Monthly Archives: December 2013

VMFS LUN sizing, Which is best?

VMFS LUN sizing notes
Creating a one LUN to one VM
You can get the best performance with 1 VM to 1 LUN/VMFS mapping. There is no competition between machines on the same VMFS, each load is separated and all is good. 
The problem is that you are going to manage an ungodly amount of LUNs, may hit supported maximum limits, face headaches with VMFS resizing and migration, have underutilized resources (those single percentage point free space on VMFS adds up) and generally create a thing that is not nice to manage.
Creating one LUN for all VM
The other extreme is one big VMFS designated to host everything. You’ll get best resources utilization that way, there will be no problem with deciding what do deploy where and problems with VMFS X being a hot spot while VMFS Y is idling. Maintenance is an issue since bringing down the one and only LUN means taking down the only storage available to the VMware environment, all the eggs are in one basket so to speak.
 
The accepted practice is to create datastores large enough to host a number of VMs and divide the available storage space into appropriately sized chunks. What the number of VMs is depended on the nature of the VMs. You may want a single or a couple of critical production data bases on a VMFS, but allow three or four dozen of test and development machines onto the same datastore. 

VMware Tools for ESXi

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-tools-for-nested-esxi

Finally, VMware tools are available for VMware ESXi 5.0 onwards. This is great for those running nested ESXi.

This solves one of the big problems regarding automatic guest shutdown requires VMware Tools since it did not exist for ESXi, lack of VMware tools turned this basic task into a very painful, multi-step process. But not anymore! This new VMware fling brings what many of us have been waiting for so long > VMware Tools for Nested ESXi (requires ESXi 5.0 or later).

This VIB package provides a VMware Tools service (vmtoolsd) for running inside a nested ESXi virtual machine. The following capabilities are exposed through VMware Tools:

  • Provides guest OS information of the nested ESXi Hypervisor (eg. IP address, configured hostname, etc.).
  • Allows the nested ESXi VM to be cleanly shut down or restarted when performing power operations with the vSphere Web/C# Client or vSphere APIs.
  • Executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
  • Supports the Guest Operations API (formally known as the VIX API).

 

Pay to recover your data – CryptoLocker

A new trojan called CryptoLocker is making the rounds which silently encrypts files on your computers, along with files on any connected network storage or USB devices, rendering them unreadable. Once the encryption process finishes, it tells users to pay a ransom, which so far has been $100, $300 or two bitcoins, currently worth about $2400.

Currently, there is no way to recover your data other then from an “offline” backup, if the backup was online or attached at the time of the encryption then more then likely the backup is now encrypted as well.