On the 25th January 2010, 3PAR announced the release of the 3PAR Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere.
Working at a 3PAR Cloud-Agile Partner I have free access to this application, so I have downloaded, installed and given it a whirl. (Note. The vCenter plugin and Recovery Manager for VMware are supported only on version 2.3.1 of […]

Have you ever been looking into an issue in vCenter only to find that the time the issue happened has just dropped off of the bottom of the Tasks or Events lists? Well that's happened to me a few times.
I've just come across something in the VMware Infrastructure Client which I didn't know existed.. and […]

I've been asked to take a look into the Hot-Add Memory and CPU features which are available with vSphere 4. The concept seems pretty useful and straight forward, but what isn't is the list of Operating Systems that support these features. There doesn't seem to be a definitive list. Either that, or I should have […]

Yesterday, QLogic announced that its 2nd Generation, Single Chip, 8100 Series 10Gb Converged Network Adapters are now certified by VMware for ESX/ESXi 4.0. This is key because a number of end users have been waiting for VMware to announce certification for 2nd Generation CNAs since QLogic announced the industry’s first 2nd Gen CNAs in March […]

Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s.
Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the Windows version. I’m not great […]

After doing a range of Memory testing and analysis on a group of Vmware Virtual Machines, the subject of the “Unlimited” Memory/CPU tick box was brought up.
When Resource Allocation’s are setup on a VM there is the option of selecting an Unlimited Limit. It seems as though some people misunderstand exactly what that tick box […]

Have you ever gazed longingly into the eyes of vCenter 4 Performance Charts and thought to yourself “What the hell does that Counter mean??”.
Since the version 4 upgrade, vCenter now has an even larger amount of Performance Counters for you to use at your disposal. But what do they all mean?

After digging around on the […]

Confused by VMware vCenter 4 Performance Counters?

I’ve had numerous emails about this question which can be found in my VCP410 Practice Exam. So I think it’s time to sort this out once and for all.

According to the VMware document: ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide page 16, it clearly states;
Memory – 3GB RAM. Memory requirements might be higher if the database […]

VMware vCenter 4 minimum RAM requirement, is it 2GB or 3GB?

A couple of months ago i spoke about the possiblity of using VMotion over a WAN connection. Well yesterday at VMWorld, VMware announced that long distance VMotion was now supported for up to 200 Kilometers.

Here is what Erik Zandboer posted:
Today was announced that long distance VMotion is now officially supported by VMware up to a […]

WAN VMotion – Now Supported by VMware

What is VMware VMDirectPath I/O?
VMDirectPath allows guest operating systems to directly access an I/O device, bypassing the virtualization layer. This direct path, or passthrough can improve performance for VMware ESX systems that utilize high-speed I/O devices, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A single VM can connect to up to two passthrough devices.
VMDirectPath I/O is experimentally […]

VMware VMDirectPath I/O