Power of two

VMware ESX 4 now supports up to 8 processors and 16 cores each.
But do you know that you don’t have to assign vCPU by the power of two!
 
 
 
Another nice feature…

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Troubleshooting poor storage controller performance

You can use the utility esxtop to help assess the bottleneck.
 
To use esxtop to help assess the bottleneck:

Log into the ESX server console.
Execute the command esxtop
Press d to go to the disk statistics screen.
Press f to go to the field selector.
If the J does not have an asterisk (*) beside it, press j to add that [...]

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Windows Server 2008 and Windows vista SP2 Available for download!

Today we are pleased to announce the Release to Web (RTW) of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  SP2, a combined service pack for both operating systems encapsulated in a single installer, will simplify deployment, management, and support for IT Pros.  It includes support for new types of hardware and [...]

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Determining if multiple virtual CPUs are causing performance issues

You may experience these performance issues with a multiple CPU virtual machine running on an ESX host:

Poor transfer speeds when copying data to or from a virtual machine
Backup jobs time out or are very slow
A virtual machine performs poorly

To determine if multiple vCPUs assigned to your virtual machine is causing poor performance:

Open a console prompt on [...]

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Does fragmentation affect VMFS datastores?

Fragmentation is when blocks belonging to the a file are scattered over the volume in a non-contiguous way, thus increasing disk seek and rotational latency.
Fragmentation is not relevant to VMFS performance for the following reasons:

Fragmentation causes performance degradation when I/O request from application spans multiple blocks and these blocks are discontiguous. The VMFS block size is [...]

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SOX compliant: Enabling logging for the VMware Authorization service

To enable logging for the vmauthd service:

Log in as root to the ESX host with an SSH client.
Open the /etc/vmware/config file in a text editor.
Add these lines to the configuration file: 
vmauthd.logEnabled = “TRUE”
vmauthd.logInfo = “TRUE”
log.vmauthdFileName = “/var/log/vmware/vmauthd.log”

Restart the vmkauthd service using the command:

service vmware-vmkauthd restart

Source: vmware.com

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vSphere 4.0 Best Practices

VMware has released a series of KB articles outlining the requirements and best practices for installing vSphere, upgrading to vSphere, and upgrading ESX 3.0 virtual machines to ESX 4.0 hardware. 
Installing ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices
Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices
vCenter Server Installation Worksheet
Upgrading an ESX 3.x virtual machine to [...]

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Hype Cycle

I came across this interesting ‘hype cycle’ thing in a blog post and I thought I would share the idea with you…
A hype cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technology.
Since 1995, Gartner has used hype cycles to characterize the over-enthusiasm or “hype” and subsequent disappointment that typically [...]

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VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself

Running VMware ESX inside a virtual machine is a great way to experiment with different configurations and features without building out a whole lab full of hardware and storage. It is pretty common to do this on VMware Workstation nowadays — the first public documentation of this process that I know of was published by [...]

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VMware vSphere™ 4 has achieved 364,000 IOPS !!!

VMware vSphereTM 4 Clocks 364,000 IOPS in Record Storage Throughput Enabling customers to Move Toward 100 Percent Virtualization in the Internal Cloud
ORLANDO, FL–(Marketwire – May 18, 2009) – Today at EMC World 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced record storage performance for VMware [...]

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