VMware vExpert 2012

I received some great news this morning from VMware that I was named vExpert for 2012.  There should be a formal announcement by VMware this week about all the great people that made this list again or for the first time (like myself).  If someone nominated you or you applied yourself and would like to know if you are on the list, check it out.

Congrats to all!

New Fling - vBenchmark

Have you ever wondered how to quantify the benefits of virtualization to your management? If so, please consider using vBenchmark. vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:

• Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
• Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
• Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?

vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group. The data you submit is anonymized and encrypted for secure transmission.

Key Features:

• Retrieves metrics across one or multiple vCenter servers
• Allows inclusion or exclusion of hosts at the cluster level
• Allows you to save queries and compare over time to measure changes as your environment evolves
• Allows you to define your peer group by geographic region, industry and company size, to see how you stack up

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VMware Parnter Exchange 2012

Great start to PEX.  Looks like another great conference this year.

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.

continue to article

Ready for VMware Partner Exchange

Looking forward to another big 'geek out' at PEX in Las Vegas.