A while ago I was asked to aid in some performance issues in a customers’ vSphere environment. This article is all about troubleshooting your own environment using esxtop in combination with a tool called PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) which can generate a report including alerts and graphs.
vSphere
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.
Frequent DAG failovers in a virtualized Microsoft Exchange environment on VMware vSphere
Running Microsoft Exchange in a virtualized environment provides a lot of extra flexibility and even increased availability when running in a HA configuration. This short article is dedicated to some extra tuning that might be necessary in your environment.
The environment I’m talking about is consisting of 2 virtual Exchange 2013 servers, running on VMware vSphere 5.5. Storage is provided by an iSCSI-based array. Compute by HP Gen6 Intel-blades.
Ever since these servers are running, a failover is triggered by the Microsoft Cluster Service, failing all the active mailbox databases over to the second Exchange server. It seems that a snapshot creation task is triggering this failover. As we are using Veeam for backups, we contacted them to ask if there are any workaround for this issue.
Veeam released this following KB article, telling you how to decrease the cluster sensitivity and prevent the failovers to happen. In our case, these settings sadly didn’t solve our issues.
What seems to be the problem, are dropped network packets from within the Guest OS. Following this KB article by VMware, it seems there are some issues with the VMXNET3 NIC on systems that have high traffic bursts (like Exchange).
For now, these settings seem to solve our issue and no failovers are happening again, but if it arises again, I will definitely update this article.
Hopefully both possible solutions by Veeam and VMware can help you in case you are running into the same issue.
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The new features of vSphere 6
On the 30th of June 2014, the vSphere 6 beta was announced and finally, after months of additional development, VMware has announced vSphere 6. This post will tell you more about this new release of vSphere.
Monitoring done differently. A closer look at PRTG Network Monitor
Monitoring your environment, whether it’s physical or virtual is very important. There are numerous tools available that can help you by keeping an eye on your systems and inform you when something is wrong, or even tell you before disaster strikes.
In this article, I will be zooming in to PRTG Network Monitor, a monitoring solution supporting an impressive amount of applications and platforms. Read on to learn more about this awesome product!
Happy New Year from SnowVM!
First of all I would like to wish everyone a happy New Year! This post is dedicated to my personal highlights of 2014 and give you a brief insight about the things that have been keeping me busy and how my blog is doing at the moment.
A quick PowerCLI oneliner to get the network configuration of each ESXi host
Some time ago I had to find out the configured IP addresses of all VMkernel ports of all ESXi hosts in an environment because of a new IP subnet that had to be implemented.
Using HP Tools on a ProLiant with ESXi
Are you looking for additional ways of efficiently managing your HP ProLiant servers that have ESXi installed? Read on to learn more about monitoring vSphere hosts and alternatives for managing your HP hardware.
PernixData FVP homelab experience
This post is dedicated to FVP, a storage acceleration solution by PernixData. I will briefly introduce their company and solution to give you an idea of what it does. Next I will show the installation steps, benchmarking data and share my opinion with you.
VMworld 2014: Software-Defined Data Center and vCloud Suite Roadmap
This session brought by Fausta Ibarra and Wayne Greene, both from VMware, was all about the roadmap and missions for SDDC and the vCloud Suite. I will share the highlights of this session with you in case you missed it.
SnowVM 