VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘esx 4’

This VMworld 2009 session took place Thurs at 9:30 am in room 134

Points made by the presenter worth remembering.

• Physical failure is unavoidable, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• There is a 50% chance that pieces of an ESX Cluster will fail and take down critical services and servers.
• You’re not usually staring at a monitoring screen, and you want to be notified as the hardware degrades not afterwards.
• You want as much hardware info about a host, from multiple different vendor platforms, and on a single screen
• Physical failure is a fact of virtual life
• Be proactive about hardware failure and use DRS + hardware monitoring + Alarms

An interesting demo in this session showed the use of  the built in vCenter 4 host hardware temperature status alarm generating SNMP traps as well as automatically putting a host in maintenance mode so an administrator can investigate. This action instigated a VMotion evacuation of the VMs on the impacted host and effectively isolated the hardware issue in the environment with minimal or zero impact.

My key take away of this session is that numerous “out of the box” vCenter event based alarms can be leveraged during the warning phase of hardware failures. This includes alerts covering power, fans, cpus, memory, batteries, etc. The ESX host hardware monitoring feature is detected and available automtically in vSphere 4.

My notes: Read the rest of this entry »