monitoring

One Workload Per Virtual Machine

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This is post #2 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” Back when the computing world was built on bare metal we often tried to squeeze more than one workload on a physical machine. We did this to save money. Servers are expensive so we wanted to make the most of each one. What we didn’t account for was how complicated things could get. Applications fought with each other over system libraries and DLLs. Security was complicated. And, most relevant to this series, performance tuning became this multivariate dance involving resource limits and other arcane system witchcraft. In the end we saved a little money on …

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Statseeker

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I was fortunate have been invited to Gestalt IT’s Network Field Day 4. I’m a systems guy so it seems odd that I’d go to a networking event, but as silos in IT fall and virtualization wants to do everything in software there’s quite a lot for a guy like me to contribute. Even if it’s just to add a different point of view to some of the network-centric discussions with vendors. Anyhow, one of the vendors we spoke with was Statseeker. They make statistics gathering software for network equipment. You might be inclined to think that network performance monitoring is a pretty dull topic, and you may have noticed that I usually don’t write specifically about products here. The …

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Is it possible to have too much monitoring?

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In the category of shameless self-promotion[0] I’m one of the SolarWinds thwack Ambassadors for the month of March, and I’ve posted my first discussion topic, asking whether it’s possible to ever have too much monitoring. If you’re not familiar with thwack it’s the SolarWinds community site, it’s great. I’ve been in orbit around SolarWinds since Networking Tech Field Day #1, and I’m happy to take a few topics that are more discussion-oriented and post them over there. SolarWinds also has a whole bunch of free tools there, like a Wake-On-LAN tool I’ve used to wake my VMware ESXi hosts up from standby, a VM-to-Cloud calculator to let you see how expensive it would be to take all your VMs and …

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vCenter Hardware Status Stops Polling After 1 Hour

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(Update, 1/19/2012, 1130 CST: The product manager for this feature, commenting below, has indicated this is actually a bug, and I’ve emailed her the details of my case so she can help track down where the information I was told came from, and fix my problem, too) —————— For what seems like an eternity I’ve had a support case open with VMware because the hardware status functionality in vCenter (4.1 and 5) stops updating. I was told today by my support guy that, for a variety of reasons that cannot be known by me, VMware has decided that the hardware status polling should stop after 1 hour. So my bug isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, case closed. I am …

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