Aug 30

I like vCenter Configuration Manager more and more as I use it. The reporting and control it gives me is much better than my previous product. I am pointing at my Altiris server with the dust on it. Who am i kidding, I virtualized that product when we installed it. The thought of a physical server not running esx on it is laughable to me. I am going to sit here and eat my pretzel while we wait for the session to start. I assure you that your wait will be shorter than mine.

See? Let’s begin.

1. This session was a little weird because the presenters would interrupt each other and start talking. Odd.
2. VCM integration with vCloud Director looks cool. Auto discovery and understanding of machines with the same name and ip but in different zones.
3. The change detection is tricky for me. I want to monitor everything that could possibly change because of paranoia.
4. Although I do not use it, VCM can provision OS, via pxe boot.
5. Someone agrees that the cloud should include moving the workload back and forth between the public and private cloud.
6. One thing I had not really considered before but I am now, is giving read only access and reports to the server app owners in my org. We keep this info to the server guys right now.

Aug 30


A few notes from the session.

1. The iterative memory copy that vMotion does was interesting to hear more about in detail. I think too many people may not quite understand what a vMotion is really doing. I often just explain it as black magic.
2. VSphere 5 interests me, the idea of multiple nics being used for vMotion. I wonder how best to configure this in UCS. Is vMotion traffic more than client traffic?
3. VMotion ID once found can give details about vMotion in the vmkernel log.
Tests appear to show that vMotion on vSphere 5 is faster, 37% drop in time on vSphere 5.
4. vMotion obviously gains tremendous performance on 10GbE.
5. Multiple vMotion NICs and vMotion performance gain in vSphere 5.
6. Configure vMotion NIC’s on the same vSwitch.
7. For best vMotion performance place vm swap on SAN.
8. If you use CPU reservations, leave some CPU for the host for vMotion ~30%.
9. Metro vMotion supported in vSphere 5. Doesn’t help us VPlex Geo guys.
10. Conclusion? Upgrade to vSphere 5 ASAP if you want faster vmotions.
11. I’m headed to ask about vMotion over asynchronous distances. If not NDA I will share :)

Good session for vMotion people.

Aug 26


I have been working on a new orchestrator server and ran into this issue. Looked for logs and could not find them in the location they should be. Starting the service would fail with a VMWare specific error that I could not see. In the orchestrator console I saw all green lights and no logging level changes seemed to produce me any logs. Finally I ran the service manually removing the -s and found the java VM could not start because it could not allocate the necessary memory. I checked wrapper.conf and confirmed it only needed 2048MB to initialize and maximum. I checked how much memory I had knowing it was at least 2GB and whoops it was only 1GB. Doh! Changed it to 3GB and powered on the VM for a successful orchestrator install since the service worked great now.

Moral of story? Measure twice, cut once.

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