Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) simplifies vMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. EVC automatically configures server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Requires ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 or higher with Virtual Center 2.5 Update 2 or higher.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003212
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

Unattended Authentication in vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) - vMA 4.1 offers improved authentication capability, including integration with Active Directory and commands to configure the connection.

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vima/
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Linux

ESX is not Linux.
ESXi isn't Linux either.
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ESX script to display the full path

ESX script to display the full path in the Service Console
Example:
In your ESX console, instead of seeing this:
[root@host vmware]#
You’ll see this:
[root@host /etc/vmware]#
Paste the following into PuTTY on your ESX host:
mv /etc/bashrc /etc/bashrc.old
sed -e “s/\\h \\\W/\\h \\\w/g” /etc/bashrc.old > /etc/bashrc
Close your PuTTY session and re-open to see the change take effect.
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Workstation 7

On this day in 2009, VMware released Workstation 7 - the gold standard in desktop virtualization for technical professionals. Features include Best in class Windows 7 support, Superior 3D graphics, up to 4 vCPUs and 32GB of RAM per virtual machine.

Read more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/wkstn7-ga.html
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VMware ThinApp

Make Portable Applications with VMware ThinApp

The following URL provides a tutorial in packaging applications with ThinApp. It's very easy. All you need is a pristine Windows machine (I highly recommend a VM with non-persistent disk so upon power off, the VM is pristine once again).

http://hacktolive.org/wiki/Make_portable_applications_with_VMware_ThinApp
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Configuration Maximums

Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere is my favorite VMware document. It answers many of the "How many", "How much" type questions about VI capabilities. This is one of the documents that will most often be updated as new releases of VMware VI are released so it's a good one to keep tabs on.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf
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Configuration Maximums Comparison

Configuration Maximums Comparison

NFS datastores:
ESX(i) 4.1: 64 NFS datastores
ESX(i) 4.0 Update 1: 64 NFS datastores (requires change in advanced settings)
ESX(i) 3.5 Update 5: 32 NFS datastores (requires change in advanced settings)
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Multiple TCP sessions

One of the big improvements to iSCSI in vSphere is that multiple TCP sessions can be aggregated to a single iSCSI target. Although vSphere allows just 1 TCP connection per iSCSI session, the key enabler is that vSphere allows multiple iSCSI sessions per target.

Previous versions of ESX(i) allowed just one TCP connection per iSCSI session & 1 iSCSI session per target.
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VMFS volumes blocks

Are your VMFS volumes block aligned? For optimal disk I/O utilization & performance they should be. You can find out in the ESX Service Console with the following command:

fdisk -lu /vmfs/devices/disks/[vmhba_path]

A start value of 63 indicates no VMFS alignment (not optimized)
A start value of 128 indicates VMFS alignment (optimized)
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

Access Virtual Machine Serial Ports Over the Network - You can redirect virtual machine serial ports over a standard network link in vSphere 4.1. This enables solutions such as third-party virtual serial port concentrators for virtual machine serial console management or monitoring.

http://vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_vm_admin_guide.pdf
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Transparent Page Sharing

Transparent Page Sharing is an incredible VMware invention that allows 2 or more VMs to share identical pages in host memory. This allows an over commit of VM guest memory and a cost savings of host memory. Take a technical deep dive by reading Carl Waldspurger's ESX Memory Resource Management white paper at:

http://www.waldspurger.org/carl/papers/esx-mem-osdi02.pdf

One day this paper should be in museum.
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vSMP

vSMP

Scheduling 2+ vCPUs in a VM, ESX2 used a "Strict Co-Scheduling" technique where a skew value for each vCPU was tracked & increased when vCPUs were at different progress levels. With enough skew, the entire VM was descheduled. The co-scheduling algorithm was improved to a "Relaxed Co-Scheduling" scheme in ESX3 (and vSphere) resulting in a significant reduction of co-scheduling fragmentation.
See http://bit.ly/yplYU
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

Reduced Overhead Memory - vSphere 4.1 reduces the amount of overhead memory required, especially when running large virtual machines on systems with CPUs that provide hardware MMU support (AMD RVI or Intel EPT).
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Installation of VMware

The new LSI Logic SAS virtual SCSI Controller in the guest VM is for Windows Server 2008 clustering. It is recommended to use this SCSI Controller when building Windows Server 2008 VMs in case clustering is installed later down the road.
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Disk timeout

