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There's a lot of different places the choke point could be. Not enough information to make a good guess, but a shot in the dark might be your spindles are doing too much work. Especially if those VMs are desktops for a VDI implementation (they tend to thrash storage). If it's the spindles, you...

Just got 5 of them. Putting them through their paces now.

sweet.

It looks a little thick, is it maybe two 2 TBs inside?

Congrats!

You can do passthrough with the free version of ESXi (as long as your processor/motherboard supports it). The limit for vSphere 4 hypervisor (ESXi 5.x) is that you're limited to 32 GB of physical RAM. Free ESXi 4.x was limited to 256 GB. Go figure.

My recommendation (I'm a Cisco certified instructor): Get your CCNA and VCP5 (it's a better test than the VCP4 anyway). After that, VCAP5 (DCA or DCD). There's an excellent series of podcasts and webex's call vBrownBag for the pursuit of VCAP certs. Great way to study and learn from some...

Usually if you clone a VM the MAC will change as you can't have identical MACs on the same segment, VMware prevents this, and even if you were able to do it, this would cause a lot of weird problems. That's why if you move a VM from one host to another by copying it, VMware will ask you if the...

I would recommend having an interest in both networking and virtualization. Both are hot careers right now, and you can make a great living off either. But if you know *both*, it will be highly, highly beneficial to you. I know a guy who's a VCDX and a Cisco CCNP. He's highly sought after.

I noticed that adding up the cores gets 16, was there a particular reason for this? You don't need to dedicate cores to VMs. Let's say you have a 4 core system. You can have more than 4 VMs. I could, for example, have 10 VMs, each allocated 2 vCPUs. The encoding VM you have seems about the only...

Fast Ethernet is limited to 12.5 Megabytes/second, which is probably insufficient for a lot of HD video. Gigabit Ethernet is limited to 125 Megabytes/second, which will work with most HD video (not RED generated RAW I don't think, but all regularly encoded 1080p content). You can get a 4 or...

If you weren't already planning on it, throw in a 4 GB flash drive to boot from, and perhaps splurge for an SSD (decent 256 GB can be had for around ~$225 now), which will make high I/O VMs fly.

One issue to keep an eye out for is the trombone effect. If you move a VM from one datacenter to another, what's its outgoing default gateway? Still in the old data center? All traffic destined for the VM will traverse the DCI, and return traffic will go back out through the DCI. Here's a...

Since most laptops/desktops use non-ECC memory, you'd think the risks we're talking about here would result in lots of data corruption, all day 'errday. In reality, we rarely see anything of the sort. Most of the time, a memory problem (which are rare, and tend to be a really, really bad DIMM)...

How exactly is non-ECC memory putting your data at risk?

Unless you're doing file copies, you won't much notice the difference between SATA II and SATA III. The biggest difference between SSDs and HDD are that SSDs give way better IOPS (thouands of IOPS versus 100 or so) and lower latency. Both of which are mostly unaffected by the difference in...

I used to run the VMware server on Linux, and it was annoying. Anytime you updated the host system, you had to go through a bunch of crap to get it working again (compiles which didn't work, etc.) Years ago I switched to ESXi 4.1, and then 5.0, and now I'm on 5.1. It's free, and runs up to 32...

How much RAM can you put in the desktop PC? If you can stuff more RAM in your old desktop, swap 'em. Slower CPU wouldn't much affect most VM workloads (YMMV). Looks like the E8500 can do VT-x and VT-d, so you're good there.

It's a convenience thing and a market share thing. Right now at least, VMware the largest hypervisor footprint by a long shot. After vTax, Hyper-V and KVM/RHEV have made some inroads, but virtually (get it?) every data center that does x86 virtualization does ESXi/vSphere. So on a pure...

Oops, yeah you're right, it was 6 cores until you went to E+.

I disagree. Cisco, HP, IBM, and all of them have blades/servers that can fit 512 GB, 1 TB, even 2 TB. With most workloads, the primary constraint preventing me from cramming more VMs into a system is memory. 128 GB versus 256 GB server? I can put twice as many VMs usually, and buy half as many...

