Each virtual machine (VM) is a collection of resources provided by the infrastructure layer, usually organized in a pool of resources and assigned dynamically (or in some case statically) to each VM. VMs “see” a subset of physical resources in a form of virtual hardware components defined usually by the certain minimum elements. Adding hardware components can be useful in some cases, or they can be necessary for performing some basic operations, like, for example, installing the guest OS where a video driver, a keyboard and a mouse device are needed to use the remote console. That is why you should be aware of which hardware resources can be hot-add and which hot-remove.

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5 out of 5, based on 1 review

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CPU, ESXi, NIC, RAM, vSphere

In the previous article, I’ve described 3 scenarios for testing NVMe-oF performance and skimmed through their hardware and software configuration. Again, what I wanna do, is measure how virtualization influences the NVMe-oF performance (maybe, it doesn’t at all). For this, I’m gonna examine how NVMe-oF performs on a bare metal configuration, and on an infrastructure with Hyper-V and ESXi deployed. In each case, I’ll also evaluate the performance of iSER transport using LIO and SPDK iSCSI. Now that you have the overall understanding of the project, it’s time to move on to configuring our testing environment.

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3 out of 5, based on 1 review

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IOPS, iSCSI, iSCSI target, iSER, LIO, Mellanox, NIC, NVMe over Fabrics, NVMe-oF, NVMf, RDMA, SPDK, SPDK iSCSI

Anyone who has configured and used SMB Direct with RoCE RDMA Mellanox cards appreciates the excellent diagnostic counters Mellanox provides for use with Windows Performance Monitor. They are instrumental when it comes to finding issues and verifying everything is working correctly.

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DCB, Hyper-V cluster, Mellanox, network, NIC, RDMA, rNIC, RoCE RDMA Mellanox, SMB Direct, WQEs

NIC teaming is not something we got with Windows Server 2016, but I just find it interesting to review this functionality as we have it in the current iteration of Windows Server, as usual, touching a bit on the basics and history of this feature.

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5 out of 5, based on 1 review

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Hyper-V, network, NIC, NIC teaming, PowerShell, SDN, server manager, switch, Windows Server 2012 R2, windows server 2016, WS2016

I’ve been using VMWare’s VPID (Virtual Port ID) technology for some time now both in work and in the home lab but I was curious to see just how VMWare handled a NIC going down and then coming back up and it turned out to be a lot more powerful and smooth than I first thought.

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ESXi host, NIC, VMs, VMware, vNIC, VPID, vSwitch

The placement of the virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster is an important step to ensure performance and high availability. To make a highly available application, usually, a cluster is deployed spread across two or more virtual machines. In case of a Hyper-V node is crashing, the application must keep working.

But the VM placement concerns also its storage and its network. Let’s think about a storage solution where you have several LUNs (or Storage Spaces) according to a service level. Maybe you have an LUN with HDD in RAID 6 and another in RAID 1 with SSD. You don’t want that the VM which requires intensive IO was placed on HDD LUN.

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cluster, host, Hyper-V, I/O, network, NIC, nodes, performance, RAID, Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine Manager, VMM

Yesterday I saw a blog post in Homelab subreddit discussing what Intel NUC to choose. I have spent quite some time recently to choose the right server for my homelab expansion and I have considered a lot of options.

I was also looking at Intel  NUC as many other fellow IT professionals, but luckily last month I read on Tinkertry.com that Supermicro had just released new Mini-1U SuperServers – SYS-E300-8D and SYS-E200-8D.  I had some discussions with my colleagues and other people on Reddit and TinkerTry and I came to the conclusion that if you are aimed to run home lab for virtualization Intel NUC shouldn’t be considered. I believe SuperMicro is a new king on the market of mini servers for home lab.

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5 out of 5, based on 1 review

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CPU, ESXi, Intel, Intel Xeon, Mini-1U servers, network, NIC, NUC, server, SSD, Supermicro, VMware

vSphere Replication has proved to be a great bonus to any paid vSphere license. It is an amazing and simple tool that provides cheap and semi-automated Disaster Recovery solution. Another great use case for vSphere Replication is migration of virtual machines.

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5 out of 5, based on 1 review

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ESXi, network, NIC, performance, Virtual Machines, VMKernel, VMware, vSphere, vSphere Replication

When a large Hyper-V infrastructure is deployed, often Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is installed. It enables to deploy logical switches which are mainly VM Switches and virtual network adapters for Live-Migration, Backup, heartbeat, storage or management purposes. However small or medium business doesn’t necessarily implement VMM because it is expensive or not well-known. Even if you don’t use VMM, you can deploy consistency VM Switches on several Hyper-V by using PowerShell. This topic aims to show you how to deploy VM Switches and virtual network adapters by using PowerShell. In this way you will be able to make a standard script to configure your Hyper-V hosts.

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Hyper-V, NIC, PowerShell, Virtual Network Adapter, VM Switches