VMForum 2010 - São Paulo

Hey guys, this morning I received an invitation to the VMFORUM 2010 in São Paulo.

Last year I went to it and it was very good, with several partners , news, some labs.
It’s a good opportunity to exchange ideas, raise your networking and take a day off office and relax a little ; )

Hurry up and register yourself ASAP. It will be on Aug 03rd.

I expect they have had time to create presentations about new features of vSphere 4.1
take a look at the agenda

See you there…

Migration from VMware Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4

Now that vSphere 4 is out there for a long time and VMware has released vSphere 4.1 you may be confident to migrate your environment.
I’m pretty sure that with the new features you can convince your boss to afford new hardware’s and licensing to use all the capacity of vSphere ; )

Well, let’s focus on the technical piece, which is the easier one.

VMware has a great Upgrade Center page where you can learn a lot of things like, new licensing program, documentation, communities, etc..

But if you want something more practical take a look at the prerequisite checklist, it will covers everything you need to know to start upgrading it.

Good luck..

vSphere 4.1 has been released

VMware has now released it’s new version vSphere 4.1, there’s a few new features as Storage I/O Control, some other changes in functionality like HA and DRS and changes in the capacity of virtual center, it’s now capable of support a lot more virtual machines and hosts into a single vCenter Server. check what’s new here.

One thing to note is that it’s the last version with the 2 flavors of VMWARE (ESX and ESXi). Vmware has decided to keep just the ESXi in future releases, so if you are not using it already, it’s time to get used with it and started migrating it.
Vmware has a good page about ESXi including how to upgrade from ESX to ESXi. click here

Also Vmware made available a single page with all the KBs about vSphere 4.1 as you might know every new product comes with it’s own new issues, check it out here...

And for you guys, like me : (
That did not start the migration from VMware Infrastructure 3.5 to vSphere 4.x, here's a guide page about how to do that.

Do or do not set a memory limitation on your guest ???

I can tell you guys that there’s not right choice in here, it’s because every environment is unique.
Depending on the amount of resources available you have, the over commitment of your resources, your guests’ behavior, etc…

So, I’d like to give you some ideas about when to use and when not to use it.

But be aware that it’s not a general idea you should consider it for each guest you have.

- start with no memory limit
- then if you have a guest that has an application consuming a lot of memory or may be has a memory leak, it’s a good idea to think about memory limitation.
- If you memory availability is to low and you have a lot of memory ballooning activity, which would impact the performance on several guests, may be it’s time to check the more offenders guests and set a limitation on them.

- Now if you have plenty of memory available there’s no reason to limit your guests
- do not set a limitation close to the memory allocated or bellow that, give some room for it run when peaks of utilization occurs.

Bellow you can see a video where memory limitation impacts the guest’s performance even when there’s plenty of memory available on the host, if you want to read the history it’s here.

Don’t use memory limits – Proofpudding from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.