vSphere 5 Reference Card

Forbes Guthrie created a vSphere 5 Reference Card. The documentation is about 1700 pages, but fortunately these notes are packed down into about 50 pages.
They’re all excerpts take directly from the official VMware PDFs. This makes it great to study from, as the VCP questions are often taken straight from their documentation. I occasionally added a few words to help clarify the context of the sentence, but the vast majority of the content is word-for-word. Being direct quotes makes it easy for you to search within the PDF if you are unsure on an area or need greater clarification surround a statement.

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To download just click on the picture Knipogende emoticon.

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Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5

A white paper has been published that examines how Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 performs on 5 in terms of scaling up (adding more virtual CPUs) and scaling out (adding more VMs). Having the choice to scale up or out while maintaining a positive user experience gives IT more flexibility to right-size system deployments and maximize total cost of ownership with respect to licensing and hardware purchases.

Testing shows the effectiveness of vSphere 5 to add compute power by scaling up Exchange Server VMs, in increments, from 2 to 12 virtual CPUs. This allowed the total number of very heavy Exchange users to increase from 2,000 to 12,000 while sendmail latency remained well within the range of acceptable user responsiveness. Processor utilization remained low, at about 15% of the total host processing capacity for 12,000 very heavy Exchange users.

Testing also shows that scaling out to eight Exchange Server VMs supports a workload of up to 16,000 very heavy users, with the load consuming only 32% of the ESXi host processing capacity.

Additional tests were undertaken to show the performance improvements of vMotion and Storage vMotion in vSphere 5. vMotion migration time for a 4-vCPU Exchange mailbox server VM showed a 34% reduction in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1. Storage vMotion migration time for a 350GB database VMDK showed an 11% reduction in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1.

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For the full paper, see Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5.

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VMware vSphere 5.0 Product Documentation

New Features and Release Notes

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0

VMware vSphere 5.0 Release Notes

Compatibility and Configuration Limits

Hardware, Host, and Guest Operating System Compatibility Guides

VMware Product Interoperability Matrix

Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 5.0

ESXi and vCenter Server Product Documentation

Basics Guide

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vSphere Installation and Setup Guide

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vSphere Upgrade Guide

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vCenter Server and Host Management Guide

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vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide

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vSphere Host Profiles Guide

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vSphere Networking Guide

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vSphere Storage Guide

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vSphere Security Guide

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vSphere Resource Management Guide

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vSphere Availability Guide

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vSphere Monitoring and Performance Guide

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vSphere Troubleshooting

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VMware vSphere Examples and Scenarios Guide

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Command-Line Product Documentation

Getting Started with vSphere Command-Line Interfaces Guide

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vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples

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vSphere PowerCLI User’s Guide

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VMware vSphere Update Manager PowerCLI Installation and Administration Guide

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vSphere Management Assistant Guide

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VMware vSphere 5.0 Documentation

™ 5.0 (“”) introduces many improvements and new features to extend the benefits and capabilities of 4.1. These advancements build on the core capacities in to provide improved scalability; better performance; and easier provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting. This paper focuses on the following new features and enhancements:

• Virtual machine enhancements
• Improved SSD handling and optimization
• Command-line enhancements
• VMware® ESXi™ firewall
• vSphere Image Builder
• vSphere Auto Deploy server
• vSphere Host Profiles
• VMware vCenter™ Update Manager

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Clipboard Copy and Paste option is disabled in vSphere Client 4.1

I upgraded my home test server to ESXi 4.1 and I the Clipboard Functie is disabled by default and that is so annying

Solution:

Starting with 4.1, the Copy and Paste options are, by default, disabled for security reasons.

To be able to copy and paste between the guest operating system and the remote console, you must enable the Copy and Paste options using the vSphere Client. Alternatively, you can use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to connect to the virtual machines.

To enable this option for a specific virtual machine:

  1. Log into a vCenter Server system using the vSphere Client and power off the virtual machine.
  2. Select the virtual machine and click the Summary tab.
  3. Click Edit Settings.
  4. Navigate to Options > Advanced > General and click Configuration Parameters.
  5. Click Add Row and type the following values in the Name and Value columns:

    • isolation.tools.copy.disable – false
    • isolation.tools.paste.disable – false
      Note: These options override any settings made in the Tools control panel of the guest operating system.

  6. Click OK to close the Configuration Parameters dialog, and click OK again to close the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.
  7. Power on the virtual machine.

Note: If you vMotion a virtual machine to a host where the isolation.tools.*="FALSE" is already set, the copy and paste options are automatically activated for that virtual machine.

To enable this option for all the virtual machines in the /ESXi host:

  1. Log in to the ESX/ESXi host as a root user and open the /etc/vmware/config file using a text editor.
  2. Add these entries to the file:
    isolation.tools.copy.disable="FALSE"
    isolation.tools.paste.disable="FALSE"
  3. Save and close the file. The Copy and Paste options are only enabled when the virtual machines restart or resume the next time.

For more information, see the Limiting Exposure of Sensitive Data Copied to the Clipboard section of the  ESX Configuration Guide.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026437

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Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1

has released another great “technical paper” regarding Performance Best Practices for 4.1. It can be found in the Technical Resource Center which by the way contains a lot of awesome docs.

The technical paper, Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

Chapter 1 – “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Chapter 2 – “ and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.

Chapter 3 – “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.

Chapter 4 – “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding resource management best practices.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.1.pdf

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