In the last two years I was participating on the many designs, implementations and reviews of the vSphere on IBM/Lenovo Flex System or PureFlex, if you want to call like that. Therefore today I would like to share with you my preferred way of doing it right from vSphere perspective… Continue reading
IBM has released a flash alert regarding a new behavior introduced in vSphere 5.5 Update2 and vSphere 6.0 where VAAI ATS (Atomic Test and Set or in the other words Hardware accelerated locking) is used for heartbeat I/O. http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=ssg1S1005201 According to IBM: Due to the low timeout value for heartbeat… Continue reading
During the last week I was working with my colleague Nikolay Nikolov on a VDI design solution using IBM FlashSystem storage. The old solution using SSD local disks was experiencing the login time for VDI users up to 4 mins. After case analyzing we found high number of IOPS which was… Continue reading
VMware recently introduced a new VM Resource and Availability Service fling, which helps you to identify the available resources in case of one or more ESXi hosts fail. The output will show how many VMs will be safely restarted, how many of them will be experiencing performance issue and how… Continue reading
Some of you might consider purchasing the Lenovo (formally IBM) System x servers. For the enterprise environments Lenovo offers x3850 X5 and x3850 X6 series. Since x3850 X5 will be discontinued from the market during this year, it makes sense to start considering x3850 X6. Such type of server will… Continue reading
I would like to share an experience with vMotion problem, which I’ve met a while ago during upgrade of few hosts from ESXi 4.1 to ESXi5.0. Environment: IBM x3850 M2 /x3950 M2 -[72334RG]- with Integrated Dual-port Broadcom 5709C PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller, 2 dual-port ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express… Continue reading
New issue was discovered which may result in corrupted backups leveraging vSphere CBT (Change Block Tracking) for incremental backups. Basically all backup products which use VMware API for Backups ( Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) )are affected. This issue occurs when you expand a virtual disk vmdk file which has… Continue reading
If you decided to go with disk mirroring inside your guest operating system across two SAN LUNs for whatever reason (e.g. you want to bring another level of the protection for your application and your SAN environment does not support “stretch cluster” implementation, no support for synchronous mirroring, budget constrains… Continue reading
IBM, HP, DELL are releasing its own customized “embedded” versions of ESXi which contain vendor specific drivers, opened firewall ports for their management solutions, etc. Patches are different for each ESXi version 5.0, 5.1, 5.5. I will show you how to download and implement those patches for IBM x3850 X5,… Continue reading
We get improvement in default values compared with vSphere 5.1 but there are still default values which you need to change directly after host installation Network MTU is set by default to 1500 have to be changed to 1600 VMware recommends for VXLAN setting physical and virtual switch MTU to… Continue reading
