I had to screendump the following presentation from Slideshare, I found it from some other blog and thought it was  interesting as much of the virtualization success depends of the storage and how it is performing. I am wondering if this of course is intentional and MS actually pays google?! and also pays for setting this ad on vmware related stuff…

If someone is interested in this presentation follow this link, I really recommend that you get to know what esxtop values to look at and also if you have not checked it before, Align the VM-disks! This is done automatically when using win 2008 and later but check your win 2003 servers. If your storage can support the new VAAI i recommend you to enable it in your vSphere environment as long as it is at least version 4.1, this can be set with powerCLI of course and gives performance gains when doing provisioning, cloning or storage vMotion and also get better cluster locking and meta data operations…

Probably some Mac fanatics will go crazy when they see my MB Pro and what i have done to it but i think it is quite funny and if I can get more attention by giving my mac a fine VMwarish look i think its cool..

I had to big ambitions when i wanted to find a VM and in what datacenter it was located at a customer today with powerCLI, at first i thought that it was not so easy as it really appeared to be 😉

i started by tinking after looking at Get-Datacenter | Get-View and Get-Datacenter | Get-Member that i needed something like Get-Datacenter | where {$_.vmfolder -eq (get-vm partVM | Select-Object VMfolder)} (that command gave me nothing)

I then read the excellent VMware powerCLI cmdlet reference and got happy as i realized that i only needed to use the following command and get the datacenter where the vm resided

Get-Datacenter -VM partVM

or i could also pass the VM object to the Get-Datacenter cmdlet

Get-VM partVM | Get-Datacenter

if i want to get what cluster it is in i use the Get-Cluster cmdlet instead

Get-VM partVM | Get-Cluster

Friday was the second and last day of the Automation course, i would say that i now have learned some more of the powerCLI and also of powershell. As the material was for the vSphere 4.0 and powerCLI 4.0 u1, some of the lab commands came up as deprecated (which means that there is a new cmdlet that could be used instead) because the lab kit that we used had ESXi 4.1 u1 and PowerCLI 4.1.1. Also i would like an update of the lab material in some task that could be shortened (which i showed my lab partner) instead of of setting variable that is only used once. At some parts of the lab material there are sometimes used alias and sometimes the cmdlet, could cause confusion, but it is also good that it shows different ways of getting the same result, as long as the student think and not only write what it says. I don´t know if just our group was faster than others but we did complete all labs quite fast. I would have liked that either the instructor or the material included some more examples, scripts and other stuff that a VMware Automation Admin uses! I showed a fellow student mr Renoufs vCheck Script, and he really liked it 🙂

On twitter i got a question to blog about my tweet that said deployment of servers from a csv file, as there is more than one way to do it i found a shorter way as i said above than in the labs, this is the edited command from a presentation of Alan Renouf and Luc Decens that also uses a template and a OS customization file for the deployment.

Import-CSV C:\Scripts\Servers.csv | Foreach { New-VM -Name $_.Name -VMHost <code>
(Get-VMHost bimini02.rtsvl.local) </code>
-Datastore (Get-Datastore SharedVMs) <code>
-Template $_.Template </code>
-OsCustomizationSpec WinSpec02 -RunAsync}

And when you are ready playing around you run the following command,

Get-VM Br* | Remove-VM -Confirm:$false

This of course that your playing machines are called something like Br… and that no other production machines are named starting with that 😉

Today i have been attending the VMware vSphere Automation course for powerCLI. I don´t know how my fellow students think but i think the course could benefit of a little update and get some more content! There are some good resources that have much more information on the internet and also the VMware PowerCLI web with the powerCLI poster etc. The VMware PowerCLI reference book is going to be mine as soon as it comes to Kindle!

One thing i learned on my own with some help from the Internet and a powershell guru is how to recalculate a result and show it in antother unit for example GB instead of MB, the cool part here is that you include the math library to be able to minimize the number of decimals, this can of course be used on any result you want to remake..

Connect-VIServer localhost

Get-Datastore | Select-Object -Property Name, @{Name="FreeSpaceGB";Expression={[math]::Round(($_.FreeSpaceMB/1024),2)}}

so instead of the screendump below

i get the following:

Another thing that can be done with powercli is to set the Mtu for a vmkernel port to enable the jumbo frames support when using ip storage, as i understand this has to be done in some kind of script/cli to enable because it cannot be done in the gui, and also as important, you cannot edit an existing vmkernel port and change the Mtu so if you have set it up with default Mtu you will have to remove and recreate. Do not forget to edit the vSwitch also because if the Mtu is not set on the vSwitch or the physical switches you will not get the benefit of using the larger frames..

$VMHost = Get-VMHost -Name esxi02.test.local
$pnic = (Get-VMhostNetwork -VMHost $VMHost).PhysicalNic[3]
$vSwitch = New-VirtualSwitch -VMhost $VMHost -Nic $pnic.DeviceName -NumPorts 64 -Name vSwitch3 -Mtu 9000

$PortGroup = New-VirtualPortGroup -Name iSCSI -VirtualSwitch $vSwitch
New-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost $VMHost -Portgroup $PortGroup -VirtualSwitch $vSwitch -IP 192.168.20.68 -SubnetMask 255.255.255.0 -Mtu 9000

If i find something cool in my journey in powerCLI tomorrow i will give an update 🙂

I found this performance study from VMware today, it was actually released yesterday but i want to put a small post about it anyway because i found the results very interesting!

This study shows that the virtual machines on vSphere 4.1 can saturate the physical network cards at 10 Gbit and also what was cool, VM-VM traffic inside one host could get speeds up to 27 Gbit. In this graph that i have copied from the report you can see that with only one vCPU you can get almost 10 Gbit both in transmit and recive, this is really cool cause this shows that virtual machines runnig in vSphere can be loaded with serious amount of network traffic and still deliver!

This report among other shows that there is no longer arguments for using a physical installation for your critical applications! and with the features that comes with virtualization you get more security and availability also.