When writing a VMware design just writing can be dry and simple messages get hard to convey that is why its always nice to add diagrams. Unfortunately VMware don’t seem to prepare any Visio stencils, but luckily Maish Saidel-Keesing has created some from the official VMware Powerpoint library icons and diagrams.
(Read more...)On our team4tech.org project in rural Tanzania we are planning to use Windows 7 and 8 devices running MS Office. While we plan to include all current patches within the image we’re deploying these we discussed ongoing supportability and patching. The challenge being that there is no internet connection within each school.
(Read more...)Here I address the most common query people have when using HP C7000 chassis, namely how do the bay mappings work.
(Read more...)In a newly deployed Windows Server 2012 HyperV environment with around sixty nodes, running a
couple of hundred Windows Server 2012 virtual machines running various applications. We found t
he EMC VMX storage which underpinned this became massively busy with Write IO at around 3am,
the Write IO was mostly coming from TRIM and Unmap commands, the amount has a dramatic impact
and leads to lots of 153 errors on the server estate, after one to two hours the Write IO subsided.
I wrote a script to audit the estate to identify if there was any pattern to the errors. We found
the errors correlated to the 3am Window also.
Data ONTAP 8.0.1 and later supports certain VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) features when the ESX host is running ESX 4.1 or later. These features help offload operations from the ESX host to the storage system and increase the network throughput. The ESX host enables the features automatically in the correct environment. You can determine the extent to which your system is using the VAAI features by checking the statistics contained in the VAAI counters.
(Read more...)