VMware Resource Pools: Misplacement

March 18, 2013 John Davis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

A common issue is that VMs are placed outside of any resource pools, leaving them at the same level as the highest level of user-created resource pools. For example, an administrator created two VMs named VM-1 and VM-2. One resource pool was named Sales and the other was named Finance, each having Normal Shares, which is equivalent to 4,000 CPU shares. The Limit and Reservation settings of each pool and VMs were left at default values. The administrator was shocked that when under a period of heavy CPU usage, the Sales and Finance VMs appeared to drag excessively, yet VM-1 and VM‑2 continued working normally. Eventually, the problem was traced to the allocation of the CPU Shares. Each VM in the Sales and Finance Pools had obtained a much smaller number of CPU Shares than VM-1 and VM-2.

VMware Resource Pools: Prioritizing VMs

March 11, 2013 John Davis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Resource Pools are often misunderstood, disliked, and untrusted by vSphere Administrators. However, resource pools can be very useful tools for administrators who want to configure resource management without having to individually configure each VM. This leads to the administrator’s desire to explore the proper usage of resource pools.

VMware Workstation and Fusion Product Lines

February 12, 2013 Raj Tolani Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

I have only talked about the Hardware versions in ESX/ESXi product line. There are other products from VMware that have their own support issues such as the VMware Workstation and the Fusion product lines for hosted solutions. You have to really know what version of hosted product you have. For example, VMware workstation 6.0x supports […]

vSphere Essentials: Virtual Machines

February 5, 2013 Raj Tolani Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

The VMware component that allocates CPU, Memory, and Input/Output is called Hypervisor. The installation of ESXi software right on top of the physical server (Dell Server in our case) is called bare-metal hypervisor architecture. So, an x86-based system running the virtualization layer directly is the bare metal hypervisor. This bare metal hypervisor option is common […]

A Background on vSphere Essentials

January 29, 2013 Raj Tolani Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

In every VMware class I teach, whether it’s the basic ICM (Install Configure, Manage) or it’s the more involved FastTrack, a lot of students run into basic confusion on planning or the lingo. Consequently, I decided to cover these topics in this series of posts.
Background on Physical Machines

The terminology seems to be the first cause for confusion. Remember, before we went to virtualization, we used to buy expensive servers from IBM, HP, Dell or other hardware vendors and then install our operating systems (Oss). The operating system was either something from Microsoft or some flavor of Linux. Then on top of that OS, we installed our application, for example, installing Windows 2008 on top of your Dell Server and then putting something like Microsoft Exchange or SQL on top of that.