vSphere 4.1: What's new on ESXi & Availability

I recently did a partner training on vSphere 4.1. The session covers the new features. Focus of the 1 hour session was on ESXi and Availability (HA, FT, etc) and a bit of management.

Slide can be found here

Hope you find useful.

Virtualising Tier 1 Applications

I did a presentation on the above. It was a short presentation (45 min), so the focus is on the overall approach.

Since there are many requests for the slide, I thought of sharing it here for a wider audience. Hope you find it useful. You can download it here.

Manual Sizing

This is a simple spreadsheet I use to collect data for manual sizing/design. It takes into account location (physical data centers), application licensing (normally, Oracle Apps are licenced by CPU and putting them into dedicated cluster helps).

You can find it here.

Enterprise Admin exam: study guide

Just sharing a personal study notes that I prepared for partners. It's a template that we have found useful for preparing for the VI3 Enterprise Admin exam.

You can find here

vSphere Design Best Practice

I put together what I learned on design consideration from customers, colleagues, partners and Internet.

You can find it here.

As usual, it's my personal opinion.

Hope you find it useful.

Cheers!
e1

VMware User Group - 16 March 2010

I started the user group around mid 2008. It has been fun doing it as I learn more about real VMware usage from the meetings.

The meeting is always on Tuesday, 5pm at VMware office. We are located at Suntec City, Tower 4, #06-01. Next meeting is 16 March 2010.

I'd share the road ahead of virtualisation in 2010 and beyond. It's looking exciting with a few key enhancements coming in next 2 years. The idea is to help users with their planning.


Cheers!

e1

vSphere Performance Troubleshooting tips

Contents:
- Various troubleshooting tips for vSphere.
- It covers CPU, RAM, Network and Storage.

Source:
- my lab
- VMworld
- feedback from others
- manuals

You can find it here: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11742

Hope you find it useful.

VMware vSphere Cluster Size

How many ESX/ESXi hosts do you put in a Cluster?

If there is a need for >8 hosts, then I'd go for 8 hosts per cluster.

Reasons why 8, not 4 or 12 or 16 or 32 hosts:

• Best practice for cluster is to give is same hardware spec with same CPU frequency.
• Eliminates risk of incompatibility
• Complies with Fault Tolerant best practices
• So more than 8 means it’s more difficult/costly to keep them all the same. You need to buy 8 hosts a time, which can be expensive.
  
• Too few hosts result in overhead (the “spare” host)
• Too many hosts are harder to manage (patch, performance troubleshooting, too many VMs per cluster, HW upgrade)
• Some cluster changes in the Advanced Attributes requires cluster to be disable and enable.
• It is harder/longer to do this when there are many hosts
• DRS: 
• 8 hosts give DRS sufficient space to “maneuver”
  
• #VM per host decrease by 4x in >8 host.
• 160 VMs per host if <= 8 hosts in cluster
• 40 VMs per host if > 8 hosts in cluster
• We should avoid being near the limit.
• 40 VM/host is easily reached in Lab Manager or View environment.
• Availability: Able to withstand 1-2 host failures
• A balance between too small (4 hosts) and too large (>12 hosts)
• Allow us to isolate 1 host for VM-troubleshooting purpose
• Upgrading >8 servers at a time is expensive ($$) and complex
• Storage: 8 hosts/LUN à a safe value of 16 paths to a LUN
• Consistent with VMware View
• View 4 cluster is limited to 8 hosts if we use View Composer
  
• 8 is easy number to remember. And a lucky one. And we all know that production needs luck, not just experience :-)

That's for my first posting. I sincerely hope it's useful.