04.20.09
The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 6
OK, so the count is up to five posts on vSwitches. If you’ve not read these posts, I recommend that you go back and do so now. The first five posts were:
- The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 1
In this post, I discussed vSwitch functions, Port Groups, VLAN tagging/trunking, valid communications paths, and some other basic vSwitch information. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 2
In Part 2, I covered the vSwitch security features (Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Change, and Forged Transmits) as well as network traffic shaping options. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 3
Here I discussed the various load balancing options that are available in a VMware vSwitch. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 4
In Part 4, I covered fault detection and the Cisco Discovery Protocol. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 5
In Part 5, I talked about the various networks that you have to contend with in an ESX environment as well as an approach to help in deciding which networks to combine, if you have to.
Now, in Part 6, we finally start talking about host configurations! I started a thread over on the VMTN Community forums for people to provide input about content they would like to see in this series. VMTN user RobVM asked about a configuration with eight pNICs and iSCSI connectivity, so I’ll tackle that first. But before we do, let me lay some ground rules: Read the rest of this entry »
04.17.09
The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 5
So far, we’ve been through four posts on vSwitches. If you’ve not read these posts, I recommend that you go back and do so now (or you can read this post and then go back – there are not many dependencies). The first four posts were:
- The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 1
In this post, I discussed vSwitch functions, Port Groups, VLAN tagging/trunking, valid communications paths, and some other basic vSwitch information. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 2
In Part 2, I covered the vSwitch security features (Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Change, and Forged Transmits) as well as network traffic shaping options. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 3
Here I discussed the various load balancing options that are available in a VMware vSwitch. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 4
In Part 4, I covered fault detection and the Cisco Discovery Protocol.
Now, in Part 5, I’m going to identify the various “networks” that you interact with in a VMware environment and also provide my recommendation for a configuration with only two pNICs. On with the show! Read the rest of this entry »
03.09.09
Reaction to “Say it isn’t so: Hyper-V and XenServer outperform ESX”
Jason Boche posted an interesting article on his blog today, and I thought I’d offer my thoughts on it.
First, here’s the article from Virtualization Review magazine that started all this furor!
My guess is that part of the difference comes from both Hyper-V & Xen requiring VT capable CPUs (i.e. the VM always runs within a VT jail) while ESX supports binary translation (BT) for some 32-bit x86 instructions. The first generation of chips that supported VT weren’t very good, and VMware’s BT would often do a better job of executing the protected instructions than the hardware assist provided by the CPU. Intel has gotten better in the hardware support for virtualization which is shown in the subject test.
