VMware

Scott Lowe is a popular virtualization blogger, speaker and author of the newly released Mastering VMware vSphere 5 book. In this video interview from VMworld 2011, Scott talks about his latest book, his VMworld 2011 presentations and his favorite features in vSphere 5.

In his final installment of Introduction to Desktop Virtualization, Elias Khnaser goes over the challenges of Desktop Virtualization and attempts to debunk some of the myths surrounding these challenges. Lastly, Elias offers some best practices and tips to keep in mind when implementing desktop virtualization.

David Davis explains an exciting feature with VMware’s new vSphere 5 that allows you to manage your vSphere environments through an iPad with the new VMware vSphere Client for iPad. David explains how to set up the client on your machine and iPad. After reading this article, you’ll be managing your virtual machines from a sunny beach in no time.

Every now and then an application on a virtual machine will become very resource hungry. If the application requires high-availability and is mission critical, shutting the application down to add more RAM or CPU is not an option. In such an instance, Hot-Adding CPU or RAM is a very useful skill. The following article describes how to Dynamically add CPU and Memory using vSphere Hot-Add.

The Power Management feature in vSphere 4.1 allows you to choose between five power management policies, helping you reduce energy consumption and increase savings. See how easy it is to configure hardware power management in vSphere and utilize graphing to monitor the CPU of your ESX and ESXi servers.

What does a typical vSphere upgrade entail? What do you need to know before upgrading your vSphere to version 4.1? In this overview you’ll learn about preventing downtimes, performing backups, and using the vCenter Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Tool to get ready for upgrading to vSphere 4.1

Esxtop is VMware’s command-line tool to analyze performance. David Davis provides an overview and configuration options of this valuable tool for solving vSphere performance issues. Also included are suggestions on top resources available to further your understanding of esxtop.

An overview by David Davis on memory compression, new in vSphere 4.1. Memory compression helps to prevent degradation of performance when you’re running low on memory. It’s not as fast as real memory but a lot faster than swap (on disk). This article includes configuring memory compression on your vSphere virtual infrastructure.

VMware vSphere’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is mainly used for load balancing virtual machines on a cluster. While most virtualization admins will want to run DRS in fully automated mode, there may be certain instances when you would want to enforce some conditions by setting what are known as DRS Affinity Rules. In this article, David Davis explains setting up VM to Host Affinity Rules on vSphere 4.1.

How-to tutorial and video by David Davis providing a rundown of Storage IO Control (SIOC), a new feature in vSphere 4.1. SIOC ensures that each virtual machine is given an appropriate allocation of disk resources by preventing a single VM from monopolizing storage resources over other virtual machines. Includes instructions for enabling SIOC, explanation of shares and IOPs, configuration guidelines for controlling resources between VMs, and SIOC performance monitoring.