Articles about VMware vSphere and related technologies.
Eager thick vs Lazy thick disk performance
Write performance differences between the VMware disk types
Determine the Zeroed status of Thick Lazy disk
How to see the percentage of zeroing on a live VM
ESXi virtual machine network statistics
How to read “show interface” like statistics from the virtual switch
VMXNET3 vs E1000E and E1000 – part 1
The difference between emulated and paravirtualized network adapters.
VMXNET3 vs E1000E and E1000 – part 2
Performance tests between VMXNET3, E1000E and the E1000 virtual adapters.
vSwitch and VLAN tagging, part 1
How the ESXi VLAN tagging/trunking works.
Troubleshoot ESXi networking with tcpdump-uw
Use the ESXi packet sniffer and learn the useful parameters.
Troubleshoot iSCSI TCP connectivity from ESXi with netcat
Using the NC tool to do port scanning from ESXi.
VMKping ESXi – select outgoing network adapter
How to select the vmkernel interface to use for vmkping in iSCSI multipath subnet.
VMFS exposed to Windows – what will happen
How the SAN Policy in Windows work if a VMFS datastore is presented to a Windows server.
Verify VAAI from GUI and command line
Learn how to verify if VAAI is supported on the SAN.
ESXi and Flow Control
How to activate and verify Flow Control on ESXi and the physical switch.
ESXi Network Health Check with Jumbo Frames
The functionality to test physical switches MTU / Jumbo Frames compability.
ESXi BDPU Guard
How to enable the new security feature of Spanning Tree BPDU filtering in ESXi.
ESXi Network Health Check VLANs
How to verify physical switch VLAN configuration with ESXi
LACP and ESXi
How to configure the LACP in VMware ESXi
The vSwitch “Notify Switches” setting
Why the Notify switches setting with RARP is very important to help vMotions and VM failover.
Reclaim disk space from Thin Provisioned disks
How to reclaim storage from VMware Thin VMDK files.
Remove the SSH warning in vSphere Client
How to disable the warning of SSH and ESXi shell.
VMware vExpert award 2012
The award for significant contribution to the VMware community.
Vmkernel Jumbo Frames on ESXi 4.1
How to enable Jumbo Frames through the CLI and GUI.
Using netstat and ARP commands in ESXi
How to use the esxcli tool instead of the missing netstat and ARP commands.
Test virtual network performance with Iperf
See the actual throughput from the virtual machines on the virtual switches.
SCSI Unmap VAAI command removed in ESXi 5 patch
The support for aid with Thin Provisioned LUNs is removed in latest update.
Using vSwitch CDP with HP switches
Why CDP on vSwitches is very useful even on HP networking devices.
Troubleshooting ESXi networking with LLDP
Using LLDP to isolate network configuration errors.
Troubleshooting Jumbo Frames on ESXi
Monitor VAAI with esxtop on ESXi 5
Verify that ESXi 5 storage offload VAAI is actually used with ESXTOP or RESXTOP.
Activate multi-NIC vMotion in ESXi 5
The undocumented steps for enabling multi-nic vMotion network.
Optimize Storage vMotion and VM cloning with VAAI
How the VAAI clone block primitive could improve performance on an iSCSI network.
ESXi 5.0 partitions
The layout, sizes and purposes of the partitions of ESXi 5.0.
Increased vRAM for free vSphere Hypervisor 5.0
The changes in vSphere licensing.
New names for virtual hard disks in vSphere 5
The new names for the Guest Operating System disk types in vSphere 5 Release Candidate.
LLDP support added for vSphere 5
How to enable and use the Link Layer Discovery Protocol in vSphere 5 vSwitches.
Unclear future for the free vSphere Hypervisor
New limits in vSphere 5 for the free version of ESXi.
The new vRAM license model in vSphere 5
How the new virtual memory based licensing works in vSphere 5.
VMware HA and das.failuredetectiontime
Why NOT to change the Failure Detection Time when having multiple isolation test addresses.
VMware Thin disks and Guest drive format options
Watch out for Windows 2008 and R2 doing non-quick formats together with Thin Disk provisioning.
Creating a virtual iSCSI target server for VMware lab
How to setup a free iSCSI target server running in a virtual machine for a vSphere lab.