Recently I have been thinking a lot about the basic process we go through when designing an infrastructure solution, the choices we make, and why we make them. These processes may be carefully structured within well-formed and trusted architectural frameworks, or they may be the sort of inherent thoughts that whiz through your mind when […]
Too frequently I hear the expression n+1 as a model for ESX clusters to provide High Availability. If you EVER expect to patch ESX servers without VM downtime then you need at least(†) n+2. When running your clusters to only n+1, you can never safely put one of your hosts in Maintenance Mode; not if High Availability is important […]
Following on from my last post about kickstart scripts which looked at partitioning, this one concentrates on user account provisioning. There are lots of useful guides online about how to configure user accounts, however none that fitted all my requirements. So nothing below is groundbreakingly new, but it does demonstrate a complete working solution. I […]
The default GUI install of ESX4 makes the /tmp partition 1GB and even then it is only categorized as optional. I’ve been asked several times why you’d want to make /tmp any bigger. If it fills up you just clear it out, right? Well here’s a good reason. It seems that VUM (vCenter Update Manager) […]