Quotes of the day: “After I learned PowerShell I knew I could stop being a Console Hugger and transition to ESXi”
“Snapshots are a back out process, NOT a backup process”
Some interesting things learned from today include:
If applications are not multi-threaded, use 1 app per VM, scale-out not up.
PVSCSI can help in with getting better I/O for VM’s that need it, along with lowering their CPU usage.
You should store your ESX/ESXi level swap files on the local ESX server if possible, it will make vmotion take a little longer, however, it will save valuable SAN space as well as make ESX level swapping faster if your in that situation.
If you want to eliminate ESX level swapping set a memory limit to the exact amount of memory assigned to the VM, this will prevent an ESX level swap file from being created.
if your using ESXi, syslogs are NOT saved after a power failure or a reboot, in order to save those logs use a syslog server, configure them to be written to a datastore, or use vMA to collect them.
Overall this was a great course, we were told from the beginning that we weren’t there to learn what SAN or what flavor of VMWare to use. Instead, we were there to learn what questions needed to be addressed to provide a complete design. The instructor did a great job of moderating the discussion when it needed it, and letting it run free when students were on to something. I would highly recommend this class to anyone who is either an administrator or a presales engineer. I would also recommend taking this course in person and not online as there will be no replacement for the interaction with other people in the class and learning from their experiences.