With all the news and buzz around vSphere it’s easy to get carried away by all the new stuff appearing. But even with all these new features we still need to think about High Availability and how to design the infrastructure.

Everytime we design a virtual infrastructure we design it for high availability. We enable HA, we put in a lot of network cards etc to make the infrastructure resilient. Even vSphere brings more high availability options like FT.

But what IS high availability? According to Wikipedia it is:

a system design protocol and associated implementation that ensures a certain absolute degree of operational continuity during a given measurement period.

Well, nice definition, but what does this mean for designing a infrastructure? (more…)

Last week a collegue asked how big the initial database for VirtualCenter should be and how much it grows.  He also needed to know much diskspace he needed to reserve for the database.

Since we have to do this more often I thought it would be handy to collect the various calculation sheets here.

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Now most of our loyal followers know, I usually do not post any content on this blog other than things related to the hosting of website. It’s my “job” to keep this part of the infrastructure running (well, that’s not quite how it is, but that’s another subject for another post ). In my day-to-day job I see a lot of infrastructures pass by and recently I started to notice that some of my colleagues look at virtualisation as an application. They think in boxes.. “we need a DC, and a filer, and blahblahblah”…So I thought, let’s post an entry here and see if you all have something to say about it.

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I came across some scripts to run on your ESX server after it has been installed. These script did some stuff like disabling firewall and enabling root logon from a remote system.

Although it looks like it makes your life easier now you can logon with root from a remote system I would urge you not to do these kind of things.

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In one of our previous projects we suggested a LUN to use for ISO’s. The client said: ‘Well, we don’t need one, we have all our software on network shares and operating systems are deployed by the means of an unattended install with boot from network’.

It didn’t matter how much I talked and how much advantages I could name, they wouldn’t give in.

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