This morning I gave an internal presentation to my colleagues about upgrading vCloud Networking & Security (vCNS) to NSX including vCloud Director (vCD), as there’s still quite some customers that need to follow up on this. In this article, you can find my remarks and key takeaways that might assist you in performing the upgrade without any hassle.
vCNS
NLVMUG USERCON 2015: Presenting about VMware Hybrid Cloud
I have some exciting news! I will be presenting at the Dutch VMware User Group event on the 19th of March about building a Hybrid Cloud using products from the VMware vCloud Suite.
Virtualizing Internet using VMware and Sophos
Have you ever wondered how far virtualization goes? How much flexibility can you implement in your environment and what is the minimum amount of hardware you still require?
These questions will hopefully be answered if you read on.
VMworld 2013: Successfully Virtualize Microsoft Exchange Server #VAPP5613
Alex Fontana, creator of the VMware documentation about virtualizing Microsoft Exchange products told all listeners about the best practices and pitfalls you can experience.
Some information was presented last year in Barcelona, but still provided useful information which I will pass on to my Exchange friends. My highlights of this session:
- Use EagerZeroThick virtual disks instead of thin provisioned virtual disks. I believe this is only for the disks hosting mailbox databases. This due to the fact that there is a small performance penalty when writing new blocks to a thin provisioned disk.
- When having multiple virtual disks in your virtual Exchange server, configure multiple vSCSI adapters (4 is the max, so when having 4 or more virtual disks, use them all and split the virtual disks among the vSCSI adapters). During testing, this has brought the Exchange latency from 60 to around 10ms.
- Exchange latency should be under 10ms and should be no more then 20ms.
- When using vMotion, make sure you use Jumbo Frames on the vMotion network. When this is not possible, configure the ‘SameSubnetDelay’ parameter to 2000ms instead of the default 1000ms on the DAG cluster.
- Load balancing using the vCloud Networking & Security Edge is supported and works fine. No need to use a hardware or third-party load balancer.
A nice session and experienced speaker, thanks Alex!