Paravirtual Archives

Provisioning Services Shared Volumes Using Read-Only Managed Stores

When discussing options for vDisk storage placement and provisioning services there are two primary options: Block-based attached storage (Locally attached, iSCSI, FC, FCoE) and network attached storage (CIFS or NFS). One of the best resources to understand the advantages of Block-Based attached storage and NTFS file caching is the Advanced Memory and Storage Considerations for Provisioning Services document. After understanding the concepts in this document any Citrix engineer would choose block-based over network storage any day of the week! If you’ve made the mistake I made this would result in local storage for each Provisioning Server in a site and manual [...]

Automated Migration to VMxNet3 Network Adapters and Paravirtual SCSI Controllers for vSphere 4.x Virtual Machines

VMware vSphere 4.x was released for general availability nearly two years ago and now vSphere 5.x is rumored for release later this year. In June 2009, virtualization master Scott Lowe wrote a blog post illustrating the roughly 16 manual steps to upgrade virtual machines to VMxNet3 adapters and Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controllers. Interestingly, two years following I still encounter larger environments that are not fully taking advantage of the performance characteristics of these two virtual machine hardware types. The reason is simple, this 16 step process can take up to 30 minutes of downtime per virtual machine if done manually, [...]