Virtualization

I see a good number of IT shops with my job and in most cases the largest priority is system uptime. I might be there to install, troubleshoot, etc. but in the front off my mind is the idea that everything must stay up and running. IT departments are adding redundant WAN connections, server clusters, fault tolerance, failover devices, disaster recovery sites and redundancies at every level. But in some cases these departments are forgetting a pretty integral part of continuous uptime. ...

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?” So here we go: Thin vs Thick Thin provisioning: Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example. ...

It’s hard to believe but theITHollow.com is now 1 year old! The first year has been great and I feel like I’ve probably learned more writing it than the readers have learned from reading it. Thank you for a great first year and if you keep reading it, I’ll keep writing it.

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment. What is a Slot? To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control. A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources. ...

I recently decided to give VMware Horizon a shot and found the install to be a little confusing so this gives me a good opportunity to lay it all out so that others can try it out for themselves. A big “thank you” goes out to Raj Jethnani for a helping hand with this post. If you’d like to follow him on twitter his link is here: @rajtech For those of you who don’t know, Horizon is a nifty SAAS platform for you to present thinapp applications too. I could see many organizations benefit from this technology in the near future. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) Configure the Horizon Service Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1) In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard. The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) In the last part we configured the Horizon Connector, now we’re going to run the setup wizard in order to assign applications and select users. Horizon Connector Setup Wizard Let’s begin the setup wizard Join the domain. Enter the domain name and enter the username and password that has permissions to add a machine to the domain. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) In the last part, we finished setting up the basics of Horizon Connector and the Service Portal. Now we can login to the Service Portal to assign our applications. Application Prerequisites A couple of more prerequisites should be done before we log in. First, install the Horizon agent on all (or a few test machines) clients that will be using the thinapp packages that are published with Horizon. ...

Many times I see new virtualization admins add too many vCPUs to virtual machines after they’ve converted their physical machines. I believe the reason for this is a simple misunderstanding that more is not always better in this case. With physical servers, the more is better approach seems to work fine. If you have a quad core processor it’s better than a dual core and if you have a dual processor server it’s better than a single socket. When it comes to virtual machines extra processors can actually make a VM perform worse than having too few processors. ...

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration! At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install. ...