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Storage for VDI: local or shared?

Reading Time: 4 minutes In my interview with Sakthi Chandra (NexentaVSA for View Director), during the last Open Storage Summit EMEA, we have talk about the Nexenta approach of the storage for a VDI environment. Their product has been developed from a collaboration with VMware and some aspects sound familiar: for example the overview of the VSA deployment and design seems similar to the VMware VSA, except the scalability limit (that is limited to max 3 host for the VMware solution). But I don’t want talk about the product, yet (I prefer dedicate it a post, when I will […]

Highlights, vStorage none

Manage a storage array with System Center VMM 2012

Reading Time: 2 minutes One of the interesting features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is that it can handle several other objects and not only the VM (when the name will be changed to reflect this?). Of course it can handle hosts (not only Hyper-V hosts), but also networking and storage. All those resource are in the “fabric” tab. In this case we see a storage array with its LUNs:

Highlights, Microsoft, vStorage

Convert virtual disk format – VMDK to VHD

Reading Time: < 1 minute In the previous post we have discuss on how convert from VHD (used for example in Microsoft Hyper-V) to VMDK format (used in VMware products). Now let’s see how to convert from the other side. There are several tools to make this V2V operation:

Highlights, Microsoft, VMware, vStorage

Convert virtual disk format – VHD to VMDK

Reading Time: < 1 minute As you probably already know a VM is incapsulated with a set of files that define VM properties and objects. Some of those files are the virtual disks files and each vendor use its own format: VMware use the VMDK and Microsoft & Citrix use the VHD format. Note that there could be more sub-types (for example for the VMDK files, but we will explain in future posts). To convert between different format you can use some kind of converter to perform a virtual to virtual (V2V) task.

Highlights, Microsoft, VMware, vStorage none

ESXi – How does the dual bank work?

23 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes As written in the previous posts, in the ESXi installation there are two copy of the system image located in two different partitions (see Partitions layout of system disk and More on partitions posts). The actual system image is located on the first 250 MB partition, formatted with plain old FAT16 filesystem, but using a special pseudo-filesystem on it (see VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images). The image itself, s.v00, is a 124 MB compressed file, which is decompressed on boot and contains the hypervisor operating system. Note that the […]

Highlights, VMware, vSphere none

ESXi – More on partitions

20 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In a previous post I’ve described the partitions used by a ESXi installation (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk). Partitions are formatted with a FAT16 filesystem, but the ESXi files are stored into the banks partitions with a specific system that consist in some compressed archives containing the required files or more archives (as also described in the yesterday’s post about the reset of the root password). More details on the filesystem used is on the first number of the VMware Technical Journal, in the paper: VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient […]

Highlights, vSphere none

ESXi – How to reset the root password

19 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes Reset the root password with ESX 3.x was quite simple, just because the service console was a partition writable a live CD… With ESX 4.x it was a little more complicated (the service console was basically a vmdk). But with ESXi things are more complicated, due to the partition layout, that ESXi works in RAM and that all configurations files are stored in the banks it special archive files. The file containing the password hashes is called “shadow” and it is is contained in  a nested structure of archives inside the state.tgz file.

Highlights, vSphere none
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