Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 15

What a week. Not only did I start on one of the first cloud engagements in EMEA but also one of the largest clouds was implemented in Iceland and because of this (ash) cloud I got stuck in the UK. I wanted to get the weekly top 5 done in the morning but ended up spending my morning on something else and the afternoon walking around in London. I did manage to squeeze in a couple of minutes this morning to get this article out though, and just before you start reading don’t forget the vExpert "awards" for 2010!

• Richard Garsthagen - unofficial SDK for VMware View
  Welcome to this first part of the ‘unofficial SDK for VMware View”. You might wonder, why “unofficial”? Well, simple, VMware View is one of the few products from VMware that does not have an SDK So if you want to script/program/automate anything against VMware View, you are out of luck. That is, officially you can not. VMware View uses Microsoft ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) to store its data. After a day of googling and puzzling, I was finally able to figure out how to do some of these ADAM calls myself using visual basic and powershell. In this part 1, I want to share 2 beginning powershell scripts with you.
• Scott Drummonds - Windows Guest Defragmentation, Take Two
  Before I describe the test and its results, I want to share an important point on guest defragmentation. Most of the computer literate are aware that file fragmentation–the separation of logically contiguous pieces of a file–can hurt storage performance. But many may not realize that free space fragmentation is as big of an issue. When free space is fragmented, writes take longer and files are re-fragmented rapidly. PerfectDisk defragments files and free space and the results below benefit from both of these improvements.
• Stuart Radnidge - Be Agile
  Agility is another buzzword that goes hand in hand with Cloud, but what I’m referring to here is more aligned with Agile as a philosophy or methodology rather than the conventional interpretation (although of the course the 2 are closely linked). Agile is most often used for software projects, so you may initially think it’s a bit strange to use for something that is as much infrastructure as it is software but trust me, it works exceptionally well.
• Eric Sloof - What’s faster E1000 or VMXNET3 – let’s see what PassMark’s PerformanceTest says
  When both virtual machines are hosted on the same ESX server and only using the “left side” of the distributed virtual switch the network performance is 300% faster. I know these network graphs show details of the TCP/IP network transfer speed (in kilobits / sec) over short period of time and are not really representative, the average network speed may be limited by the LAN card, the CPU or network infrastructure such as firewalls and switches. But I’ve learned two lessons, the VMXNET3 is faster and local ESX traffic outperforms external traffic by 300%.
• Gabrie van Zanten - [Gestalt] vBlock, great product, just not for you
  What I don’t understand though is where the bottleneck is in a Vblock type 1 to use only 48GB? When starting with 2 chassis there is plenty of memory that could be added before adding a 3rd chassis. CPU shouldn’t be the problem, since the Vblock type 2 blades are the same B-200 blades, all running 96GB RAM and are able to host more VMs per blade than the Vblock type 1. Would storage be the bottleneck? Actually, I doubt that, since adding a 3rd or 4th chassis would put more VMs on the storage and ask more IOPS from the storage, which the Vblock can deliver according to the specs. Then why would the balance be gone when adding more memory? I have no answer on that, I can only say that where 4 chassis with each 6x 48GB + 2x 96GB blades will give me 1920GB RAM, a non-supported config with 3 chassis of 8x 96GB blades would give me 2304GB RAM and thus save me buying that 4rd chassis.