VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was Fault Tolerance (FT). I just created a random VM and enabled FT on it which all went fine.

After FT was enabled on the VM we wanted to see how we could upgrade the ESX hosts in that cluster as the documentation states that FT only works on hosts with the same build number.

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Usually everybody is on holiday during this period and because of that we lack new projects and great news. ‘Komkommertijd‘, as we call it in the Netherlands. Fortunately (for us) Duncan Epping, known from Yellow-Bricks, isn’t  on holiday (yet) and he pointed me to some great new VMware whitepapers.

So,do you want to get educated on VMware now?

Then you should definitely visit Duncan’s blog or directly download and read the following whitepapers:

• VMware vSphere 4: The CPU scheduler in VMware ESX 4;
• Virtual Machine execution modes in VMware vSphere 4;
• VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance.

And to top it of, yesterday Duncan posted an addition to his ‘HA deepdive‘ discussing HA and slot sizes.

So that’s four documents which will help you through your day.

Across the room Anne Jan is working on an article discussing his first vCenter Chargeback implementation. So after you have read the four documents get back here as soon as possible.

With the launch of VMware vSphere this week there are some new features to play with. One of the most interesting features, I think, is VMware FT (Fault Tolerance). Implementation of this features introduces some new caveats, in the case of FT you can not use all CPU’s and you can only apply FT on virtual machines with 1 vCPU. 1vCPU limits the implementations but is very easy to check in contrast to finding more compatible CPUs.

To check which CPUs are compatibel Gabrie van Zanten from Gabes Virtual World published a great article with a matrix of compatibel and incompatibel CPUs.

You can check the list and read the article here.