Category: ESX / ESXi

Consolidating snapshots on VMware

There are times when for one reason or another a VMware datastore fills up, it's usually because of 'fault’ from a snaphost that doesn't account for the maximum size of the disk definition. On certain occasions when the datastore is completely full, we will not even be able to delete the snapshot, Not even being able to start the machine; So we're lost. A 'solution'’ is to extend the LUN, then expand the datastore and that's it, We retried what we wanted. Sometimes this is not possible, or is it directly a ñapa; what we have to do is consolidate our disks with their snapshots on a temporary LUN and finally return everything to its original datastore without snapshots or so on, Here's the solution.

Configuring VMware Distributed Power Management or VMware DPM

VMware Distributed Power Management is one of the real benefits of having a virtual environment for me, since with this, we will be able to reduce electricity consumption in our data center by a lot. VMware DPM Allows Unnecessary ESX Hosts to Be Powered Off, and when virtual machines are loaded and require more physical servers, these start automatically. All of this would be achieved in a DPM-enabled DRS cluster. The power consumption of a server is 15W when it is in Standby mode and depending on the server and its components it can vary approximately between 300W and 500W when it is booted. Starting from this, we can calculate how much we can save if we opt for VMware and set up a VMware DRS cluster + VMware DPM. Example:

Using VMware FT

Another new feature of VMware vSphere 4 is the ability to use Fault Tolerance or FT. It is the ability to have real high availability, This is, with previous versions of VMware, we had DRS, that if a physical host went down, the virtual machines running on it, they run on another host, Foresaw a restart of the virtual machines. What VMware FT gives us is the possibility that virtual machines do not have to be restarted, and in case of ESX host crash with virtual machines, those that are protected with FT will continue to run on another host without loss of service.

Configuring Physical Appliances for Virtual Machines in VMware

One of the new features of VMware vSphere is the ability to give physical devices from hosts to virtual machines, This ensures that the driver of the virtual operating system, Directly access the physical device in question, The advantages of course is the increased performance of the device, as latencies are reduced. Latest version of VMware Tools required, it should also be taken into account that they can only be assigned 2 per virtual machine and 8 Per Host. And logically such a virtual machine will lose all the advantages of moving to other hosts, since we are assigning a physical device of a specific host. This is called VMDirectPath I/O.

Using Host Profile in VMware vSphere

One way to help us in the configuration of our virtual environment is to rely on one of the new features that VMware vSphere brings 4, the ability to use already configured templates to apply to all our ESX hosts, or for when we add a new VMware ESX host to our virtual community, we can apply the same configurations that one of our hosts already has.. We can create a template from scratch by configuring everything manually or get said template from one of our servers already configured perfectly (being able to edit the profile if necessary), and then apply it to the rest of the hosts that do not meet the requirements that we indicate. This is called the VMware Host Profile.

Using Veeam Backup & Replication to make backups and replicas of our virtual environment

This Veeam product called Veeam Backup and Replication, offers us the possibility of both backups and replication of our VMware virtual environment, for both VMware Infrastructure 3 How to VMware vSphere 4 (VMware ESX or VMware ESXi, depending on the license purchased, that the product is paid for, but very cheap). It will allow us to make backups of the virtual machines that we indicate in the location that interests us, We will be able to keep as many copies of the same virtual machine as we are interested in, as Veeam will store them incrementally. Personally, what I like is the replication, since the backup is given to us by VCB or VMware Data Recovery, replication can be carried out in another storage array that we have and the replicated virtual machines will be optionally placed in the VMware inventory, just like backups, We can have so many replicas […]