Monthly Archives: March 2014

ESXi Host Isolation Response and custom isolation address configuration.

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I was reviewing a vSphere design recently and I came across an interesting design choice which I thought I would share.

The architect selected the isolation response of “Leave Powered On” and disabled  “das.usedefaultisolationaddress”  (which is by default enabled) and configured multiple custom isolation addresses using the “das.isolationadressX” advanced setting.

The architect explained that this was done to minimize the chance of a false positive isolation event. In many environments such as ones using IP storage or where the ESXi Management VMKernel default gateway is not highly available, this can be a very good idea.

In this environment, the storage was provided via FC and the default gateway was highly available.

So was there a benefit in changing the default setting of “das.usedefaultisolationaddress” and configuring custom isolation addresses?

The short answer is No.

This is because the isolation response is configured with “Leave Powered On” so regardless of the host being isolated or not, the Virtual Machines will remain powered on.

So keep it simple, if your isolation response is “Leave Powered On” there is no need to change either of these advanced settings.

The below articles show examples of isolation response and custom isolation addresses configurations for IP Storage, FC storage and Hyper-converged environments.

Related Articles

1. Host Isolation Response for IP Storage
2. Host isolation response for FC based Storage
3. Host Isolation Response for a Nutanix Environment

Example Architectural Decision – Default Virtual Machine Compatibility Configuration

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Problem Statement

In a VMware vSphere 5.5 environment, what is the most suitable configuration for Virtual Machine Compatibility setting at the Datacenter and Cluster layers?

Assumptions

1. vSphere Flash Read Cache is not required.
2. VMDKs of greater than 2TB minus 512b are not required.

Motivation

1. Reduce complexity where possible.
2. Maximize supportability.

Architectural Decision

Configure the vSphere Datacenter level “Default VM Compatibility” as “ESXi 5.1 or later” and leave the vSphere Cluster level “Default VM Compatibility” as “Use datacenter setting and host version” (default).

Justification

1. Avoid limiting management of the environment to the vSphere Web Client.
2. The Default VM Compatibility only needs to be set once at the datacenter layer and then all clusters within the datacenter will inherit the desired setting.
3. Reduce the dependency of the Web Client in the event of a disaster recovery.
4. As vFRC and >2TB VMDKs and vGPU are not required, there is no significant advantage to HW Version 10.
5. Ensuring a standard virtual machine compatibility level is maintained throughout the environment and reducing the chance of mismatched VM version types in the environment.
6. Simplicity.

Implications

1. Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility automatic update must be DISABLED to prevent the VM hardware being automatically upgraded following a shutdown.
2. vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) cannot be used.
3. VMDKs will remain limited at 2TB minus 512b.

Alternatives

1. Virtual Machine HW Version 10 (vSphere 5.5 onwards).
2. Virtual Machine HW Version 8 (vSphere 5.0 onwards).
3. Virtual Machine HW Version 7 (vSphere 4.1 onwards).
4. Older Virtual machine HW versions.

 

Virtual Machine Swap File Location & Capacity Usage on Nutanix

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The Location of the Virtual Machine swap file can be critical when deploying vSphere with traditional centralized storage solutions, or legacy solutions which acknowledge “zeros” or “White-space” as the Virtual Machine swap file can be as large as the VMs configured vRAM where Memory Reservations are not used.

The below shows the default configuration.
VMswapFileLocation

If a VM resides on Tier 1 storage for example, and the VM does not have a memory reservation set (or a reservation of less than 100%), the Swap-file will take up valuable Tier 1 storage capacity.

This can be avoided by specifying a Swap-file datastore however this introduces complexity and in the event the Swap-file datastore is on a low tier of storage, performance in the event of swapping will degrade significantly.

Some platforms recommend having different datastores for VM swap files to minimize the overheads on de duplication or replication for environments using SRM as discussed in Example Architectural Decision – Virtual Machine Swap-file location for SRM Protected VMs.

The Nutanix Distributed File System does not write “White space” to disk, as a result the impact of Virtual Machine swap files is negligible which makes the issue of swap file placement much less of an issue.

The only time when Virtual machine swap files will use storage capacity in the Nutanix Distributed File System is when host memory utilization is >100% and swapping needs to occur.

As such, the default vSphere configuration of “Virtual Machine Directory” is ideal for Nutanix environments and valuable storage capacity is not unnecessarily wasted resulting in increased usable space, reduced complexity by removing the requirement for dedicated swap-file datastores without compromising the benefits of de-duplication and compression.