LucD notes

Continuing my Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation series with a post on the VMFS5 feature. This feature clocked in at position 8 in the Top 10.

With VMFS5 comes a bunch of new features. Just to name a few:

• 64TB VMFS Volumes in 1 extent
• 64TB physical RDM
• Unified block size of 1MB
• Support for more files (> 100000)

For a complete list of the features that VMFS5 introduces, have a look at Cormac‘s post, called vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Part 1 – VMFS-5.

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Another post from our Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation. This time it’s about number 5 in the Top-10, Network I/O Control. This feature allows user-defined network resource pools and end-to-end QoS.

Note that this feature requires distributed Switches (dvSwitch). In fact I could have also written this post in my dvSwitch series with the title dvSwitch scripting – Part 10 – NetIOC.

Another post coming from our Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation. On position number 10, we find the vMotion Enhancements that were introduced with vSphere 5.

A single vMotion can now scale over multiple NICs. This feature can use a regular vSwitch or distributed vSwitch.On YouTube there are 2 videos, uploaded by VMwareKB, that show how to configure such a vMotion enabled multi-NIC vSwitch, regular and distributed.

Very useful videos, but as you can imagine, I wanted to automate this. No GUI clicking for me 

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The second post originating from our presentation at the Dutch VMUG Event 2011 is about HA. vSphere High Availability appeared in the 2nd place of the vSphere 5 features Top 10. For the HA feature we showed how you could find out the FDM master and slaves in your cluster, and how to find the heartbeat datastore.

During our presentation at the Dutch VMUG Event 2011, Alan and myself showed how several entries of the Top 10 vSphere 5 Features session could be automated with the help of PowerCLI. In the session we showed several demos.

This post is the first in a series, that will publish and document most of the scripts we used for the demos.

On the first position in the Top 10 we have Storage DRS. This feature brings intelligent placement of VMs and storage load balancing based on space usage and IO metrics. See part 4, part 5 and part 6 in Cormac‘s excellent series on vSphere 5 Storage Features.

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