VMware vCenter & SQL server best practices [updated 15/4/09]
VMware vCenter & SQL : Best Practice
This month I started on a new project and I noticed again a different approach from a colleague to the vCenter/SQL/Physical/Virtual issue. And of course there has been written a lot about this issue but I couldn’t find my exact view anywhere else so I thought I’d open up a discussion here by presenting the Best Practice in my humble opinion.
There are 4 critical decisions you have to make concerning the vCenter server for your VI:
1. vCenter server : physical or virtual.
2. SQL Database (server) : locally or detached.
3. Redundancy options : make it redundant and if so; how?
4. License server : locally or detached.
Difference between free ESXi and licensed ESXi
Rich Brambley over at VMetc.com updated his very popular article about the difference between the free ESXi and the licensed ESXi. One major improvement since Update 3 is:
RCLI is no longer read only. You can read and write changes thus making remote administration possible.
Thanks Rich for the update!
VMware VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3)
I was searching for information about the new experimental tool for ESX 3.5 VMDK Recovery Tool and I found a great knowledgebase article at VMware. VMDK Recovery Tool is a tool to recover VMDK files if they become deleted, or if the VMFS datastore gets deleted or corrupted. There are some limitations to the tool:
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The tool is experimental. Experimental means that the tool is not supported and might not work as expected in all customer environments.
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The tool is not available for ESXi.
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You cannot restore from multiple block list files.
Unfortunately, currently at home I only have ESXi running and I have no customer running U3 already. Anyone who tried VMDK Recovery Tool yet?
VMware ESX 3.5 and thinprovisioning
Thinprovisioning will be a new feature of the next release of ESX. However, it is already possible to use thinprovisioning from the service console with the vmkfstools command. Here are some tips (thanks to Richard Garsthagen):
Create a 15GB thinprovisioned disk:
vmkfstools -c 15G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/vmfs_volume/VM_name/thin_disk.vmdk
If you want to convert a thick disk, you can create a copy from it as thin disk. After that, you will need to remove the old disk from the VM and add the new converted copy. … Continue Reading
The Power of XEN
Last week I attended a meeting with several guys from Citrix. Purpose of the meeting was to convince us that the latest releases of Citrix XenServer are mature products for the enterprise market. Why this meeting? Because lot’s is said about Xen (the non commercial product) and XenServer (Citrix commercial product), but for now it only has a 3% marketshare. So when customers ask us for a reference it far more difficult to give a reference than for example VmWare. But back to the point, What did Citrix tell us to convince us?
