VMware ESX has the ability to clone templates, and this is a great feature when using iSCSI or FC datastores. When leveraging NFS datastores however, you lose thin provisioning on those NFS datastores. One way to get around this is to use a third party imaging software. Microsoft provides a free imaging package titled imageX. […]
Tag: ESX
Leveraging Solaris 10 ZFS Functionality for ESXi
With the decision of VMware to release the ESXi version of the industry leading hypervisor for free, one might wonder where else can I save money and still get enterprise level performance. One area is in the storage. The Solaris ZFS file system is a great starting point for small businesses looking to move into […]
Microsoft Licensing 3 – Clusters
In this post, I’ll discuss licensing when working in a clustered Microsoft environment. I’ll pick some of the more common Microsoft Apps and detail what is required to properly license them. Windows 2003 and 2008 support eight node clusters. In a two node cluster, you can technically have them configured in an active/active configuration. However, […]
Microsoft licensing
We are beginning to go a usage audit to true-up our Microsoft licensing. For the most part, the licensing is straight forward. Use a product, get a license. Don’t use the product, don’t get a license. But where confusion creeps in is around items such as virtualization, Public web access, Clustering. In this blog I’ll […]
Poor performance when using ESX SMP
Our development environment consists of two dual HP Proliant DL380 G5s. Both nodes have two dual core processors and 36GB of ram each. We have DRS enabled and are running about 32 vCPUs. We started getting complaints from the application owners that their dev environments were becoming extremely sluggish. Looking at the Virtual Center server, […]