Книга: Mastering VMware® Infrastructure3

Virtual Machine Best Practices

Virtual Machine Best Practices

The configuration details regarding the virtual networking best practices shown here can be found in Chapters 6 and 7.

? Construct virtual machines with separate drives for operating systems and user data. Place each of the virtual SCSI hard drives on separate virtual SCSI adapters.

? Always install VMware Tools to provide the optimized SCSI drivers, enhanced virtual NIC drives, and support for quiescing the file system during the VMware snapshot process.

? Use the VMware tools to complement the Windows Time Services to synchronize the time on a virtual machine. The Windows server functioning as the PDC emulator operations master should be configured to synchronize time with the same time server used by the ESX Server hosts.

? Avoid special characters and spaces in the display names of virtual machines. Create virtual machine display names with the same rules you apply when providing DNS hostnames.

? During a physical-to-virtual migration, adjust the size of the hard drives to prevent excess storage consumption of the target datastore.

? After a physical-to-virtual migration, reduce the amount of memory to a more appropriate level. In most physical server environments, the amount of RAM is drastically overallocated. In virtual environments, resource allocation must be carefully considered.

? After a physical-to-virtual migration, reduce the number of CPUs to one. Increase only as needed by the virtual machine. Additional virtual CPUs can cause unwanted contention with the scheduling of multiple vCPUs onto pCPUs. The number of vCPUs in a virtual machine should be less than the number of pCPUs in the server to prevent the virtual machine from consuming all pCPUs.

? Maintain virtual machine templates for several different operating system installations. For example, create and maintain templates for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008, and so forth.

? When templates are brought online, place them onto isolated networks away from access by standard end users.

? Use CPU and memory reservations to guarantee resources to critical virtual machines and use share values to guarantee appropriate resources to critical virtual machines during periods of increased contention.

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