As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.

Considering a switch from VMware? Whether you’re a small business tightening the budget or an enterprise seeking greater flexibility, XCP-ng, an open-source XenServer-based virtualization platform, offers a compelling alternative to VMware.

vSphere 8 now offers the vMotion Application Notification feature, aimed at improving application migrations. Interested in the technical aspects?

As any other admin, you know that the VMs eventually start to suffer from disruptions, performance problems, or simply stop responding. That is a fact of life, unfortunately. Chances are, as a virtualization engineer, you’ve probably already met these problems at least once. And since the virtualized environment is quite a complicated system, there can be too many different reasons or factors that impact poor VM performance. Trying to find out what is wrong can take a lot of your time.

NIC or ports teaming in ESXi allows the hypervisor to share traffic among the physical and virtual networks, thereby increasing the bandwidth of vSphere virtual switch or a group of ports. It allows to load balance network traffic in the event of a hardware or network failure. Configuring the load balancing policy enables you to decide how exactly a standard switch is going to load balance the traffic between the physical NICs. The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi. The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi. This is precisely when the ability to configure the load balancing policy through the ESXi console has a moment to shine. It’s even more useful if a host is at a remote location. The point is, a lot of people think that not being able to ping the host is the end of the story. In most cases, this is quite possible, but if you still can console into the ESXi host through out-of-band remote management (IDRAC or else), all is not lost.

  Before starting to talk about new features and improvements, I suggest we take a little trip down memory lane.

As you remember from my previous article, I have been interested in testing the performance levels of two virtual SAN configurations from different vendors. I got my results, but this experience prompted me to continue. Here, I’ve chosen to try another configuration for performance comparison, albeit with only a slightly different list of participants. Since no one needs an introduction from VMware vSAN, I’d like to say a few words about its companion – Ceph. Basically, it is an object-based software storage platform. I know that doesn’t sound epic at all, but Ceph is also completely fault-tolerant, uses off-the-shelf hardware, and is extremely scalable. The most interesting thing is that some Ceph releases apply erasure-coded data pools so that it would be a less resource-hungry solution than traditional replicated pools. In practice, that means the following: when you store an object in a Ceph storage cluster, the algorithm divides this object into data and coding chunks, stored in different OSDs (that way, the system could lose an OSD without actually losing the data). Now, that’s when I thought that theoretically, Ceph could make a good virtualization platform (proper configuration, of course), so I had to see whether it would be justified in terms of time and resources spent. Naturally, I hardly could have done it without a credible comparison, hence VMware vSAN (with a similar configuration, of course, otherwise it would make no sense). So, shall we?

Looking to enhance your VMware vSphere update strategy? Get the lowdown in our article, featuring practical advice on using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM).

Explore storage protocols with our performance benchmarking series! In Part 1, we configured NFS, and now, Part 2 dives deep into iSCSI configuration. Which protocol is your best fit for virtual infrastructure?