Part 1 – PVRDMA and how to test it in home lab.
One of the members of the VMware User Community (VMTN) inspired me to build a configuration where two VMs use PVRDMA network adapters to communicate. The goal I wanted to achieve was to establish the communication between VMs without using Host Channel Adapter cards installed in hosts. It’s possible to configure it as stated here, in the VMware vSphere documentation. For virtual machines on the same ESXi hosts or virtual machines using the TCP-based fallback, the HCA is not required….
NSX-V VTEP, MAC, ARP Tables content mapping
It took me a while to figure out what information I see while displaying VTEP, MAC and ARP table on Controller Cluster in NSX. In documentation you can find what information are included in those tables but it might not be seemingly obvious which field contains what kind of data that’s why I decided to make a short reference for myself but maybe it will help also someone else. To understand those tables I started with Central CLI to display…
Infinio Accelerator – how it works?
In my last post about Infinio Accelerator we introduced product and basics about it. Now it is time to go more deep – how this server side cache is working ? Infinio’s cache inserts server RAM (and optionally, flash devices) transparently into the I/O stream. By dynamically populating server-side media with the hottest data, Infinio’s software reduces storage requirements to a small fraction of the workload size. Infinio is built on VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. This enables administrators…
Mysterious Infinio – Product overview
Shared storage performance and characteristics (iops,latency) is crucial for overall vSphere platform performance and users satisfaction. In the advent of ssd and memory cache solutions we have many options to chose in case storage acceleration (local ssd, array side ssd , server side ssd). Lets discuse further server side caching – act of caching data on the server. Data can be cached anywhere and at any point on the server that makes sense. It is common to cache commonly used…
VMware Auto Deploy Configuration in vSphere 6.5
The architecture of auto deploy has changed in vSphere 6.5, one of the main difference is the ImageBuilder build in vCenter and the fact that you can create image profiles through the GUI instead of PowerCLI. That is really good news for those how is not keen on PowerCLI. But let’s go throgh the new configuration process of Auto Deploy. Below I gathered all the necessary steps to configure Auto Deploy in your environment. Enable Auto Deploy…
VMware Auto Deploy considerations
According to VMware definitione vSphere Auto Deploy can provision hundreds of physical hosts with ESXi software. You can specify the image to deploy and the hosts to provision with the image. Optionally, you can specify host profiles to apply to the hosts, a vCenter Server location (datacenter, folder or cluster), and assign a script bundle for each host. In short that is the tool to automate your ESXi deployment or upgrade. As far as I know in particular on the Polish…
VirtualVillage’s Lab environment
We have received a few questions about our lab which is rather extraordinary 🙂 Some of you wanted us to publish a picture of it. Unfortunatelly, I’ve got only the old one (nowadays cables are better organised so it looks far more better). I’m sorry for the quality of the picture as well. Anyway, at this moment we are in implementation phase – the management cluster is going to be expanded to four host cluster. We are planning to implement…
VirtualVillage’s home LAB
It is possible to learn especially about VMware products using just books, official trainings, blogs, etc. However, we believe that the real knowledge is available only by practice and not all could be tested or verified using production environments 🙂 And again, you can test a lot just using Workstation on your notebook (providing it is powerful enough) but these days there are more and more virtual infrastructure component which requires a lot of resources. Furthermore, having real servers and…
How to monitor virtual network – story about netflow in vSphere environment.
Before we start talking about NetFlow configuration on VMware vSphere let’s back to basics and review protocol itself. NetFlow was originally developed by Cisco and has become a reasonably standard mechanism to perform network analysis. NetFlow collect network traffic statistics on designated interfaces. Commonly used in the physical world to help gain visibility into traffic and understanding just who is sending what and to where. NetFlow comes in a variety of versions, from v1 to v10. VMware uses the IPFIX…