VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘boche.net’

Or maybe it’s just a cleaning service for the popular Australian boots!

Image Counseling Service for VM /ETC UGG Winners?

Besides, Ugly Green Gurus don’t mind a little mud on them once in a while.

Jason Boche sent me this photo. With 2 consecutive UGH awards, Jason probably already has an annual pass at this establishment!

I wonder if any VM /ETC UGG/UGH winners actually own any UGGs?

If you have not had advanced access to the VMware vSphere Beta or attended VMworld Europe 2009 or Partner Exchange 2009 Labs and you are just itching to see the new client management interface look and feel, then there are plenty of blogs with feature screen shots posting daily. This post is just a generic introduction to the new vSphere client options,  but primarily features  screen shots of the new vSphere web interface.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Boche’s post titled Idle Memory Tax is a great read if you are trying to understand ESX memory allocation between virtual machines (VMs). Specifically, the post does a great job explaining how it works when you over commit your physical host’s memory. In other words, the sum of all the RAM assigned to the VMs running on a host is greater than the actual physical RAM of the ESX server.

Here’s a quote from Jason that briefly explains part of the technology that makes over commit possible: the Idle Memory Tax (IMT).

“Quite simply it’s a mechanism to take idle/unused memory from guest VMs that are hogging it in order to give that memory to another VM where it’s more badly needed. Sort of like Robin Hood for VI. By default this is performed using VMware’s balloon driver which is the more optimal of the two available methods. Out of the box, the amount of idle memory that will be reclaimed is 75% as configured by Mem.IdleTax under advanced host configuration. The VMKernel polls for idle memory in guest VMs every 60 seconds.”

Read the entire post for much more technical details and examples.

I’ve blogged before about the symptoms when the IMT and the ESX balloon driver can no longer keep up and it’s time to add another ESX host and spread the VM load.

I believe that ESX 3.x changed the need to Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve posted about dealing with ESX snapshots before, but it seems to always be a topic that resurfaces. It’s almost as if there is a “virtualization school of hard knocks” and dealing with open ESX snapshots is a required course. Maybe the misunderstanding is so widespread because a lot of administrators first use VMware Workstation before implementing production servers hosted on ESX?

Anyways, there is a lot of information about snapshots and the problems they can get you in already on the web, but this week Jason Boche posted Know thy open snapshots
which I found to be very informative and helpful. The title of my post was taken from an eye opening quote from Jason:

“Unfortunately in the current builds, VMware doesn’t give us real good (or automated) visibility of open snapshots. I liken it to handing a loaded gun to a child – it’s only a matter of time before an accident happens. That analogy is quite extreme but it gets my point across …”

Read Jason’s post in it’s entirety for much more information, but I particularly like his explanation Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve downloaded your free version of ESXi. Maybe you’ve built a couple of ESX Servers but you haven’t purchased a full VI 3.5 Enterpise license. You might even have an enterprise license but your VirtualCenter (VC) server will be a virtual machine (VM) and you want to build a template VM as a gold image first. These are some of several possible scenarios where it helps to have VC -like functionalities without VirtualCenter. This post is a summary of 3 freely available tools that can provide some of VirtualCenter’s features.

First let me state that there is not an exact substitute for VirtualCenter, and the automation and ease of management VC provides is well worth it’s cost. Now for some alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Boche posted a VMware VI network communications and port usage diagram that I had to have a copy of for my knowledge base. The diagram is apparently collaboration between Jason and Nigel Metheringham that was started on communities.vmware .com. The result is a single page solution to important port information that I always seem to have to dig out of the VMware installation and quick start manuals.

Here’s an image of the current version of the diagram. Go to the post on boche.net for the .pdf version. Read the rest of this entry »