Browsing Posts in vDesign

Reading Time: 3 minutes With a vSphere 5 upgrade there is an important vDesign decision: if you already have some VMFS3 datastores could be better upgrade them to the new version of build new datastores directly with VMFS5? The upgrade procedure is quite fast and friendly and could be applied to a live datastore, so seems that there isn’t a big different between an upgrade or a clean format. But usually the recommendation is to re-format each LUN to VMFS-5 rather than upgrade it. This will fix a number of issues, including:

Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the “issue” with vmdk in thin format is that they start “small” and then grow when you add new data… But when you delete some data, the vmdk file size is not reduced. To be honest this issue is more related to the guest file systems that does never delete the block data, but only the metada (or some of them). Of course at guest OS level you will see the right disk usage, but this will probably not match the one that you see at VMware level (that usually will be bigger).

Reading Time: 2 minutes As described in the  release notes, one of the new features of View5 is the certificate check from the View Client (similar as the certificate check of the vSphere Client): Updated client certificate checking for View clients – View clients now follow the well-known browser model for handling certificates, displaying errors detected in the certificate presented by View Connection Server, or in the certificate trust chain. Administrators can set the Certificate verification mode group policy to enforce strict certificate checking; if any certificate error occurs, the user cannot connect to View Connection Server. Alternatively, administrators […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes The RDM disks are a feature of VMware vSphere (but was present also in Virtual Infrastructure) to make a “mapping” between a LUN (or logical disk) to a VM (is similar to a disk pass-through). This feature can be used in different cases, for example: to support disk larger than 2 TB (only in vSphere 5 with physical RDM) and to implement guest clustering with shared storage (still only with physical RDM). But there is an issue (or a feature :) ) that does not allow to add a RDM disk from the GUI for […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes With the new HA implemenation, something has changed also in the advanced options with new parameters, but also with some that now are no more available. For a list see Supported vSphere 5.0 Advanced Options. One options that has been removed “das.failuredetectiontime”. The reason is well explained in Duncan’s HA Deep Dive: I know many of you used this advanced setting to tweak when the host would trigger the isolation response, that is no longer possible and needed to be honest. If you’ve closely read my other articles you hopefully picked up on the datastore […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes For a list of all objectives see the VCP5 page. Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines See also: Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines and Objective 5.5 – Backup and Restore Virtual Machines. Identify snapshot requirements (similar as vSphere 4.x) See the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide (page 208) and VMware KB: Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware. Note that snapshots provide a point-in-time image of the disk that backup solutions can use, but Snapshots are not meant to be a robust method of backup and recovery. If the files containing a […]

Reading Time: 9 minutes Note This product has been discountined with the release 5.1 and replaced by the new VDP. Disclaimer I do not work for VMware and I’m not writing that VDR is the best backup product! First versions were affected by some bugs and issues… But now (from 1.2 release) could be one possible backup solution (of course with its limits). VMware Data Recovery (VDR) Official VMware site: http://www.vmware.com/products/data-recovery/ See also: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11443 For VDR2 see also: Things to know before implementing VMware Data Recovery (vDR) 2.0 Note that this product works quite like the old esXpress (similar […]

© 2024-2011 vInfrastructure Blog | Disclaimer & Copyright