Best Practice: How to correctly remove a LUN from an ESX host

I find this to be a very common topic that is not covered.  This is the best article from VMware that I have seen regarding what to look out for when removing storage from a vSphere Cluster or ESX host.

Yes, at first glance, you may be forgiven for thinking that this subject hardly warrants a blog post. But for those of you who have suffered the consequences of an All Paths Down (APD) condition, you'll know  why this is so important.

Let's recap on what APD actually is.

APD is when there are no longer any active paths to a storage device from the ESX, yet the ESX continues to try to access that device. When hostd tries to open a disk device, a number of commands such as read capacity and read requests to validate the partition table are sent. If the device is in APD, these commands will be retried until they time out. The problem is that hostd is responsible for a number of other tasks as well, not just opening devices. One task is ESX to vCenter communication, and if hostd is blocked waiting for a device to open, it may not respond in a timely enough fashion to these other tasks. One consequence is that you might observe your ESX hosts disconnecting from vCenter.

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VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance & Best Practices

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud:

 

• Fast Provisioning  
• vCloud Custom Guest Data
• Expanded vCloud API and SDK
• vCloud API Query Service
• vCloud Messages
• Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration
• vSphere 5.0 Support
• Microsoft SQL Server Support
• Globalization
• vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules
• Static Routing
• IPSec Site-to-Site VPN

 This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance:

• vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements
• Best practices in performance and tuning  
• Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

Dowload the whitepaper

Best Practices for Providers Offering vCloud Powered Services Part 4: Make Your Cloud Safe, Secure and Easy with VMware vShield Technologies

It’s no secret that security concerns are one of the biggest inhibitors to public cloud adoption – many customers fear moving their workloads to the public cloud, because they believe that the infrastructure they host themselves is safer and more secure than a public cloud. However, providers of vCloud Powered service offerings can attract more customers and customer workloads by demonstrating how VMware technologies can deliver higher levels of security, making their virtual datacenters safer and more secure, and often at a lower cost than hosting themselves. This is the 4th installment in our series on best practices for service providers with vCloud Powered offerings. 

To start at the beginning; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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VDS Best Practice Examples for 1 & 10 Gbe

I find that there is a lot of 'best practice' articles and opinions out there around vSwitches on either 1Gbe or 10Gbe interfaces.  This article is the best that I have seen on the subject.  Very informative.

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