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Posts Tagged ‘vmware monitor’

VMware vSphere – Are you ready? We are!

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Unless you live under a rock, you know that VMware recently released vSphere 4.  The highly anticipated upgrade to its virtual infrastructure suite.  The number of feature upgrades and enhancements makes the new version somewhat hard to ignore.  But if you’re like me you tend to shy away from .0 releases.  I usually wait for the real world installations to sort out the bugs and let the developer issue a patch or point release. Let someone else be my guinea pig.  The last thing you want is for an upgrade to nuke your production system.

I am, however, happy to report that our experience with vSphere 4 has been relatively smooth so far.  While I’ve not taken the plunge and upgraded our production environment yet, our lab upgrade from 3.5 to the 4.0 beta, and subsequently the general release went off without a hitch.  This gives me the confidence to at least begin the planning stages of the production system upgrade.

Step one is to make sure our existing systems are at the latest version of Infrastructure 3.5 and fully patched. We start that in a a week or so and I’ll keep you all abreast of the progress.  One thing I don’t have to worry about as we ready our production environment for vSphere is that the up.time monitoring station is waiting for us on the other side.  It’s just waiting for me to play catch up!

So, have you upgraded to vSphere yet?  Tell us about your experience with the process and about vSphere in general. Or even better, if you are monitoring your vSphere infrastructure with up.time we’d love to hear about your experience. You can visit the up.time website for more on vSphere Monitoring or VMware monitors.

VMware VMotion & DRS… Problem Solved

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

I have been working with a large financial institution for the past few months and on Monday, they used one of the many Virtualization reports available in up.time 5 to help solve an issue they were having with one of their VMware ESX clusters. I have been using this report quite a bit but wanted to highlight it on the blog. It’s called the VMware Instance Motion Report and tracks instances (Virtual Machines) and when they VMotion (move) around an ESX cluster. Either manually or by such methods as DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler).

For the financial customer I was referring to, they had recently setup DRS on a new cluster. For those of you not familiar with DRS, it basically dynamically allocates resources to enforce resource management policies while harmonizing resource usage across multiple ESX hosts. One of the options when setting up DRS is how aggressive you want to be (this is set across the entire cluster) and has five different options which range from Level 1 (Conservative) to level 5 (Aggressive). The person who had setup DRS on this new cluster had it set to level 5 which was causing constant VMotioning between hosts. We were able to immediately see this in the instance motion report, which tracks individual Virtual Machines across multiple ESX hosts.

Problem Solved.

VMware Instance Motion Report

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