In my last post I was Exploring a Limitation of VMware DRS and I have encountered another situation that had similar symptoms but the resolution was quite different. This problem was occurring on a VMware ESX 3.5 cluster that was specifically affecting Windows 2008 R2 64bit virtual machines that were configured with four processors and eight gigabits of RAM. These virtual machines were taking an extreme amount of time to perform a reboot. During the reboot ESXTOP was showing insane %RDY with spikes climbing over 200. When the reboot would finally finish several services would have failed to start.
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration as well as being contributing author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and How to Cheat at Configuring VMware ESX Server. Stephen is an IT Veteran with over 15 years experience in the industry. Stephen is a moderator on the VMware Communities Forum and was elected vExpert for 2009 and 2010. Stephen can also be seen regularly presenting on different topics at national and international virtualization conferences.
Exploring a Limitation of VMware DRS
I have been a big fan of VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). VMware DRS is a service or feature that will dynamically allocate and balance computing resources across the hosts in a cluster. In all of the environments I have work with so far, DRS has been a fantastic tool for getting and maintaining that balance across all the hosts in a cluster. Recently though I have come across a limitation of VMware’s DRS that is worth mentioning.
Monitoring from the Cloud
I have started the year 2011 out by looking at some of the different monitoring solutions available for us to have an insight into the health and welfare of the systems that we support. In your typical monitoring solution you would install the monitoring server in your environment and let the system discover all the devices in your infrastructure and or to control the licenses we would manually enter the devices that we want to monitor. Some of these monitoring servers solutions have to have a beefy box to begin with and all solutions will need a great deal of “tweaking” to control the number of false positives as well as time put in to be able to report on what exactly we care to be alerted about.
A Look at VMTurbo Monitoring
It is the start of a new year and the time to start taking a look at some of the 3rd party products that are available to help us manage our virtual infrastructures. To start the New Year off I am going to be looking at what VMTurbo has to offer.
A New Year VMUG Challenge
It is the start of 2011 and I hope everyone has not broken their New Year’s Resolutions already. To start the year off, I would like to encourage and or challenge you to become a part of your local VMware User Group or VMUG as we like to call it. Last year I did a post on My Experience with VMUGs and I am a full supporter of this program and the good it can bring. Although I have a bias for the VMUGS over other types of user groups, the concept of people helping people rates high in my book and I would like to challenge you all to get involved.
Virtualization Review 2010
It is the last few days of the year and time for a review of virtualization 2010. Although VMware was founded in 1998 it was not until 2001 that I first heard of VMware and played with the workstation product to be able to run different flavors of Linux. So for me, 2010 closes out a great year in virtualization as a whole as well as a decade of virtualization and what a ride it has been.