Windows Services for Unix provides a NFS server. The writing speed to NFS export may be slow. Set this registry key to 1 to speed it up. Otherwise, the software and hardware cache may not work well with NFS.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NfsSvr\Parameters\UseWriteCache
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
VMware vSphere 4.0 Quick Start
Played with VMware vSphere 4 for a couple of days. Here is briefly what I found. It could you save some time putting together a similar rig just to test out.
You need at least two physical hosts running ESXi 4 or ESX 4. I used to two Dell Optiplex 755 desktop boxes to run ESXi 4. Optiplex 755 does not run ESXi 3.5 without adding a new NIC, but works fine with ESXi 4. Just remember to switch the SATA mode to ATA in BIOS which is not by default.
The management part of vSphere is vCenter, which is a pack of applications running on top of a beefy Windows environment. VMware recommends dual core CPU with 2 to 4 GB of memory, and preferably x64. This is true because vCenter uses Tomcat and Java extensively. A VM running on a standalone ESXi will be fine however you need to provide separate high availability to this critical system since if it down, the ESXi/ESX boxes running will all be alone without any vSphere management.
You will also need a storage server to host VM files. I used an old Pentium 4 box with 1G of RAM to run Openfiler to serve as an iSCSI target. VMotion and VMware HA are only available when VM files sit on backend storage server.
With all boxes setup, you can try out VMotion and VMware HA features. Here is the catch:
• The two ESXi/ESX boxes better to have same CPU and memory for these two features to run. VMotion is more tolerant, while HA is not. However, my VMotion and HA runs with one Quad-core Q6600 plus one Dual-core E6550, but not that Q6600 plus a faster Quad-core Q9550.
• Make sure DNS servers are properly set up for HA to run.
VMotion can be done from one datastore to another on the same host, but not across hosts. If two hosts share the same backend storage, VMotion can go across hosts.
The so called storage VMotion is simply VMotion across datastores. Nothing special.
VMware HA only provided HA to VM frontend. If the backend storage NAS goes down, all is down. VMware provide vStorage API to help integrating with storage system replication/copy. So to achieve true HA, you need much more than VMware HA.
VMSafe is also kind of API thing to help third-party security appliance to monitor the virtual-switched network.
DRS is for load-balancing and redistribution. Not a very useful feature to small to medium enterprises.
Data Recovery is pretty useful if you need high level of HA, but it requires two physical sites connected by WAN to run.
You need at least two physical hosts running ESXi 4 or ESX 4. I used to two Dell Optiplex 755 desktop boxes to run ESXi 4. Optiplex 755 does not run ESXi 3.5 without adding a new NIC, but works fine with ESXi 4. Just remember to switch the SATA mode to ATA in BIOS which is not by default.
The management part of vSphere is vCenter, which is a pack of applications running on top of a beefy Windows environment. VMware recommends dual core CPU with 2 to 4 GB of memory, and preferably x64. This is true because vCenter uses Tomcat and Java extensively. A VM running on a standalone ESXi will be fine however you need to provide separate high availability to this critical system since if it down, the ESXi/ESX boxes running will all be alone without any vSphere management.
You will also need a storage server to host VM files. I used an old Pentium 4 box with 1G of RAM to run Openfiler to serve as an iSCSI target. VMotion and VMware HA are only available when VM files sit on backend storage server.
With all boxes setup, you can try out VMotion and VMware HA features. Here is the catch:
• The two ESXi/ESX boxes better to have same CPU and memory for these two features to run. VMotion is more tolerant, while HA is not. However, my VMotion and HA runs with one Quad-core Q6600 plus one Dual-core E6550, but not that Q6600 plus a faster Quad-core Q9550.
• Make sure DNS servers are properly set up for HA to run.
VMotion can be done from one datastore to another on the same host, but not across hosts. If two hosts share the same backend storage, VMotion can go across hosts.
The so called storage VMotion is simply VMotion across datastores. Nothing special.
VMware HA only provided HA to VM frontend. If the backend storage NAS goes down, all is down. VMware provide vStorage API to help integrating with storage system replication/copy. So to achieve true HA, you need much more than VMware HA.
VMSafe is also kind of API thing to help third-party security appliance to monitor the virtual-switched network.
DRS is for load-balancing and redistribution. Not a very useful feature to small to medium enterprises.
Data Recovery is pretty useful if you need high level of HA, but it requires two physical sites connected by WAN to run.
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