Posts Tagged ‘Storage’
But Wait, There’s Less (Durability)!
Amazon recently announced a new tier of storage available within their web services cloud infrastructure. Amazon’s current storage solution, S3, is truly the gold standard for durable cloud based storage that provides 99.999999999% durability (which if my math is right, means that for every 100 Billion objects stored in S3, Amazon “may” lose a single object every year). Amazon is listening to their customers, and now provides a lower cost (33% cheaper) S3 storage solution called Reduced Redundancy Solution (RRS).
How to Add VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters.
A few months before the vSphere release VMware showed some amazing stats in regards to the increased level of I/O that can be attained in a virtual infrastructure. They posted this info on their blog and the outcome of the testing was impressive. They were able to achieve 350,000 I/O operations per second on a single vSphere host (ESX 4.0) and with just 3 virtual machines. Their testing utilized the EMC Enterprise Flash Drives, which have an incredibly high throughput. They talked about how the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter was able to achieve 12% more throughput with 18% less CPU cost compared to the LSI virtual adapter.
Those stats are equally impressive, since being able to achieve an almost 20% CPU decrease while increasing performance means more density per virtual host. This further allows companies to squeeze more resources from their virtual infrastructure without needing to purchase more hardware. And in this economy, everyone is trying to get their money’s worth when it comes to their infrastructure capital spending.
How to Extend Windows Boot Volumes in VMware
I am frequently asked the question about how to grow a VMware virtual disk (VMDK) and have it be recognized by the operating system. If you are trying to simply extend a non-system volume within Windows (ie, anything other than the C:\ drive), then the process is pretty simple (refer to MS KB 325590). But when you are trying to grow a C:\ with windows, you need to get around the limitation of extending the system partition. This is just one more instance where VMware shows how powerful and flexible it truly is.
Disclaimer – Before doing anything like this, make sure you have adequate backups and understand that this is probably not supported by Microsoft or VMware – I take no responsibility for any damage to your systems
If you would like to grow a virtual disk the “safe” way (read: much, much slower), you can use VMware’s Converter tool, which will grow the volume for you on conversion, the downside is that it will require the VM to be shutdown during the conversion. The steps below can significantly speed up the process, especially if you have a very large VMDK which needs to be extended.