Recovering From RedoLog Corrupt Errors On VMware ESX/ESXi
March 11, 2010 14:50 PM
RedoLog corrupt errors are a common issue on VMware ESX/ESXi machines where machines are snapshotted and the datastore is allowed to run low on space. Use this step by step guide to get your machine back in business.
Snapshot Caveats On VMware VI4
February 17, 2010 09:00 AM
A typical morning in IT: The phone rings first thing in the morning and a mail server is down. Since e-mail is the lifeblood of every organization, this is the type of problem that can seriously ruin your day. The cause: A VMware ESX snapshot gone awry and the disk files have used up all available space on the datastore. On powering up the virtual machine, I was greeted with an error message that the "RedoLog" was corrupt and the machine needed to be powered off. My subsequent investigation into what went wrong and how it could be fixed revealed to me that the net was woefully inadequate in describing the problem and providing a remedy.
The Do's And Don'ts Of Virtualizing Database Servers
January 21, 2010 00:24 AM
Virtualization conveys numerous benefits to traditional x86/64 bit server environments, but everybody knows that virtualization and heavily utilized databases don't tango; at least that's the consensus. By utilizing some simple best practices and taking advantage of smart features in vSphere, you can harness the flexibility, load balancing and high availability features of virtualized database servers.
Smartphone Virtualization: Useful Or Useless?
January 04, 2010 13:00 PM
The virtualization industry has been on fire with news of VMware's latest experimental venture: Smartphone Virtualization. The technology has been targeted at the mobile professional who currently carries two phones, one for personal and one for business use. VMware touts that with a real hypervisor on board, our prototype telecommuter of tomorrow will be able to switch seamlessly between two different installed operating systems on the same phone. With Gigahertz processor cell phones on the market and storage into the 100GB mark, it seems reasonable to virtualize phone technology. Getting deeper into the logistics, however, it starts to sound like more trouble than it's worth.
Harnessing vSphere Performance Benefits For NUMA: Part 2
December 14, 2009 17:32 PM
In my last post I talked a great deal about native support for NUMA in vSphere on enabled Opteron and Nehalem processor platforms. NUMA is a strong technology in and of itself, but it really starts to shine when teamed with other supporting technologies. In this post, I'm going to cover the details of integrating next generation networking and interrupt technologies to improve storage and networking performance. I'll focus on MSI-X, but future posts will cover VMDq, RSS and Multiple Queue's in more detail, as all these technologies work closely to distribute load to multi-core CPUs and dramatically improve system performance.
Harnessing vSphere Performance Benefits for NUMA
December 05, 2009 19:31 PM
Non Uniform Memory Access or NUMA is becoming increasingly commonplace on the next generation of very powerful servers. What does this mean for virtualization applications on the latest VMware incarnation? Serious performance increases for NUMA equipped systems.
Updating ESX To vSphere 4
December 04, 2009 08:00 AM
It's no secret that the latest version of VMware's virtual infrastructure is bigger, better, faster and more capable than ever, but along with the new feature set comes a whole load of complexity. vSphere 4.0 has a ton of features designed to bring system performance to the next level, but it requires a little tweaking to get the most out of them.
Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.
