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Showing posts from February, 2012

vSphere 5: Design Considerations

Decide to start a new chain of post on articles and reference done by various expert that I refer to and read about which might be good to take note of. I will be updating this post as often as possible and updating the date so it will be the first post whenever I update it. For those who are into know more on planning for DRS and Availability I would strongly encourage that you read about the VMware vSphere 5 Clustering technical deepdive. Storage DRS Have datastore clean formatted as VMFS 5 datastores.  This does not just helps but it will also put the load when perform any storage activities like Storage DRS, Storage vMotion to the storage subsystem if VAAI is supported.  Having upgrade the datastore from VMFS 3, would still result in sub-block sizes especially if there are not formatted using 1MB blocksize which is standardize in vSphere 5.  In such, the lod legacy datamover (FSDM) will be use which slow down such activities and making benefits from Storage DRS not as cos

VCAP5 DCD Beta Experience

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I must stress this blog of mine is on a personal account and has no relationship with any company or affiliation that I am associated with.  Participates of beta includes partners to users. Did my VCAP5 DCD Beta today.  Went at 2:30PM seated throughout for over 4 hours. I would say it almost similar as VCAP4 DCD however more tougher.  More on BCDR and also more design questions. Since the exam is still in beta, there definitely would be improvement before GA that is what the beta is exam is for to gather feedback. 1.  Some of the questions in English used were rather ambiguous.  Some of us did have some problem understanding it and you might just misunderstood it.  That happens in most IT exams I would say even Microsoft ones. 2.  On the drag and drop drawing diagram questions, I encounter one question which I have to do it 4 times.  Reason was because every time I clicked next and after which click back the whole design I did was cleared.  I did that 3 times and on the four

Understanding vCenter 5 Editions

Have met some customer who are tight on budget and is on Essentials or Essentials Plus. There are some confusion with the packaging of the vCenter editions and I would like to clarify some of this with some of the links around VMware sites for easy understanding. Essentials or Essentials Plus are bundled with vCenter Essentials while vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus is often quote with vCenter Standard. So what does this mean?  With the different vCenter Edition, there are some hard limitations.  If you refer to my vRAM entitlement post here , I have mentioned that there is a hard 192GB vRAM entitlement and limit to 3 hosts to one vCenter for Essentials and Essentials Plus.   vCenter Essentials bundled ONLY in vSphere Essentials or vSphere Essentials Plus kit is limited to manage hosts up to 6 CPUs or 3 hosts whichever comes first.  This is due to the limitations from this vCenter edition. Also with vCenter Essentials, there is no linked mode and this is found

SRM 4.x: Installation Error

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A customer got to me on the following during their installation.  They were trying to configure SRM 4.x to their storage and encounter the below error: Before starting the implementation of SRM, it is always recommended to check out the storage matrix of the management software, firmware and the adapter version required.  This can be done so from here . Some Site Recovery Adapters require a specific version of Java to be installed.  There is a KB on the requirement of JRE which have been stated.  So make sure Java is installed on the SRM server.  Check with the Storage vendor on the required Java version for this case.  They might be dependency for different version of management software used. Some Array vendors do not include the path to the perl binary.  To resolved this issue, you can point the path to SRM installation path from this KB . A collection of common issues you can refer to from the VMware Communities post . As for those users using EMC Clariion CX4-120/24