Large locally attached storage
We all know that ESX supports LUNs / Disks up to 2TB (minus a few kb) but what happens when a larger locally attached disk is connected to a host?
This is what I have noticed when I tried to create a large volume on my own ESX white box with more than 2TB locally attached storage: it only allowed me to create a volume with the space above the 2TB. In my situation I got a 48 GB volume on a 2048 GB LUN. Also, this ”2TB” volume, which I created with the vmkfstools commandline utility, was useless because I could not create a single VM on it. … Continue Reading
VMworld 2009: Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage
Edit: I started this blogpost more than a week ago, but I never finished it. Just as I wanted to complete the blogpost, I found out VMware released a new whitepaper about VMware vSphere Memory management. I’ve added the best practices on the bottom of this blogpost.
This hour and a half session about “Host” and “Guest” memory usage was very interesting. The topics in this session were:
- Define host and guest memory usage and ask some questions
- Memory management concepts
- Answer our questions
- Best practices
- Future Directions
It covered way more than I can put in this blogpost, but I want to highlight some of the things that were discussed during this presentation. The most important part to remember is:
The ESX hypervisor doesn’t have a clue which memory pages are active or free within a guest-OS. The hypervisor only knows how much memory is allocated to a VM.
Why vCenter server should be free
Do you remember the days when VMware P2V Assistant costs $20.000? And a couple of years ago, the product was suddenly available for free? And what about the introduction of the free ESXi? VMware’s hypervisor available for free all of a sudden? Well, this is exactly what I think will happen to vCenter Server. It’s just a matter of time, but VMworld 2009 is getting close, so why wait, VMware? 
… Continue Reading
HOWTO manage HP P400 RAID controller in a vSphere whitebox
A while ago I posted an article about my ESX whitebox and the HP P400 RAID controller I use in this whitebox server. At that time, I used ESXi 3.5 and there was no way I could configure or get the status from the RAID controller. Fortunately, someone commented that it was possible when using the regular ESX (no i) version by installing some HP software packages. I’ve been using ESXi 4 for some time now, but it was quiet annoying when of my disks died and I wasn’t informed about it or could not check the status, other than by restarting the server. I have switched to ESX 4 and now I want to be able to check and configure my P400 RAID controller. And I can! This is how I did it: … Continue Reading
1 week of G/A of vSphere 4.0 : getting started
vSphere is out on the market for about a week now and the blogosphere was already actively releasing all kinds of information about VMware’s next-gen “Cloud Operating System”.
I‘ve been reading quite a lot and made a list for myself with articles that I found most interesting concerning VMware vSphere 4.0 and I would like to share it with you.
… Continue Reading
