P2V of big Oracle machines and heap size

In VMware infrastructure we have still seen pushing on the limits. One of the limit which we have to take into account is heap size. Particulary if you are in the middle of project of migration of all oracle database to virtual infastructure with couple of TB disks. Default value for vSphere 5.0 for  VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB is 80MB what in summary gets us up to 8TB of vmdks per esxi host. If you hit this limit you will not able to power on VMs. You can change this value to max. 256MB but it required esxi host to reboot. Imagine situation where you finished migration you have enough CPU and memory but you are not able power on DB because you forget increase heap size, and all previously migrated VMs are in production. If you lucky emogh you can shuffle VMs between hosts to bypass and fit to 8TB limit.

Here is VMware kb article:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004424

How VMware vSphere 5.x VAAI XCOPY is handled by EMC VNX platform.

It is not so obvious and hard to find how VAAI XCOPY is handled if we clone Virtual Machines between datastores which are not shared across esxi host or esxi clusters. Here is the answer:

In order for VAAI to work

The source and destination LUNs (Datastores) must be accessible by the host performing the clone task, and they must be on the same VNX storage system

You need to make sure that your host has source and destination datastores mounted or it will fall back to a host copy.

Here is link to excellent document of Jeff Purcel from EMC Engineering [h8229-vnx-vmware-tb]:

http://tinyurl.com/mggkf7o

Enjoy!

iLO/RDAC/CIMC Managment IP from vCenter in vSphere 5.x

'Ziggy' has showed me nice feature recently in vSphere 5.x. How to check IP of iLO/RDAC/CIMC in vCenter.

1. For esx host choose Hardware Status tab
2. Expand 'Baseboard Management Controller'
3. Expnad 'Management Controller IP Interface'
4. Here you are IP address of Management Interface [iLO/RDAC/CIMC]

What does 'Uptime' column in vCenter referes to?

Whuu... big customer all red flags raised. All VMs reboot during vMotion and svMotion, migration project stopped...

Virtual Machine which interest us is dc2 with uptime 10 minutes.

We choose dc2 and vMotion to second esxi host.

1..2..3 vmotion me..

After vmotion we see uptime 21 seconds !!! OMG my VM crash, rebooted ? NO ;-) Everything Okay...

The 'Uptime' column referes to the uptime of a given VM process on ESXi and it is unfortunate that it's often interpreted as guest OS uptime. The behaviour is expected since a new vmx process and associateed world ID is created for a VM on migration so logic dictates the 'Uptime' is reset during vMotion/svMotion. Let's say sometimes 'less is more' ;-)