Alex Samoylenko
Alex Samoylenko
Virtualization technology professional. 10 years ago he built #1 website on virtualization in Russia. Alex runs his own virtualization-focused company VMC. He is a CEO of a mobile game publisher Nova Games and a CEO of an international dating site

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on December 18, 2018
VMware vSphere 6.7 Network I/O Control – getting under the hood

Generally, Network I/O Control (NIOC), a traffic-specific vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) mechanism of network bandwidth regulation, is not common knowledge for VMware vSphere administrators. Probably, the reason is that NIOC is a vSphere Enterprise Plus feature. This means that many users, basically, do not have a chance to try it out as this license is quite expensive. Anyway, I believe it is good to know about NIOC. Being introduced in vSphere 4.1, back in 2010, this technology was something like a real breakthrough. NIOC appeared when 10G networking was becoming increasingly prevalent. It became clear that thanks to high network throughput you can go with fewer network adapters in ESXi hosts. On the other hand, having such a broad channel often faced users with another challenge: distributing the massive network bandwidth between various traffic types.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on October 23, 2018
Reclaiming guest OS storage in VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 with TRIM/UNMAP process

VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1 was presented during VMware VMworld 2018 and became available for download recently. It is still talked over in the IT community as the update brought many new features to the platform. TRIM/UNMAP, the process for guest OS disk space reclamation, is one of those new features. To make the long story short, it enables to use the storage resources smarter once you create thin provisioned virtual disks. In this article, I discuss how to enable TRIM/UNMAP and why actually you need this feature.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on August 28, 2018
Persistent memory in VMware vSphere 6.7: what is it & how fast is it?

Persistent Memory (PMEM) support is introduced in the recently released VMware vSphere 6.7. This new non-volatile memory type covers the gap in performance between the random-access memory (RAM) and Flash/SSD. But, is PMEM really that fast? In this article, I take a closer look at what persistent memory is and its performance.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on July 20, 2018
How does REST API work in VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation?

VMware introduced REST API in VMware Fusion 10, the desktop virtualization platform for MacOS, back in the last fall. This interface enables to orchestrate not only the virtualization platform itself but also virtual machines running on top of it. Exact the same REST API appeared in the recently released VMware Workstation 2018 Tech Preview. However, there’s a small thing about the API for Workstation: it works only on Windows hosts so far.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on June 28, 2018
VMware Skyline – Advanced Technical Support for Large Virtualized Environments

For some reason, VMware Skyline is not common knowledge for VMware vSphere admins and VMware products users on the whole. Skyline is VMware proactive support technology allowing to provide advanced technical support for VMware vSphere products (including vSAN 6.6 and later) and VMware NSX. Soon, some other products will be supported. But wait, what is this service actually for? To make that thing clear for everyone, I’d like to shed light on VMware Skyline in this article.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on April 19, 2018
What should you do if “No space left on device” error occurs while updating VMware ESXi?

While updating VMware ESXi servers, VMware vSphere users may encounter the “No space left on device” error that pops up while executing “esxcli software vib update” command. Interestingly, the problem occurs even though disks are doing well and have enough free space and df -h command proves that.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on March 22, 2018
Generating a Support Bundle: How to Retrieve Virtual Infrastructure Logs from VMware vCenter and ESXi Servers

One day, any VMware administrator may require the so-called “support bundle” which contains log-files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics. Taken together, these parameters allow troubleshooting VMware vSphere. The bundle provides VMware GSS (Global Support Services) the insight into virtualized environment configuration which allows them to resolve issues, when a client submits a support ticket with this bundle attached.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on January 18, 2018
Why should you install the latest VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1d /1e?

Throughout the last month, VMware has released two important updates for virtual infrastructure management server – VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1d and 1e. Both updates have significantly improved the functionality of the vCenter management server, despite it’s just one more letter added to Update 1.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on January 10, 2018
5 useful tips to work with VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5

Nowadays, many VMware vSphere administrators manage their virtual infrastructures with VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (vCSA). This solution currently is a full-fledged alternative to the VMware vCenter for Windows which becomes a thing of the past. For ones who use vCSA not that long, this post provides several procedures which simplify solutions’ daily use. Let’s have a look at how they may come in handy.

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Posted by Alex Samoylenko on November 8, 2017
VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) – how does it work?

VMware has recently released VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO), a handy document that highlights the VAIO I/O Filtering technology operational principles. Here, we shed light on them briefly and discuss how VAIO can be implemented in a production environment. VAIO is a technology and an API providing the direct access to the virtual machines’ guest OS I/O Stream. VAIO is already employed in partner products for maintaining various tasks (i.e., caching write-back and write-through). VAIO is based on the Storage Policy Based Management framework, dedicated to managing virtual machines storages and set the storage rules.

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