migration technologies with Exchange 2010. This is welcome news for anyone looking to virtualize Exchange 2010 on vSphere, as it now allows you to take advantage of vMotion and HA on all Exchange servers, even those in a Database Availability Group (DAG).…
vSphere and Exchange admins can live in harmony – Microsoft finally supports HA and vMotion
This Saturday, Microsoft published a new white paper entitled “Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V” that provides a lot of great info that is applicable to VMware as well. One of the most important things in this entire document is a change in policy regarding supporting virtualized Exchange 2010 with Database Availability…
VMware conducting vCenter high availability survey
This week on VMware’s Uptime Blog I noticed a new post asking for customer feedback about vCenter high availability requirements. To that end, VMware has posted a survey for customers to fill out to get more information. To be clear, the survey addresses high availability of the vCenter server itself and does not relate to VMware’s HA feature that is…
VMware Tools Shrink Option Unavailable?
In my recent post on using svMotion to reclaim disk space, I talked about using SDelete to zero out blocks for free space reclamation. Another way to do this is to use the Shrink option which is part of the VMware Tools. Duncan’s post here gives details on using the VMware Tools Shrink option so I won’t go into much…
Reclaiming disk space with Storage vMotion and Thin Provisioning
I’ve seen a number of posts on the VMTN forums as well as had discussions with folks regarding reclaiming disk space with Storage vMotion so I thought it made sense to do a quick write-up on how this process works. The situation is unfortunately all too common – virtual machines are deployed and treated like a physical machine in terms…
Watch Your Guest Maintenance When Using VM Monitoring in HA, or “Why does my VM keep rebooting?!”
I’m taking the vSphere Design Workshop class this week, and during class one of my classmates mentioned a scenario he encountered that I hadn’t heard of. The situation involves using VM Monitoring as part of VMware HA and performing guest maintenance. VM Monitoring is a feature of HA that will automatically restart virtual machines when the VMware Tools heartbeat is…
Exploring the performance benefits of VAAI
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend I decided to do some testing of one of the coolest new features in vSphere 4.1 – vStorage APIs for Array Integration. My original thought was to see if the performance benefits of using VAAI would justify more heavily using the eagerzeroedthick VMDK format because of the faster deployment times. I’ll get to the results…
Right or wrong, go with what’s supported…
There has been a lot of drama recently between Microsoft and VMware with respect to virtualizing Exchange 2010. The background and details are summarized well in this article (in which I’m quoted). I think this situation brings up some important points about virtualizing critical Tier 1 applications – vendor support is very important, and disregarding vendor requirements for support can…
Three (important) things you might not know about the vmkiscsid.log file
While working on an issue for a client recently I discovered a few things about the vmkiscsid.log file that I didn’t know. I thought I’d share them in case others didn’t know this information. The vmkiscsid.log file, located in /var/log on your ESX host, maintains information and errors about iSCSI connections. We had a problem with our SANs where a…
More vSphere 4.1 Enhancements – Welcome Back PVSCSI Driver!
As I keep digging into documents and KB articles I keep finding more and more things to like about vSphere 4.1. Today’s find has to do with the PVSCSI driver. With the release of vSphere 4.0, VMware added a new paravirtualized SCSI driver into the VMware Tools that provides better virtual disk performance than the standard LSI driver. The PVSCSI…