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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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.
Categories: 2011, datastore, Dutch, HA, PowerShell, VMUG, vSphere Tags: 2011, datastore, Dutch, HA, VMUG
In the vCenter Client, since vSphere 4, you can find a Storage Views tab on several of the VI containers. The data in these Storage Views is collected and provided by the vCenter Storage Monitoring plug-in.
Have a look at David Davis‘s post, called Using VMware vSphere Storage Views, for more information on what you can do with the Storage Views.
Some time ago I got a question from Andrew how the Multipathing Status presented in the Storage Views could be detected and reported upon by a PowerCLI script. What looked rather simple at first, turned out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated.
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An interesting question came up in the PowerCLI Community. Can one extract the datastore statistics, that are used for the space utilization graphs in the vSphere Client, with PowerCLI ? The graph in question, which you find in the Datastores Inventory view under the Performance tab, looks something like this.
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In our PowerCLI book we presented a Delete-Harddisk function in Chapter 7.
One of our readers asked if that function could be used to remove orphaned VMDK files from one or more datastores. Now unfortunately that is not the case since the function we presented in chapter 7 uses the ReconfigVM_Task method to remove the harddisk.
In the PowerCLI Community there are some thread that provide scripts to report on orphaned VMDK files, but most of these are quite old.
So I decided to write a new script that would report on orphaned folders and VMDK files and that would have an option to remove these folders and files.
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SIOC (Storage IO Control) is apparently a hot topic. There have been an important number of posts since it was made available with vSphere 4.1. On this blog, in my Automate SIOC post, you can find functions to verify and activate/deactivate SIOC from your PowerShell script.
A recent post on Yellow-Bricks, called Enable Storage IO Control on all Datastores! got quite a few comments and Tweets.
I was intrigued by one of the comments on Twitter that stated that the users didn’t understand what SIOC was all about. From several posts on SIOC I came to understand that the non-VI workload event would be fired when SIOC doesn’t see any latency improvements when it throttles the storage queue. Simple enough, but is there any data available that can make this visible ?
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With vSphere 4.1 came 150+ new features. One of these is called Storage IO Control or SIOC.And it has been a very popular subject in the last weeks. Just a small selection of blog posts on the subject:
The only thing missing was a way to automate everything surrounding SIOC. And so I decided to write a couple of functions to fill that gap.
The New-Datastore cmdlet allows you to easily create VMFS datastores on a free LUN or local disk. But what if you want to create a VMFS datastore on that free partition you have left on a LUN or on a local disk ? These free GBs could come in handy and it’s a shame letting them go to waste. Unfortunately, the New-Datastore cmdlet doesn’t have an option (yet) to handle “free space” partitions.
Exactly such a question was raised by Alasdair in his thread new-datastore on ESX4i Installable local disk in the PowerCLI Community recently.
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