vSphere 4.1 Improvements in Availability

With the release of vSphere 4.1 there have been some great enhancements that have been added with this release. In one of my earlier post I took a look at the vSphere 4.1 release of ESXi. This post I am going to take a look at vSphere 4.1 availability options and enhancements. So what has changed with this release? A maximum of 320 virtual machines per cluster has been firmly set. In vSphere 4.0 there were different VM/Host limitations for DRS as well as different rules for VMware HA. VMware has also raised the number of virtual machines that can be run in a single cluster from 1280 in 4.0 to 3000 in the vSphere 4.1 release. How do these improvements affect your upgrade planning?

Dynamic Resource Load Balancing

I just finished writing all the content for my next book entitled VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment of Virtualization Servers (2nd Edition) which continues the discussion on Dynamic Resource Load Balancing (DRLB). DRLB is the balancing of virtualized workloads across all hosts within a cluster of virtualization hosts without human intervention. This is the ultimate goal of automation with respect to virtualization and therefore the cloud. In effect, with DRLB the virtualization administrators job has been simplified to configuration and trouble shooting leaving the virtual environment to load balance work loads on its own.

Going to vSphere — The Need to Upgrade

I have been preparing my virtual environment for a VMware vSphere upgrade. Specifically I have been going over my existing hardware with an eye towards running all aspects of vSphere including VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), NPIV, Cisco Nexus 1000V, and well everything.