Over the past couple of weeks i’ve been helping our Ops Team decommission an old storage array. Part of the process is to remove the datastore mounts and paths to ensure a clean ESXi Host config as well as remove any vCenter Tags that are used for vCloud Director Storage Policies. Looking through my post […] Read More
Quick Fix: PernixData FVP Management Server Service Doesn’t Start
Posting a very quick fix to an issue that I have seen pop up during all my installs to date of PernixData FVP Management Server (v2.x) whereby the Management Server Service Fails to start after a successful install. Once the install completes successfully if you go to the vCenter Web or VI Client to start […] Read More
In Vendors We Trust! Storage is God…
I tweeted recently that IT Professionals at some level must love pain…All through my working life I’ve dealt with outages and issues that cause myself and other around me significant amounts of agita and pain. The IT industry is unique in that we, as professionals must deal with issues that to a certain extent are caused […] Read More
ESXi 5.5: IOPS Limit and mClock scheduler
It’s fair to say that it’s not very often the difference between a 1 and 0 can have such a massive impact on performance…I had read a couple of posts from Duncan Epping in regards to a new DiskIO Schedular introduced in ESXi 5.5 and what it meant for VM Disk Limits compared to how […] Read More
EVO:RAIL – Who are VMware Really Targeting?
Probably the biggest announcement from last week’s VMworld was the unveiling of the Project Marvin/Mystic as EVO:RAIL. Most of the focus on VMware releasing their own OEM distributed hyperconverged solution was to compete head to head with established hyper converged players like Nutanix…however after reading through Duncan Eppings blog post and seeing the UI Demo […] Read More
CloudPhysics: Enhanced Storage Analytics Cards [Part 2] – Snapshots Gone Wild 2
Following up from Part 1 which focused on the Datastore Contention v2 Card, I’ll shift focus to what can sometimes be a Virutalization Admins worst nightmare…Snapshots. Snapshots are not backups (repeat x100) …but backup systems such as Veeam utilize VMware Snapshots to do their thing…and sometimes the process of SnapShot consolidation can fail, leaving unplanned SnapShots in […] Read More
CloudPhysics: Enhanced Storage Analytics Cards [Part 1] – Datastore Contention
The guys at CloudPhysics have been busy behind the scenes of late working on improving an already great Analytic and Monitoring platform and recently I was able to preview a new enhanced set of Storage Analytic Cards. These cards are currently in Preview and with an official write up here by @esxtopGuru Which goes through the different […] Read More
Nested ESXi – Reduced Network Throughput with Promiscuous Mode PortGroups
We have been conducting performance and stress testing of a new NFS connected storage platform over the past month or so and through that testing we have seen some interesting behaviours in terms of what effects overall performance relative to total network throughput vs Latency vs IOPS. Using a couple of stress test scripts, we […] Read More
vCloud Reporting: Org and OrgvDC VM Report (PowerCLI)
I had been looking for a way to get quick reports from our vCloud Zones using PowerCLI that reports on VM Allocated Usage. Basically I wanted to get a list of VMs/vAPPs and return values for allocated vCPU, vRAM and Storage. I cam across this blog from Geek After Five @jakerobinson which uses the PowerCLI CI command […] Read More
VMware PEX ANZ 2013 Thoughts – Software Defined Storage
I was luckey to attend PEX at Australia Technology Park this week and thought I would share some of my take always. The venue was a little different to what you would come to expect from a tech event in Sydney… Usually we are in and around Darling Harbour at the Convention Centre… And even […] Read More