I can think of plenty of scenarios where limits would come in handy, and none of them apply to my implementation (yet) so I’ll spare you my speculative wisdom. I have only one piece of advice regarding this setting, and it’s: DON’T make the mistake of assuming that zero and unlimited mean the same thing, because they don’t.
In summary: zero = the end of the world as you know it, so don’t do it, and especially don’t do it to all of your VMs at once. Trust me on this.
I ran into an issue this past week, where VirtualCenter wouldn’t start. I was swamped with some other issues so in my haste made a few bad decisions that made everything worse and eventually discovered the root of the issue: the SQL logfile was full. I changed it to unrestricted growth and voila we were back in business.
Wait, no we weren’t! None of the cluster hosts would enable HA, they errored out, all of them. I tried several things that were suggested at The VMWare Communities without success, from removing the hosts from the cluster and re-adding them, to just disabling HA and enabling it again. Was this the result of updates I may have installed recently? Did something else change? » Read more: VMWare HA – the wrong way.
My whole career has been about having things thrown at me and learning on the fly. This works out pretty well most of the time, especially when it’s a new-to-us technology that’s been around for a while already like Active Directory (which we didn’t start using until Server 2003 was out). With all of the published best-practices and configuration guides that were available by the time we implemented AD, it was practically a walk in the park.
There are times, however, when you’re actually keeping up with the trends in technology and have to deploy something that’s fairly new. I first deployed VMWare ESX Server a few years ago and there weren’t so many configuration options as there are now. It was a standalone server with a lot of local storage, and then all I had to do was manage the resources. Easy! So easy that we got another one to run some automation systems for the Engineering Department. Another success! After successfully reducing our hardware inventory without lowering our availability or system performance index, I convinced the powers-that-be that a full-blown virtualization platform was clearly the next step in our technological evolution. » Read more: Virtualization: best practices for real life.
These days it seems like everyone’s got a BlackBerry, iPhone or other data-enabled mobile device. The whole internet in your pocket! For those of us in IT these devices can provide real business value, enabling us to communicate via email, IM, text, and phone no matter where we are. The actual value though, is all relative to how you use it or as in many cases, don’t use it.
In a blog I posted yesterday, I wrote about how easy it is to fall behind in IT if you don’t put forth some effort to keep up. With the whole internet available on your phone, you now have the opportunity to ‘keep up’ even if you’re not at your computer. But how could I possibly manage navigating so many tech sites on my slow little phone? It’s tedious enough to check 10 news sites a day on my giant monitor at work, nevermind a 2″ phone LCD, so to be honest I don’t think I’d use my phone all that much for reading tech news. » Read more: Is that the news in your pocket?
About a year ago I was faced with the reality that we’ll keep needing more servers, and that after 3 years we have to start paying to renew the warranties. Combined with the fact that our resource utilization on most of our servers was lllllooooowwwww, it became pretty obvious that we needed to make a change (we can believe in! lol). The answer to our problems: Virtualization. Duh.
We already had two standalone VMWare ESX servers running production servers and I couldn’t be happier, so the decision to use VMWare as the platform for a large-scale (ok it’s just large-scale to us) virtualization initiative was a no-brainer. We ordered 4 Dell rack servers with ESX 3 Enterprise, and a 7TB EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, to be connected using Procurve 2810-48 switches on both the network and iSCSI side with separate switches for each. I set it all up and started migrating physical servers into the virtual environment. Abso-freaking-lutely awesome! » Read more: VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?
I’m very anti-trend for most things of a social nature, including blogging. I formerly viewed blogging as a means for people to listen to themselves talk, and I don’t really like talking. I have resisted blogging successfully until now, but recently I’ve become aware of the value of (some) blogs.
The backstory on how I came to this moment is short and sweet (yay!). I’m a Network Manager with a decent technical background and I’ve always relied partly on the experience of others to educate myself when embarking on projects that involve technologies that I’m unfamiliar with. I know, that was a long sentence. In the recent past, a lot of that information has found its way into my brain by way of blogs. People have shared their valuable experiences and I have learned from them. I have valuable experiences from time to time, and this will be where I publish them for the world to see. …or ignore. People may find my stories pointless, or completely unhelpful, but hopefully this won’t be entirely in vain.
I leave you now with a blanket disclaimer – I have but a high school education and English was never a good subject for me, and so I am prone to poor spelling and grammar. I am also rather opinionated and intolerant of others’ flaws, but I do my best to keep my outrage in check. Please excuse me of these shortcomings.
© 2010 Josh Currier · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
Twitter