Sunday, May 27, 2018

vSAN Effective Capacity - Quick and Dirty Sizer Tool


Found this online tool to quickly approximate how much datastore capacity you can get from a certain number of vSAN hosts with certain configuration. I think this is very useful in the case where you already have certain number of physical hosts with vSAN compatible disks, and you want to determine how much capacity you can get from it, and the capacity of cache disk you need to provide to fulfil the 10% recommendation of cache capacity compare to consumed storage (reference). In my experience, I have seen couple of customers where they already have considerably new server hardware with vSAN compatible components where they want to see what they will get if they use vSAN. Please note that VMware has official vSAN Sizing Calculator where you can get recommendation of the hardware specification you need to provide to accommodate certain number of workloads (VMs).



Saturday, May 12, 2018

vSphere 5.5 End of General Support Reminder


Maintain Full Level of Support by Upgrading Your vSphere Environment


In 2016 I wrote a note regarding vSphere upgrade because a lot of my customer at that time was doing upgrade due to vSphere 5.1 EoGS (End of General Support) phase. Well, it’s 2018, and this time you may already aware that vSphere 5.5 will enter EoGS phase in 19 September 2018. Which means, if you still have ESXi hosts 5.5 and/or vCenter Server 5.5, you’ll need to upgrade them in order to maintain your level of full support and subscription services as referenced here.


Sunday, May 6, 2018

Maximum Supported CPU on Windows Server 2003


Even though Windows Server 2003 has gone into end of support since July 2015, I still find their existence in my customer environment. Last week, a performance issue raised by one of my customer, where it related with application running on Windows Server 2003. The application just migrated from physical to virtual about 2 weeks before the application team observed slower performance during end of month process. When migrated, they changed the configuration from 2 CPU socket x 4 cores/socket into 4 CPU vSocket x 4 vCores/vSocket. Related to that change, my first thought, do we hit any maximum CPU limit? What is the maximum CPU on Windows Server 2003? This article is a self note about maximum CPU supported on Windows Server 2003.

Remember that Windows Server 2003 released in the era where the standard is single core CPU. Looking at the official document from Microsoft such as this document shows the supported Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) each edition of Windows Server 2003. For instance, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition support 4-way SMP. Now the question is what’s defined as 4-way SMP? I found this VMware kb article which says that 4-way SMP means 4 CPU socket (or 4 vSocket in vSphere environment).