Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance ↗:
Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 ↗ and has improved in v5.5 - so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because that’s what VMWare wants us to do nowadays…).
I don’t have an Enterprise Plus license so no Distributed Switches for me - however, if you do have Distributed Switching licenses you should be able to extrapolate from my Standard Switching how to config yours...
So you’ve downloaded all the new VMWare 5.5 goodies ↗ and you want to upgrade your vCSA install to v5.5 - this is a little more involved than you may think, however it is very much worth the effort:
In vSphere 5.5, the vCenter Server Appliance limitations have been extremely raised when using the embedded database: Previous to vSphere 5.5, the limits were:
5 vSphere Hosts 50 Virtual Machines With vSphere 5....
Introduction Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk.
To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool vmkfstools, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk.
Windows On Windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool SDelete ↗ (replace the [DRIVE:] with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1....
I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts.
There are a few caveats here:
The VMWare datastore for 2TB+ LUNs must be VMFS-5 as it is now GPT based, not MBR. This can be updated on the fly without shutting down VMs (Configuration -> Storage, Click the Datastore -> “Upgrade to VMFS-5”) Expanding the virtual disks on MD3000i’s can only be done in CLI....