VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘best practices’

Did you take the time to plan for VMware Update Manager (VUM) when designing your virtual infrastructure architecture? Planning focus is usually on VirtualCenter (VC) server’s requirements, but then, in my experience, Update Manager and it’s default local SQL 2005 Express database seem to be added on the VC server simply because the installer is prompted about VUM during the VC setup routine. This scenario can create a poor performing VUM implementation.

Recently on the VMware Performance Team’s VROOM blog, John Liang’s post titled VMware Update Manager Performance and Best Practices Paper Posted announced a new whitepaper that should be a must read for any virtual infrastructure administrator preparing to use (or already using) VUM. The .pdf is a 14 page discussion on the topics that impact VUM such as performance, networking, resource consumption, and even virus scanning.

I find a few of these recommendations interesting, and the whitepaper leaves me wondering how common using VUM for virtual machine OS patching really is. I’ve created two informal polls, so please take a second to complete them and maybe we can get a quick gauge on how VUM is commonly implemented.

[poll id="2"][poll id="3"]

The whitepaper is a quick, informative read that I strongly encourage, but the following list of best practices was copied from the whitepaper’s Conclusion section.
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This session was my last VMworld 2008 session on Tuesday 9.17. I must have missed it in my notebook Tuesday night, so I am posting my notes now. The session was hosted by Mike DePetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware. Mike did the entire session on one leg. If you saw one of Mike’s sessions or you know Mike you’ll understand that comment.

This session was designed for companies that are primarily Linux shops and have numerous virtual machines (VMs) on VMware virtual infrastructure. Mike provided general information about Linux as a guest OS as well as some best practices and performance tips for both the VMs and the ESX hosts. The rest of this post is my notes from the session.

Mike started out by talking about general recommendations for building Linux VMs.

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This will be another live blog session. Look for updates to this post every 15 minutes. I’m curious if any new best practices or insights will be mentioned that compliment the new vNetworking and vStorage pieces of the VMware VDC-OS.

Well, starting the session with the same disclaimer about the forward looking statements confirms my hopes! On the other hand, the forward statements could be new NetApp technologies. Either case would be cool!

A disclaimer before you read my notes: I have limited storage administration experience. Take my notes for what they are and understand the source (me). Help me out if I state something wrong.

This talk will be primarily on the NFS storage protocol. “NFS might be the best kept secret for virtualization”. To support this claim the speaker is talking about areas to consider when comparing storage protocols. Performance, Ease of Management, and High Availability are the main categories to consider. Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrading to ESX3.5 and VirtualCeter 2.5 Best Practices is a VMware KB article that lists best practice recommendations when performing the VI upgrade. As explained in the article:

This document provides additional steps which may be useful when upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. It is assumed at this point that you have also read the Upgrade Guide.

Although the article contains 11 items in the list, in my opinion the last few are common steps (place the cd in the cd-rom drive of the host etc.) and not really best practices.
Regardless, review the following before performing the upgrade and follow these recommendations to minimize trouble.
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A Google Group discussion thread asking for help with hung tasks in VirtualCenter points out an important Service Console configuration best practice. Killing tasks on vcenter starts off by asking if there is a way to kill several VirtualCenter tasks that are bogging down the management server. Although the method for killing individual tasks is never realized, understanding potential reasons for the problem is the more important take away. Fixing the VirtualCenter performance problem results after correcting ESX host resource issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Installing ESX is fast and simple. By default you could click through the installer GUI changing only your local time zone and end up with a stable, dependable host. However, there are some recommended partitioning best practices that should be followed in order to make sure you minimize possible future headaches and create a repeatable and scalable environment.

This post uses content from documents found in the VI Plan and Design Toolkit available to VMware partners. Logging on to Partner Central and accessing > Info Center > VAC > Services is how you find the various toolkits. It also should be pointed out that the partitioning information in this post is for ESX 3.x only, and is not applicable to ESX 3i, 2.x or previous versions.

When installing ESX you quickly reach the Partitioning Options screen. Select the “Recommended” radio button initially. You can then make changes from Read the rest of this entry »

When you use VCB you have to specify either ESX root or VC2 administrator credentials. These credentials are added and easily found stored in the required vcb-pre-backup and vcb-post-backup .bat files, and the config.js file when using a third party backup integration module. Therefore, a best practice is to create a new user that has the required permissions for backing up VMs. The new user, vcbuser, will allow you to keep your administrator and root accounts secure.

In the latest version of VC, VC2.5, the vcbuser role and permissions are predefined and called “VMware Consolidated Backup User”. The steps in this post are intended only for VC2.02 and earlier.

To create the vcbuser do the following: Read the rest of this entry »