Rickard Nobel

Test network performance with the Iperf tool

Rickard Nobel — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:15:26 +0000

In this article we shall see how to use iperf to very easily test the maximum throughput in network bandwidth between a server and a client. Iperf is a free and helpful tool, available on multiple platforms, to troubleshoot network … Continue reading →

Windows Server 8: new Task Manager

Rickard Nobel — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:05:09 +0000

In the upcoming Windows Server 8 the Task Manager tool is very different from earlier versions. The tool has been completely rewritten with both different counters and a new look. In this blog post we will see how to use … Continue reading →

SCSI Unmap VAAI command removed in ESXi 5 patch

Rickard Nobel — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:33:29 +0000

In the VMware ESXi 5.0 patch released on 15 December the VAAI support for Thin Provisioning is now disabled by default. This is due to several reported performance problems. The other VAAI options for cloning and other remains functional as … Continue reading →

Using vSwitch CDP with HP switches

Rickard Nobel — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:19:28 +0000

In this blog post we looked at the new support for vendor neutral discovery protocol LLDP in vSphere 5. Unfortunately LLDP is only available on the Distributed Virtal Switches and not for ordinary vSwitch. However, for a long time we … Continue reading →

Using Performance Monitor effectively

Rickard Nobel — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:42:55 +0000

How to use Windows Perfmon in an efficient way to troubleshoot performance. For many years the Performance Monitor tool has been available in Windows Server operating systems, and is a great tool with literally thousands of counters, but is sometimes … Continue reading →

Troubleshooting ESXi networking with LLDP

Rickard Nobel — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:29:37 +0000

One common issue with networking in virtualized environments is the outgoing ports from the virtual switches to the physical network switches. Configuring with VLANs and similar must be done very carefully to ensure that all ports are correctly setup. It … Continue reading →

Troubleshooting Jumbo Frames

Rickard Nobel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:01:09 +0000

How to troubleshoot Jumbo Frames with Vmkping on ESXi hosts or Ping on Windows servers and avoid common mistakes. “Jumbo frames” is the ability of using larger Ethernet frames than the default of 1518 bytes. As explained here this could … Continue reading →

Monitor VAAI with esxtop on ESXi 5.0

Rickard Nobel — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:04:01 +0000

VAAI is the capability for the vSphere ESXi host to offload tasks to the storage array. See this post for details how this works and how it typically will help the host while putting less load on the storage network. … Continue reading →

Activate multi-NIC vMotion in ESXi 5

Rickard Nobel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:00:11 +0000

In vSphere 5 we have support for using multiple Vmkernel ports enabled for vMotion. Having more than one physical network card for vMotion allows us to utilize them simultaneous, even when only transferring a single virtual machine. If having spare … Continue reading →

Optimize Storage vMotion and VM deploy with VAAI

Rickard Nobel — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:12:00 +0000

In this article we will look in some detail at the new features for offloading storage workloads to the SAN array. This is called VAAI – vStorage APIs for Array Integration and enables the ESXi host to hand over some … Continue reading →