Before going into the processes for creating ESXi datastore clusters, it’s worth covering the pre-requisites that need to be in place. In order to create a ESXi, DRS-enabled, cluster you…

This will be a short post to cover the VCAP-DCA objective of the same name. When you create a DRS enabled cluster you set the cluster’s default automation level, shown…

When designing/configuring a DRS cluster it is important to size the virtual machines within the cluster correctly. Likewise, it’s important to size your clusters correctly for the virtual machine workloads…

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) is a feature that helps ensure the best possible vMotion compatibility for your ESXi hosts. EVC ensures that your host’s present the same CPU features to…

This will just be a quick post to cover the VCAP-DCA objective around creating alarms to monitor DRS and DPM enabled clusters. vCenter allows you to create alarms to monitor…

Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a feature that allows a DRS-enabled cluster to power ESXi hosts on or off based on resource usage requirements. In order to bring a ESXi…

This post is intended to cover a couple of closely linked VCAP-DCA objectives. Namely, Calculating Available Resources and Sizing Virtual Machines based on Application Workload. Calculating Available Resources There are…

I ran into this issue in my vSphere 5.5 lab. After starting up my vCenter Server Appliance, and attempting to log in using the web client, I received this error:…

This post is intended to cover the topics on the VCAP-DCA blueprint relating to tuning virtual machine configurations, with a focus on memory, CPU, network and storage settings. As a…

ESXi 5 allows virtual machines to use large memory pages (Memory pages of 2MB). There can be a performance benefit for Guest OS and applications that are requesting the use…