One of the configurations that the VMware Tools installation performs on a Windows VM is the increase of the disk timeout value to 60 seconds. This helps the OS tolerate a storage path failover which may not be instant. The registry value is located at:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\TimeOutValue
The value is set to 60 Decimal/x03c Hex
MSCS installation will change this value to 20
Windows default is 10
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules - DRS provides the ability to set constraints that restrict placement of a virtual machine to a subset of hosts in a cluster. This is useful for enforcing host-based ISV licensing models, as well as keeping sets of virtual machines on different racks or blade systems for availability reasons.

http://bit.ly/d16N7f
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Unable to add an ESX host

If you are unable to add an ESX host to a cluster due to HA issues, take a look at VMware KB article 1001596 entitled Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA). This article contains several steps to troubleshoot HA issues.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1001596
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Native log file rotation

The native log file rotation behavior can be tweaked by logging into the ESX Service Console and modifying the file /etc/logrotate.conf (I very much prefer the nano editor to the VI editor).

Use the following command to view the man page detailing log rotation:
man logrotate
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Setting CPU Affinity

Setting CPU Affinity on a per VM basis is not a great idea. Here are a few reasons why:

1) Administrative burden to configure, track, and document
2) Not compatible with vMotion
3) Not compatible with DRS
4) It makes the scheduler's job more difficult when scheduling CPU time for VMs
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

iSCSI Hardware Offloads - Enables 10Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 57711) and 1Gb iSCSI hardware offloads (Broadcom 5709).

http://bit.ly/bNrQRZ
http://bit.ly/9a2NoE
http://bit.ly/cIzuuK
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VMFS-3 Maximum File Sizes

VMFS-3 Maximum File Sizes
The maximum file size allowable on a VMFS-3 volume is determined by the block size when the VMFS volume was created. Since the block size cannot be changed without destroying the VMFS volume and all the data on it, plan accordingly.
Block Size Max File Size
1MB------------256GB
2MB------------512GB
4MB------------1TB
8MB------------2TB - 512B
http://bit.ly/d8ku5Y
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Guest VM folders

Guest VM folders do not exist on a standalone ESX(i) host without vCenter Server. As an alternative, consider using resource pools to organize virtual machines. If you do so, understand the resource management impacts which resource pools deliver and configure the resource pool settings accordingly (reservations, limits, and shares).
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vCenter Server

SQL Server 2000 is a supported database back end for vCenter Server versions through 2.5 Update 6. Oracle 9iR2 through 11g is also supported.

vCenter Server 4.x requires SQL Server 2005 SP1-3 or SQL Server 2008 no SP. Oracle 10gR2 & 11g is also supported. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has limited support (5 hosts, 50 VMs).

Check the following document for specific SPs & frequent support updates: http://bit.ly/19Zbgm
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CPU utilization

Server administrators were taught to believe 90% CPU utilization is over utilized. The truth of the matter is that any server not running at 100% CPU utilization is wasting time executing idle threads. This is one of the reasons we virtualize. To contrast that statement a bit, some CPU headroom should exist for HA failover and N+1 configurations. Find a good balance.
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Hyper-Threading

Hyper-Threading (HT) has been supported in ESX since version 2.x. The ESX scheduler is aware of HT & treats logical & physical cores differently. vCPUs requesting resources are assigned first to physical cores until all physical cores are loaded. Future vCPU requests are assigned to logical (HT) cores. By this method, HT has no impact on performance until more vCPUs are concurrently executing than exist physical cores.
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vSphere ESX(i) hosts

vSphere ESX(i) hosts can have up to:

32 e1000 pNICs
32 Broadcom TG3 Gb ports
16 Broadcom BNX2 Gb ports
4 10GbE pNICs
32 vSwitch uplinks (pNICs)

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf
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Shared storage arrays

Shared storage arrays and High Availability: As a general rule of thumb, NAS (NFS) device failover generally takes longer than block (FC, iSCSI) device failover. Advantage block storage if your applications or operating system thresholds can tolerate only short storage interruptions.
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ESX has 2 execution modes

ESX has 2 execution modes: Direct Execution Mode & Virtualization Mode. Direct Execution Mode is much more efficient because it has direct access to the host hardware, thus it is the most preferred method of instruction execution. Virtualization Mode is used when Direct Execution Mode is not possible, primarily when an instruction needs access to CPU Ring 0. The VMkernel handles each of these requests, thus it's slower.
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Configuration Maximums Comparison

Configuration Maximums Comparison

Fibre Channel LUN size:
ESX(i) 4.x: 2TB minus 512B
ESX(i) 3.5 Update 4: 2TB
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