VMworld 2010 dates

Forbes Guthrie4 Comments

Since coming back from VMworld this year, I have been hunting around for the dates for next year.  I had a lot of fun, met some really interesting people and of course improved my knowledge of the products.  However simple google searches weren’t turning up the actual dates, just that it would be sometime in September.  All the top hits were about the news that VMworld Europe was changing its dates next year.

Well I was reading through some of my notes last, and just as I closed the notebook there was the answer.  The dates are on the back of this year’s red VMworld booklet 🙂  So before I forget what the dates are again, they are 30th Aug – 2nd Sep 2010.

VMworld: VMFS3

Forbes Guthrie3 Comments

On Wednesday I attended the VMFS3 session entitled “VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0”.  It was a very interesting little session discussing some of the under-the-covers work through the evolution of VMFS3.

However, why am I blogging about it now?  Well one thing jumped out at me during the presentation.  The speaker (I think it was Satyam Vaghani), introduced a slide which showed the testing that they were doing on the next implementation of VMFS3 (3.45).  To be honest I can’t remember the exact detail of the slide (and unfortunately the uploaded version currently on the VMworld site doesn’t have the same slide), but what I do recall is the upper limits of the testing.  The slide was showing the effects of new locking mechanisms.  It showed the performance of 8 hosts connecting to 512 VM on 1 VMFS LUN! Holy smoke. Ka-Pow.  Imagine being able to do that.

What sort of effect would that have on your datastore provisioning?  Time to re-think your VDI solution?  I can’t wait 🙂

VMworld: HA

Forbes GuthrieNo Comments

While attending the HA: Internals and Best Practices session (BC3197) on Tuesday afternoon, I learned something new about HA’s VM health monitoring.  With a cluster’s HA, you can set it to monitor the health of your VMs and have them automatically restart if it detects an OS hang-up.  To do this it uses a heartbeat from the Guest’s VMware tools.

The cool thing I never knew before is a screenshot of the VM’s console is taken before it is reset, with up to 10 being saved (in the same directory as the vmx file).  So when you are trying to troubleshoot the issue that caused the VM to become unresponsive, you should have a screenshot of the BSOD or any onscreen messages.  Cool.