Best Practices – latoga labs

VMware ESX Server Storage Best Practices

April 30, 2009 1 Comment

I just wrapped up a Breakfast ‘N Learn at one of my customers on the topic of Storage Best Practices for VMware Environments. A storage agnostic view of things to keep in mind on the storage side of your VMware deployments.

Here is a quick hit of the server storage best practices that should be of value to all VMware users:

Deploy a tiered storage approach
Use a separate LUN for templates
Standardize LUN sizes within tiers
Handle exceptions on a case-by-case basis
Avoid use of extents
No more than 1 VMFS volume per LUN
Deploy all virtual discs for a server on the same VMFS volume

For more details check out the VMware Resources for Virtual Storage portal.

Java on ESX Best Practices

January 28, 2009 Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago VMware internally released a best practices guide for running Java in Virtual Machines on ESX (pdf download). Recently it was posted on the VMware Support Technical Papers portal. This document covers subjects like:

Multi-tiered Java Applications
Java Heap and Virtual Machine Memory
Virtual CPUs and Threads
Disk I/O
Timekeeping and
Micro-Benchmarks

Also check out the VROOM! post discuss how ESX Runs Java Virtual Machines with Near-Native Performance.