Vmware

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5 SRM 5.5 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas Official Documentation Links SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page ...

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has. Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”. Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT). ...

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts. ...

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. ...

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. ...

In my last post I explained a memory reclamation technique called Transparent Page Sharing. This post is dedicated to the Balloon driver method. The first thing to be clear about is that Memory Ballooning is a technique that is only engaged when the host is running low on physical memory. If you have a host with 60 GB of physical memory available and the virtual machines are only allocated a total of 30GB of memory, then you may never need to know what memory ballooning is all about. However if you are over committing your hosts then this is an important topic to review. ...