Speed Up Your Horizon View Operations

JanLeave a Reply

How to speed up your Horizon View operations, you might ask? Well, you don’t have to buy an all-flash storage system or beef up your ESX hosts.

VMware Horizon View Administrator has some settings on max concurrent operations with vCenter and VMware View Composer. Increasing some of those settings can decrease the time of those operations, however when decreasing those settings, you can limit the amount of IOPs pushed to your underlying storage system, too.

Screen Shot 2015-06-26 at 5.22.46 PM

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Limit IOPs Per VMDK

JanLeave a Reply

One of the many features in VMware vSphere, which I didn’t know, is the capability, to limit IOPs per VMDK without setting any limitations on the underlying storage system or for the whole Virtual Machine.

LimitIOPerVM

As you can see on the image above, it is easy to limit the IOPs per VMDK within the vSphere web-client.
Just browse to your Virtual Machine and go to edit settings. Select the “Hard drive”, which you would limit on IOPs and expand it.

Note: By default, all VMDKs are set to unlimited IOPs.

What’s New With VMware Hardware Version 11

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As vSphere 6.0 and ESX 6.0 got released, also a new Virtual Machine Hardware Version was released.
Hardware Version 11 is the latest available version and is only supported on ESX 6.0 and later.

So, what’s new with VMware Hardware Version 11?

  • Boot Virtual Machines with EFI Support
  • Full integration with VMwarevCloud Air (private cloud)
    • Ability to create and migrate VMs from your local vSphere instance
  • The follow Operating Systems are now fully supported
    • Windows 8.1 Update
    • Windows Server 2012 RC2
    • Ubuntu 14.10
    • Red Hat 7
    • CentOS 7
    • Suse 12
    • OpenSuse 13.2

The list above is just the highlights and a full list including known issues with hardware version 11 can be found here.

Virtual Machine Monitoring For APD & PDL

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As I use vCenter 6 more and more, I realize all the amazing new features.

One of the features, I came across was Virtual Machine Responses.
This feature allows you to specify what to do in the event of an APD and PDL. Come on, how cool is this?!?
I bet everyone ran into an APD or PDL situation before and asked him/her-self, why does VMware not offer a feature to restart the VM in such an event?

Virtual Machine Response 01

By default, when vSphere HA enabled, Virtual Machine Monitoring is disabled and so are the responses. However, you do not need to enable Virtual Machine Monitoring for Virtual Machine Responses to work.
The screenshot below show you the available settings for APD vs PDL. As you can see, in the event of an APD, you have 4 options:

  1. Disabled – do nothing and let the machine die
  2. Issue events – Issue a custom event
  3. Power off and restart VMs (conservative), will try to properly shut down the VM and restart it on another host
  4. Power off and restart VMs (aggressive), will forcefully shut down the VM and restart it on another host.

APD

Similar settings are available in the event of PDL.

PDL

 

Important, this feature will NOT protect your VM from losing a RDM and will also not work with vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT)

 

Part 4 – vCloud Air OnDemand – Use Cases & Thoughts

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In Part 1 of the vCloud Air Series, I have covered how to get started. Part 2, covered how to get your first VM set-up with vCloud Air OnDemand and Part 3 covered how to make use of vCloud Connector to get your vCloud Air OnDemand environment connected with your local vSphere setup.

Screen Shot 2015-05-11 at 10.38.19 PM

Part 4 of the vCloud Air Series will be the last post in this series. Today, I want to cover some of the most common use cases for cloud solutions:

  • Flexible resources for peak-hours
    • If you have certain hours of the day where you need more resources to process data or run some application, often it is reasonable to consider services like VMware’s vCloud Air OnDemand service. With its integration in your local vSphere environment, it is an easy process to move applications into the cloud and add resources.
      The ROI for adding physical servers for certain peak hours is often much less than utilizing the flexibility of on-demand cloud environments.
  • DR solution
    • vCloud AirOnDemand provides perfect capabilities for disaster recoveries.
      • Scale up potential for local applications
      • vCloud Air Disaster Recovery is build on vSphere Replication and provides proper failover capabilities. Fail over to your cloud environment within minutes.
  • Test and development
    • QA and development can now test their applications in the cloud and avoid incpompatibilies due to the feature-rich integration with VMware vSphere.
    • Allow QA teams to run tests in production-like environments. You could clone your production environment and let them test it there while cutting your costs for traditional physical hardware.
    • Quickly scale-up your test and development infrastructure. vCloud Air allows you to quickly scale up your test infrastructure to achieve more accurate and accelerated test cycles.