I've been asked to take a look into the Hot-Add Memory and CPU features which are available with vSphere 4. The concept seems pretty useful and straight forward, but what isn't is the list of Operating Systems that support these features. There doesn't seem to be a definitive list. Either that, or I should have [...]

My new DroboPro arrived this week and so far I’m less than impressed.  As you know, I already have had a generation 1 Drobo for some time.  It has been a great device, doing exactly what I wanted.  After winning a second standard Drobo at Tech Field Day, I paid for the upgrade to the DroboPro in anticipation of a [...]

Coming out of stealth at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, startup EvoStor exemplifies this new virtualization-optimized storage concept. Taking existing storage concepts like scale-out grid and automated storage layout, EvoStor’s offering is designed exclusively to support the VMware vSphere platform.

This weekend I finally had the chance to catchup on some of the new storage features released as part of vSphere 4.0, there are quite a few changes to cover, some of them quite exciting.

What is VMware VMDirectPath I/O?
VMDirectPath allows guest operating systems to directly access an I/O device, bypassing the virtualization layer. This direct path, or passthrough can improve performance for VMware ESX systems that utilize high-speed I/O devices, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A single VM can connect to up to two passthrough devices.
VMDirectPath I/O is experimentally [...]

VMware VMDirectPath I/O

You may recall that I wrote about how to enable jumbo frames on VMkernel ports used for IP-based storage early last year. Here are some updated instructions on how to do the same with vSphere, only this time using a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).

After spending some time today walking a customer through the basics of configuring VMware ESX networking, I realized that my site doesn’t provide much information for new users. I’m going to address that with a series of posts for new users, of which this article is the first.

When folks upgraded from VMware’s version 2 products into the ESX 3 world, the first step most took was to update their old VMFS 2 datastores to the new version 3 of VMFS. With all of the new storage capabilities introduced in the vSphere 4 family, many wondered if a similar upgrade hassle would be required.

Although the technical details of VMware’s version 4 product (dubbed the vSphere family) were known ahead of time, the product’s licensing model came as a surprise. Rather than go with the “base product + options” approach used by many software products, VMware decided on a flat tiered pricing scheme. Both approaches have their fans and detractors, but the details of VMware’s system left many off guard. Has VMware pushed the tiered model too far, eliminating flexibility and forcing enterprise customers to purchase pricey top-tier licenses? The Gestalt IT staff put our heads together to think the matter through.

Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems.D