Monthly Archives: August 2013

VMware: Datastore Clusters, StorageDRS and Thin Provisioning

Howdy all,

I recently migrated some VMs to use Thin Provisioned VMDKs since they had been provisioned with way too much diskspace. Our current setup only uses stand-alone VMFS volumes so it is a manual process to migrate the machines between datastores if and when the datastores are almost full. So I started thinking about datastore clusters (which I think are a pretty cool thing). How would this be managed in datastore clusters ?

After spending large amount of time googling and reading up on vSphere documentation I was still not 100% sure on how this worked exactly. So I sent a message to Larus Hjartarson (@lhjartarson).

Of course he had the answer 🙂

So – I decided to write this here so I would at least remember this:

StorageDRS will monitor the disk space. You choose the high-watermark for the datastore cluster. You also choose the watermark for how much would be gained from moving a VMDK from datastore X to Y.
StorageDRS will then monitor the datastore cluster every 8 hours (or any given time you configured). If it finds that datastore X or Y is nearing high-watermark and gain X percentage by migrating VMDKs to another datastore in the cluster it will either notify you or take action by migrating the VMDKs (by default it only notifies you).

Now, let’s go implement datastore clusters !

Bgrds,
Finnzi

PernixData FVP v1.0

Howdy all,

PernixData just released version 1.0 of the much awaited FVP. It’s a host based read/write caching solution for the VMware ESXi hypervisor.

What this means in basic terms that you can have a cluster of ESXi hosts, each with a PCIe flash card (capable of hundreds of thousands of IOPS) and those flash cards will do read/write caching for your VM’s that sit on your EMC/IBM/InsertWhatEverSanVendorHere based datastores.

The list price is 7500$ for each host (Unlimited VMs) – compare that to buying SSDs for EasyTier, FAST Cache etc and I bet this is the cheaper solution….really ! 🙂

I don’t have a environment where I can test this, but please, check out this video by Jason Nash where he shows in a quick way how to install the PernixData solution and get it working in a already-running ESXi environment.

Also – Please check out Frank Denneman’s blog to get some more technical info on how PernixData FVP works….this could be the next big thing in virtual environments ! 🙂

Here is also a quick’n’dirty version on how PernixData came to be.

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Neat RSS reader for MacOSX

Howdy all,

If you are still hurting after the closure of Google Reader and have not found a replacement for it you could check out Vienna. It has everything that I have been looking for in a RSS reader and it’s also open source !

Bgrds,
Finnzi