You're really not going to go too wrong with any of them. However, my personal recommendation would be for Ubuntu, because it's relatively easy and there is documentation for DAYS on it for whatever you might want. Want to install dovecot? No worries, docs several blog posts. Ruby on Rails...

I'd use something that's widely used. I had an archive volume in ReiserFS... yeah. Spent a few hours compiling a modern kernel to get the data off the drive. Right now, unless there's a very specific use case, I use ext4. XFS and JFS I'd avoid, only because they're not as widely used as they...

One of the great things about UCS (I'm a UCS instructor) is the VIC card (which is what most of the blades get sold with). It allows you (among other things) to "fake" out extra NICs. And each faked out NIC (done through PCIe virtualization, so no drivers required on the OS/hypervisor or SR-IOV)...

With most uses you can't really tell the difference between a sata 2 vs sata 3 on an ssd. You will however see a huge difference between an ssd on sata 2 and a hdd on sata 3. The ssd will beat the pants off it. Ssds are great at IOPS, which is the thing you don't have enough of when your...

Officially announced recently at Cisco Live! Melbourne, the CCIE Data Center track has been long rumored. It covers a lot (UCS, Nexus 7/5/2/1K, MDS, ACE) but the first data center oriented track (CCNA/CCNP DC coming next year). Anyone going for this? I'm super stoked, I'm taking the beta...

Cisco cert's tend to hold the most weight overall. CCNA, CCNP, and of course CCIE. CCIE Data Center was just announced in particular, and I'm going for that one. VMWare's VCP5 is also a great certification to get. The VMware certs seem to have surpassed the OS vendors (Sun/Orace, MS, RedHat)...

Yeah, shoulda worked the first time. The free version of ESXi 5 allows up to 32 GB of physical RAM (originally only 8, but the backlash that resulted VMware backtracked to 32 GB). ESXi 4, incidentally, allows up to 256 GB.

Personally, I don't buy 7200 RPM drives any more over 5400/5900 drives. For me, they're just bulk storage for backups, movies, etc. For operating systems and databases, I'm all SSDs now. The difference between a 5900 RPM drive and a 7200 RPM drive is miniscule compared to the the difference...

None that I'm aware of. However, some SSDs claim to do garbage collection (reducing or eliminating the need for TRIM). Performance Pro from Corsair claims that, and says it works with RAID better.

For OS/App, you're really not going to notice the difference between any of those models, so long as they're relatively recent releases. For instance, you're not going to notice the difference between a drive that's rated at 300 MB/s versus one that's rated at 500 MB/s (unless you're doing...

You will notice a huge difference between the performance of a HDD on SATA II and a SSD on SATA II. You won't likely notice a difference between an SSD on SATA II and an SATA on SATA III. Throughput is higher on SATA III, but load times (especially an OS boot) aren't throughput-constrained...

What was the weirdness you were seeing on the vNICs? (I teach UCS)

Generally speaking, RAM is paramount. The more RAM you have, the more useful your rig will be. The free version of ESXi 4 will take up to 256 GB of RAM. ESXi 5 limits it to 32 GB of RAM. Processors should have VT-d, so you can directly connect PCI devices to a VM (drives, network cards...

I had a 64 GB SSD, and it was too small for Windows 7. Always filling up. 128 seems to be fine. And remember with SSDs, it's not the throughput that speeds things up for the most part. It's the IOPS, which is what OSs love.

Absolutely. Huge difference in performance going from HDD (even a super fast one) to an average SSD.

Something to consider with the 7200 RPM laptop drives, they tend to burn through the battery quicker. I had a 7200 RPM drive in my laptop, then swapped in a SSD. On average, the battery time shows about 2 hours longer than with the 7200 RPM drive.

The difference is not that perceptible, at least not as noticeable as the dramatic difference between HDD and SSD. I had an SSD for about 6 months before I realized I was running it in IDE mode instead of AHCI mode (AHCI enabled on the motherboard, just plugged into a non-AHCI capable port)...

SLC hasn't seem to taken off. Even enterprise storage vendors are using MLC in all-SSD arrays, like SolidFire and PureStorage.

I've got the Performance Pro and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.