POC with 3par

Whoohoo

The storage team here is going to have a proof of concept with 3par storage.
That's going to be very interesting.
They asked me if i wanted to join the "testteam" from esx perspective's. Were in the middle of the migration to vsphere but the test's are going to be mainly on the "old 3.5 environment".
If there is time the testing will also take place at the new environment with the mpio settings in place. Iometer is going to be the "measurement tool". Also software developers created a build environment to test with. This all will take place in Januari. Preparing and writing!

its christmas(olmost) :D

queuedepth

Well im still struggeling with the performance of the esx environment.
Duncan had written a nice post about queuedepth.
queuedepth-and-whats-next

Have to dive in it to check with the storage department.

Disable screensaver on vmware machines

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=9275881

* Screen savers are not necessary for virtual machines
* Running screen savers wastes CPU resources
* There is no interface option to disable the screen saver on the log on screen in Windows



To disable Windows Logon Screen Saver:
Click Start > Run, type regedit, click OK.
Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop


Double-click the ScreenSaveActive string value item in the Details pane.
In the Value data box, replace the number 1 with the number 0 , and then click OK.
Alternatively, you can save the attached registry file and double click it. The key above is set for you (Windows 2000 and 2003 only).

For more information, see Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/185348 .
Note: The preceding link was correct as of June 4, 2008. If you find the link is broken, please provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.

Vmware perfmon "addin"

Scott Drummonds created the following post on the vmware communities:
They are busy too ! :)


My colleague in product management, Praveen Kannan, has been working to extend Perfmon to show some ESX performance counters. This capability is automatically installed with VMware Tools on vSphere 4. But Praveen and I have made a stand-alone version available to those of you that are still on VI3. Download it here to give it a try.

To install, place the file in an appropriately-named directory on any Windows VM on VI3. Double-click the executable, which will self-extract the files into the same directory. Run "install.bat" and you're done.

Once you bring up Perfmon you'll see two new performance objects on your computer: "VM Memory" and "VM Processor". These objects contain counters exposed by ESX that accurately reflect the VM's memory and CPU usage. Here's Perfmon on my test VM after I've installed the tool.

Disclaimer:
This is a pre-release "sneak peak" version. Eventually this tool will be available for download on vmware.com and supported by VMware. But today there is no support for this tool and you're using it "as-is". Use at your own risk and do not contact VMware support for help with this release.


The post:
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/drummonds/2009/06/18/using-perfmon-for-accurate-esx-performance-counters
The tool:
http://ftpsite.vmware.com/download/vmStatsProvider/vmStatsProvider_006_release.exe