VMware ESX

In the past we have covered performance tweaks for the Initiator side, Linux OS tweaks, and networking speed tweaks; we have not covered the Target side though, and that is what we will do now. So read on for the details on how to optimize the IET.conf file to optimal performance. read more

After a lot of feedback on the first posting about the improved iSCSI performance in vSphere 4, I decided that I should re-test the values and see what performance I can get. So here it goes... read more

Here is the instructions for upgrade the HP Power Management Controller, this will correct the errors on the Onboard Administrator after upgrading to version 2.5x. read more

vSphere 4 introduced a new feature called Fault Tolerance this feature allows administrators to selectively choose a machine to protect against downtime and data loss. Even though HA will power up a machine after an ESX host failure, you can and will loose data since it is a hard crash and reboot of the guest machine. With FT you get zero data loss. read more

We all got up early this morning to make it to the breakfast bar and to the Keynote on time... Hopefully the rumored ECM, Cisco, and VMware announcement. More to come soon... read more

Well tonight's update was supposed to be a nice long post about the Vendor booths and a smaller report on what I learned about the VCP test today... but I have sat here fighting with my MacBook for the last 2 hours; and I have an early session tomorrow morning, so the bigger update will be delayed until sometime tomorrow. Stay tuned for information from the KeyNote tomorrow morning. Night all.

In order to get the best performance from CentOS and the iSCSI deployment we recommend the following tweaks. These tweaks will give you the best performance for your iSCSI deployments. The network configuration can be used with NFS as is. Click to read more... read more

Recently I was asked to check the performance changes in the Software iSCSI initiator on vSphere 4, more specifically I was asked to check the differences between Jumbo Frames and non-Jumbo Frames. The results may actually shock you... read more

When using multiple physical network adapters and using them in a Active/Passive configuration, you can expect the following: read more

With the release of vSphere (a.k.a. ESX 4), VMWare finally supports the addition of Jumbo frames to the vmKernel interfaces. Jumbo Frames support allows for a slight performance increase for the iSCSI or NFS datastores.

iSCSI also has quite a few other improvements, including optimizations that increase the performance of the interfaces and reducing the CPU overhead when in use.

Here is how to enable jumbo frames (9000 byte) on a vSphere installation: read more