VMWARE 5

Vmware HA – Admission Control Policy – Vsphere 5

Posted on by Imran Rashid
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If you have used Vsphere 4, you will know that when configuring HA and ‘percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity ‘ under Admission Control Policy, the percentage set is for both memory and CPU. You don’t get the option to set seperate percentages for memory and CPU. See screen shot to the left. (Click on image to enlarge)

 



With Vsphere 5, vmware have split this so you can now set seperate percentages for CPU and memory. See screen shot below: (Click on image to enlarge)

Vsphere 5 – New SDRS Maintenance mode feature

Posted on by Imran Rashid
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A new vsphere 5 feature which is going to make life a little easier when carrying out data store related work is ‘SDRS maintenance mode’, which allows you to place a data store within a datastore cluster into maintenance mode. Similar to placing an ESX or ESXi host into maintenance mode.

Create a new data store cluster, follow the instructions and select the stores you would like to be part of the data store cluster. In a production environment, it’s recommended that you group datastores with similar storage capabilities.

Once the data store cluster has been created, you can right click a datastore within your cluster and select to ‘Enter SDRS Maintenance Mode’. After work has been completed, exit SDRS Maintenance mode.

vmware 5 – consolidating snapshots

Posted on by Imran Rashid
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Snapshots within vmware can sometimes cause major problems. For example, you delete a snapshot from within your vsphere client and it shows it’s been removed successfully. But has it? and is it going to cause you issues as it grows in size? Even though the GUI shows the snapshot has been removed successfully, the snapshot may still exist on the datastore and overtime can grow too large causing storage and performance issues.

With version 5, vmware have added a great new tool. If you delete a snapshot from the GUI but it does not successfully delete from the datastore, you will be informed. Your vmware vcenter server will display a warning when the descriptor and the snapshot files do not match.

 After the warning is displayed, you can right click the virtual machine, click snapshot manager and you will be able to click consolidate to resolve. So no longer need to commit snapshots from a command line.

The consolidate option is not available within Vsphere Web Client if you’re using it.