Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a core part of the value of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS). However, the FCoE support between UCS and other data center elements might not be as complete as customers would hope.

Part of upgrading your VMware Infrastructure 3.x environment to VMware vSphere 4 also involves upgrading your virtual machines. This process upgrades the VMware Tools, virtual machine hardware, and installs the latest paravirtualized drivers for maximum performance.

You may recall that I wrote about how to enable jumbo frames on VMkernel ports used for IP-based storage early last year. Here are some updated instructions on how to do the same with vSphere, only this time using a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).

After spending some time today walking a customer through the basics of configuring VMware ESX networking, I realized that my site doesn’t provide much information for new users. I’m going to address that with a series of posts for new users, of which this article is the first.

In case you’re wondering—OK, so it’s probably only geeks like me that wonder about these sorts of things—putting a Xeon 5500-based server into a cluster with older servers and using EVC to ensure VMotion compatibility won’t impact the performance benefits of the Xeon 5500.

Is the adoption of a unified fabric an inevitability? If so, will it be FCoE or iSCSI that leads the charge?