Here’s a couple of little snippets from the FT – Overview and Best Practice session (BC2961).  Most of the material covered, I’ve seen before in the recently released FT whitepaper.  However here’s the extra bits in noticed that was new to me:

• When enabling FT on a VM in a DRS cluster, vCenter sets the DRS settings for the primary and secondary VMs to manual by default.  This is regardless of the cluster settings.  This doesn’t prevent VMotion, but prevents excessive VMotioning of FT enabled VMs.
• The error logging for FT is pushed to the VMkernel log.  (This is not the inter-host clustering traffic that VMware refers to as FT logging).

Documentation for FT is currently thin on ground, so I’m looking forward for some more technical detail on what happens in the background.

I just attended the Technical Deep Dive on Host Profiles (VM3433).  I learned a couple of interesting things that I’d not seen before:

• Only 1 profile can be applied per cluster.
• Logging on the host is to the file “pyVmomiserver.log”
• Things not covered by Host Profiles are:
• Licensing
• vDS policy configuration (however you can do non-policy vDS stuff)
• iSCSI
• Multipathing

Unfortunately there isn’t much documentation on Host Profiles at the moment, however the speakers promised a Whitepaper would be delivered soon.  I’ll post a link if I can get hold of it.

Well, this evening was the VMworld 2009 Welcome Reception Party.  Here lies my swag.  I gave up after the seventeenth t-shirt.