5 Performance-boosting vSphere Features – Webinar Follow-Up

Hello again everyone!

As you may have seen, vExperts Ryan Birk and Andy Syrewicze put on a webinar for us a few weeks ago that covered a number of performance-boosting features in vSphere that many people don’t know about. The features presented are all available via the Essentials Plus licensing level. We decided to stick to this as there are many features on at that level of vSphere that tend to see little use. Many organizations will purchase Essentials Plus for high availability, install it, enable it, and walk away. Sadly some of the best and most useful aspects get ignored. Not only are there ways to fine-tune HA to work more efficiently in your particular use case, there is a slew of other features as well that you may be missing out on. The webinar was well attended and we had a number of questions and good feedback from some of you that attended. Thanks to everyone who joined!

If you were unable to catch the live session, don’t worry! You can access the on-demand recording here: 5 Performance-boosting vSphere Features You’re Missing Out On [on-demand webinar]

As is usual for us, after every webinar we post a follow-up on our blog where we go over all the questions asked during the session so you can quickly find out what those who attended wanted more information about. It’s also the place where we answer questions that we didn’t have time to cover in the webinar itself – so if you were waiting patiently for an answer, here it is!

Let’s take a look!

Q & A

Q: When it comes to proper HA Failover and planning, is it better to scale up, or scale out?

A: This is really dependent on your own situation and there is no “correct” answer. What I can say though, is whatever route you choose to go, it is recommended all of your hosts be as uniform as possible. The main reason being, if you have 4 hosts that are quite small, and 1 host that is exceptionally large, you have to be able to tolerate the failure of the large host. Many new administrators fall into the trap of making sure they’re N+1 for node failures, without thinking of the resources in each host should the large one fail.

Q: What type of datastore should I use for the heartbeat datastore and should it be dedicated?

A: Really you can use any datastore for this. Unlike Microsoft Failover Clustering, where it is preferable to have a dedicated storage target to act as the cluster quorum, there is no such requirement with vSphere. The heartbeat datastore can be VMFS or NFS, and you could even use a VM that is hosting VMs if you’d like.

Q: With the ESXCLI commands you were showing for patching hosts via the command line, wouldn’t I have to close the firewall after the operation beings we opened it up to do the patching?

A: Yes, you would want to add that to your patching routine should you use ESXCLI for that. You can do that by running the command: “esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient”

Q: Are there any best practices around the concept of nested resource pools

A: Resource pools are one of those things where simple is usually better. Nesting resource pools too deeply can make troubleshooting difficult and can affect performance if misconfigured.

Q: Is there a recommended way to upgrade vSphere? (For Example, what components and in what order)

A: Yes, It is recommended to start with vCenter, then ESXi, then VMware tools, then VM Hardware.

Download a Copy of the Slide Deck.

Need to download a copy of the slide deck? We’ve got you covered! You can download a copy of the slide deck by following this link.

Revisit the Webinar

Need to re-watch the webinar, or maybe you missed the scheduled webinar? Not a problem! We make sure to record all of our webinars so they can be watched over and over again as needed. If you’d like to re-watch the webinar you can do so by following this link.

Wrap-Up

Well, that wraps things up for us! If you have any further follow-up questions, or you asked a question that you don’t see below, be sure to let us know using the comments form.

Thanks for attending!

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