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Reclaim free space in Thin Provisioned vmdk disk

5 December 2011
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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).

Highlights, vSphere, vStorage

Fix vCenter Plugins list: Remove Enterprise Converter

1 December 2011
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Reading Time: 2 minutes One possible issue after a vSphere 5 upgrade using an in-place upgrade of vCenter Server could appear when you forget to remove the Converter Enterprise plugin (and/or the Guided Consolidation plugin). As you know some products has been removed from vSphere 5, and their plugins may remain in a “orphan” state. The result of this issue is that you will have a “broken” plugins list (with some plugins that are no more available) and also a wrong vCenter health status, due to some services that are no more existing:

Highlights, VMware, vSphere ,

ESXi – RDM disks with SAS Storage (local or shared)

29 November 2011
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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 […]

Highlights, vDesign, vSphere none

Supported means that works well?

25 November 2011
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In the previous post I’ve consider the cases and scenarios of a “non supported” configurations. But what’s happen with “supported” configurations? Are they always working and always in the best way? A supported configuration means that it can work well, but in specific situations, cases, scenarios. Usually a good rule could be make a good analysis and a good virtual design before choose the single pieces. A supported configuration does not mean that also meets requirements like availability, scalability and performance. For example there are a lot of entry storage that are VMware certified, but […]

Highlights, vProducts none

Not supported means that it does not work?

24 November 2011
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In previous posts related to vSphere 5 upgrade, I’ve talked several time about the HCL and his relevance. For a production environment, have a completed supported configuration, in each parts (hardware, software, firmware, …) IMHO is mandatory. But “not supported” not always means “not working”. There are different scenarios with an “unsupported configuration”:

Highlights, vProducts none

Upgrading to ESXi 5 vs. doing a Fresh Install

23 November 2011
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Reading Time: 3 minutes In a vSphere upgrade process, there are two different approach for the host upgrade: a fresh re-install or a in-line upgrade. In the VMware site there is an interesting post about this choice. The differences between an upgraded host and a freshly installed host are:

Highlights, vSphere , ,

Virtual CPU and Virtual Cores

22 August 2011
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In a physical environment usually the term CPU is used to refer to the physical package (or socket). The real processing unit inside this package are called cores (and not that each core can have inside more ALU and can be seen as more logical cores with hyper-threading feature). More CPU usually define a SMP system, more cores a multi-core CPU, more CPU each with more cores a complex system (usually the NUMA architecture is used in this case). In a virtual enviroment the term vCPU is used to refer to a core assigned to […]

Highlights, vDesign, vSphere none
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