storage

December 3, 2009 | 14 comments

While Microsoft marketing material claims Hyper-V and SCVMM can transfer large virtual machine files and templates over a SAN, the truth is that all VM transfers are done over the network. Only VMware ESX leverages high-speed storage area networking for VM migration.

November 18, 2009 | 11 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers multiple options for expanding virtual machine storage with zero downtime, including the ability to grow a running virtual disk. Hyper-V marketing literature makes a similar claim, but is limited to simply adding another virtual disk.

November 14, 2009 | 2 comments

A new paper published by the VMware Performance Team shows that virtual disks using vStorage Thin Provisioning perform nearly as well as fully allocated thick disks.

October 6, 2009 | 8 comments

With VMware vSphere, ESX, and VMFS, running out of space on a datastore does not cause damage to virtual machines. It is easy to recover without even a guest OS reboot.

October 2, 2009 | 9 comments

When a datastore in your VMware vSphere environment is about to fill up, you can have vCenter automatically spring into action to prevent downtime by using Storage VMotion.

October 1, 2009 | 17 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers thin provisioned virtual disks backed by management that enables safe use in a production environment thanks to advanced accounting of all provisioned space.

June 25, 2009 | 2 comments

Snapshots have always been a powerful feature of VMware ESX — even in production deployments.  There are tons of innovative tools and scripts out there to monitor snapshots — just check out this new one from Virtu-Al. If you happen to want a simple, built-in way to monitor your snapshots in VMware vSphere 4, look no [...]

January 14, 2009 | 2 comments

Even though the VI Client does not offer creation of VMs with thin-provisioned disks, they may exist. Use a PowerShell script to identify them.

January 9, 2009 | 2 comments

By design, System Center Virtual Machine Manager copies ISO CD/DVD images to managed hosts instead of sharing. For VMware ESX it uses SFTP. For ESXi, it fails.

December 18, 2008 | 1 comment

Although the Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM allow removing snapshots from running VMs, they are not actually merged until the VM is powered off.

December 8, 2008 | 1 comment

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT). Picture this: you finally have your shiny new Hyper-V cluster configured, after asking your SAN administrator to create a LUN for you.  You create a virtual machine on that LUN and test the quick migration failover from one node to another.  It works.  So [...]

December 4, 2008 | No comments

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT). This next group of keywords are due to an unfortunate design problem with Microsoft SCVMM and Hyper-V:  ISO images are copied from the image library to individual VM directories on SAN storage before connecting. “share image file instead of copying it” mount iso scvmm scvmm does not [...]

October 27, 2008 | 19 comments

A surprising feature of SCVMM and Hyper-V is the requirement to copy multi-gigabyte ISO image files from the library server to individual VM directories on SAN storage instead of sharing a single instance.

October 23, 2008 | 4 comments

If you have been using VMware ESX, then you might be a little spoiled by VMFS, VMware’s clustered filesystem. I have a hunch that many of us just take it for granted: create large LUNs, add to multiple ESX servers, create your virtual machines and be done with it. And, oh, migrate the [...]

October 1, 2008 | 4 comments

Now that Microsoft has released the much-hyped Hyper-V Server, it’s a good time to take a look at the steps you would need to go through to configure iSCSI LUNs. As you can see in this video, it is incredibly complex.  ESXi, on the other hand, walks you through without a lot of fuss.  VMware is [...]