Before starting to talk about new features and improvements, I suggest we take a little trip down memory lane.

Previously, I shared my experience with certain problems with NIC Load Balancing on ESXi host and how they can be solved with ESXCLI. Some of my colleagues have been asking me what the difference between several types of load balancing and which one is better for use is. So, now I’m sharing my thoughts about concepts of network environment load balancing on the infrastructure level.

As any other admin, you know that the VMs eventually start to suffer from disruptions, performance problems, or simply stop responding. That is a fact of life, unfortunately. Chances are, as a virtualization engineer, you’ve probably already met these problems at least once. And since the virtualized environment is quite a complicated system, there can be too many different reasons or factors that impact poor VM performance. Trying to find out what is wrong can take a lot of your time.

Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. This combination is a harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since and enables admins with a broad range of possibilities for access control in Windows-based infrastructures. Also, Samba allows you to apply its network resources for Windows client OSs without any additional configurations required. Moreover, FreeBSD is well-documented.

NIC or ports teaming in ESXi allows the hypervisor to share traffic among the physical and virtual networks, thereby increasing the bandwidth of vSphere virtual switch or a group of ports. It allows to load balance network traffic in the event of a hardware or network failure. Configuring the load balancing policy enables you to decide how exactly a standard switch is going to load balance the traffic between the physical NICs.

The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi.

The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi. This is precisely when the ability to configure the load balancing policy through the ESXi console has a moment to shine. It’s even more useful if a host is at a remote location. The point is, a lot of people think that not being able to ping the host is the end of the story. In most cases, this is quite possible, but if you still can console into the ESXi host through out-of-band remote management (IDRAC or else), all is not lost.

Every admin knows a few tricks to find a short way when testing your VMs. Some of them are neat, and some aren’t, such as snapshots. Disk Mode in VMware ESXI allows you to replace this technology with a safe alternative!

There are always several reasons to move on from your existing infrastructure. Some admins are pursuing recent versions of familiar products. Some, on the other hand, just want to get rid of the bugs they already learned to live with but would rather not. Others are attracted by promises to increase the performance of their environment. Finally, everybody wishes to go with the times and use the latest software. Whatever the reason, we all eventually come in terms with the necessity to upgrade the infrastructure to the most recent version.

As the name of this article is hinting, I’m going to discuss the answers to the said questions. My beginner colleagues are often wondering what virtual disk is preferable to choose. Therefore, although I was talking about this topic a while ago here and there, it’s time to get to the point.

As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.

Last year, my colleague asked me for advice. He couldn’t add an iSCSI target, provided by AWS Storage Gateway, on VMware ESXi cluster. So, initially, this material was intended to serve as a manual. However, since I got a similar question once more just recently, I realized that this topic could be interesting to the others as well, which is why I decided to share this guide, hoping it will be useful.