STORAGE I/O CONTROL (SIOC) TIP:

In short, if you have vSphere 4.1 running in an entire cluster...turn it ON!

SOIC watches I/O latency across the datastores shared in a VMware Cluster and enables each VM it's fair share of disk resources in times of contention when a certain latency value is exceeded (30ms by default). This ensures one disk intensive VM doesn't impact other VMs disk performance. You can also "tweak" and say some VM need priority access in times of contention as well (at the expense of the other vms on that datastore though).

·         Storage I/O Control is supported on Fibre Channel-connected and iSCSI-connected storage. NFS datastores and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) are not supported.

But check out these links for more info: 

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/09/29/storage-io-fairness/

http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/vmware-vsphere-4-1-storage-io-control-sioc-understanding/

SPEED UP VCENTER CLIENT ON WINDOWS 7

Awesome tip from a blog and KB on the topic..really seems to help!

http://vsphere-land.com/news/how-to-speed-up-the-vsphere-client-on-windows-7.html

VMWORLD 2010 SESSIONS DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE

All the VMworld 2010 sessions are now available for download. 

www.vmworld.com/community/sessions/

NET I/O CONTROL BEST PRACTICE WHITEPAPER

Good stuff to read.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW_Netioc_BestPractices.pdf

HP BLADE VSPHERE TIPS:

I have been heavily engaged in working with both HP and VMware support over the last few weeks on a problem and wanted to share if case this helps anyone else. Using C7000 chassis and BL460 G6 blades and virtual connect all at the current release versions. A working vsphere 4 update 1 blade removed from chassis and put back would fail to load with a "no compatible network driver found" error. Running the Firmware update CD 9.10b even if everything was current to fix the issue and vsphere would then load properly.

We narrowed this down to the 1.48 network driver fixed the issue for vSphere 4 update 1. The 1.54 driver works with vSphere 4.1.

Be aware when using vSphere 4.1 there are two items you need to be aware of:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c02476622&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=3884113&swItem=MTX-c2dd60fc9642432dae086527f4&prodNameId=3884114&swEnvOID=4091&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=3

WHAT BAD ECONOMY?

No job or economy problems if your doing VMware Virtualization/Cloud computing or Storage. How about 200 job openings right now! More than 200 open positions at EMC, EMC partners and VCE link will drive you to more info. And local NC VMware partner Varrow is one of the partners really looking for people now too.

VMWARE VCLOUD DIRECTOR NETWORKING

Yellow-Bricks.com is running a very nice set of articles on the VMware vCloud Director networking, which is probably the most complex concept of the product. Three articles are planned.Part1 and Part2 have been released so far.

VMWORLD 2010 LABS:


The highlight for all at VMworld 2010 this year had to be the most excellent LAB environment we have every experienced! At first I was concerned because they had done away with most of the large Instructor led labs this year. The hands-on labs were a much better way to go for sure. With a very professional layout, awesome menu, hardware, and cool room, you got to sit down and really go through learning about the products at your own pace (with nice instruction guides that explained stuff, not just told you to click and type this and that).

The labs were open 8am-10pm first two days, 8am-6pm Wednesday, and 8am-4pm on Thursday...so you had plenty of time to really take advantage of this wonderful resource. There were 30 lab topics, 480 lab seats, and 44 hours of lab time. Total lab clouds delivered were 15,344 with a total of 145,097 VMs created! WOW! Every hour the lab cloud created and destroyed about 4000 virtual machines! (All of these stats and information are from this link).

The labs utilized PC-over-IP protocol and Wyse P20 stateless zero clients using VMware View 4.5. More details on this configuration can be found here.

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/08/29/vmworld-2010-labs-are-the-place-to-be/

The top 10 labs taken were:

1. VMware View 4.5 Install and Config (1515)
2. VMware vSphere Perf & Tuning (1229)
3. VMware ESX 4.1 new features (1112)
4. VMware vCloud Director Install & Config (1019)
5. Basic VMware vSphere Install & Config (829)
6. VMware View 4.5 Advanced (811)
7. VMware vSphere Troubleshooting (791)
8. VMware vCenter SRM Install & Config (789)
9. VMware vDS & Cisco Nexus 1KV (761)
10. VMware vShield (734)

VMWARE VCLOUD DIRECTOR INSTALL/VIDEO/LINKS

Announced at VMworld 2010, and if you haven't got to see it yet now is your chance. I found this video showing off the product.

You will notice a Web interface is used, it runs on RedHat Enterprise 64 bit I hear. Some other good links are below:

See this video covering the install process.

Lab Manager upgrade/Exchange Program details.

vCloud Architecture: 

http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/09/vcloud-director-architecture/

http://www.hypervizor.com/2010/09/diagram-the-vmware-vcloud-director-cell-architecture/

RTFM Info: 

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid201_gci1519366,00.html

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid201_gci1519368,00.html

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid201_gci1519369,00.html

VMware main Site: http://www.vmware.com/movebeyond/

VMWORLD 2010 BLOG UPDATE

Folks I am so sorry but I was not able to blog any during the extremely busy and awesome VMworld Event. My laptop is one of the desktop models and was just to much to carry around and I didn't win one of those nice IPADS or netbooks.

But I am gathering up some very useful information and will be presenting my take of VMworld and what you need to see.

Stay tuned!