One of the cool “under the hood” improvements vSphere 5 offers is the sliding scale function of the Mem.MinFreePct. Before diving into the sliding scale function, let’s take a look at the Mem.MinFreePct function itself. MinFreePct determines the amount of memory the VMkernel should keep free. This threshold is subdivided in various memory thresholds, i.e. [...]

Among many new cool features introduced by vSphere 5 is the new VMFS file system for block storage. Although vSphere 5 can use VMFS-3, VMFS-5 is the native VMFS level of vSphere 5 and it is recommended to migrate to the new VMFS level as soon as possible. Jason Boche wrote about the difference between [...]

There are some fundamental changes to vMotion scalability and performance in vSphere 5.0 one is the multi-nic support. One of the most visible changes is multi-NIC vMotion capabilities. In vSphere 5.0 vMotion is now capable of using multiple NICs concurrently to decrease lead time of a vMotion operation. With multi-NIC support even a single vMotion [...]

As of today the paperback versions of the VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive is available at Amazon. We took the feedback into account when creating this book and are offering a Full Color version and a Black and White edition. Initially we planned to release an Ebook and a Full Color version only, but [...]