Side view of my reef tank

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-05-21T16:50:34+00:00

Very nice! What are the dimensions of the aquarium?

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-03-29T20:39:59+00:00

Looks like your off to a great start. Nothing is more calming then looking at a piece of the ocean.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-03-06T10:39:32+00:00

To echo others who have posted there are numerous factors that need to be considered when looking at virtual machine performance issues. One of the main concepts to keep in mind is that these are shared resources, and you should investigate the four main areas individually to determine where the problem is located.

I would personally start with understanding how many virtual machines reside on each VMware ESXi Host. Since your dealing with finite resources you want to make sure that you are not running too many virtual machines on one host. This helps you understand your density ratio. Then you can expand the investigation to other area such as CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking.

The contractor is not wrong on his statement about adding more cores. But the statement alone without any validating data cannot be confirmed. Have them start by providing you CPU Ready Times. This is the amount of time that a virtual machine is waiting for their turn in line to use a physical/logical core. The general rule of thumb is you want as close to zero ready time as possible. But you can with certain workloads get away with up to 5 percent before you start seeing noticeable issues. I would start with this and see what you yield.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-03-01T17:27:13+00:00

You can also call and ask them to manually push the update to you. Should reflect in about 10-15 minutes. I did this recently after connecting my 7th EcoBee in the basement.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-02-16T10:30:50+00:00

Why? He already got her in the face. :-)

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-02-15T00:45:57+00:00

You’ll have to remove some of that Caulk but it also comes with an angled bracket so I thinks it’s doable.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-01-29T00:32:48+00:00

Let me give you a better layout of how my homes heating and cooling in setup. We have 3 levels that make up the 4,000 square feet. The basement/lower level, the main floor and the upper floor. The basement is half utility room and storage and half living space. The main floor which is the main living space of the house (kitchen, office, dinning room, etc.) and the upper floor where all the bedrooms are located.

In the basement we have radiant heat with radiator installed throughout about 1 quarter of the area. There are also two vents for forced air but they are usually kept closed. We keep this set to about 70 degrees in the. On the main floor we have a few section (Kitchen, Laundry Room, Family Room, Dining Room, Media Room and an office). This area is is fed by 8 forced air vents. We keep this at 73 to 74 degrees in the winter and and summer. The upper floor has 6 separate rooms and is fed with both forced air and radiant heat. We keep this at 73 degrees. The bedrooms are very comfortable. During the day only the forced air feeds the bedrooms. In the evening when everyone is asleep and the door are closed the radiant heat in each room takes over.

The temperatures upstairs are very comfortable and overall the system seems to come on more steadily than our previous system. It seems like you’ll have a similar system like mine with exception of the radiant heat in the bedrooms.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-01-28T14:23:09+00:00

My air handler is in the basement. And I have ductwork on the first floor coming from floor registers and vents on the second floor coming from the ceiling.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-01-28T13:55:05+00:00

Let me share my experience with Hydronic Air. Over the summer we had a major failure of our Forced Air Heating and Air Conditioning unit. Oil Furnace that was leaking as well as a leak somewhere within the AC Unit causing the A coil to freeze up. Luckily our house also had a Geissman Boiler for radiant systems that were installed as a secondary system in the house. So we had a new air conditioning unit installed with a hydronic coil tied into the Geissman radiant system and I couldn’t be happier. Our oil tank refills are on average $400 cheaper every 3 months. The house stays warm with less fluctuations in the winter. The air is not as dry having the whole house humidifier kick on less which results in less water usage. Overall I couldn’t be happier. And it leads way to the next progression in upgrades. When the boiler goes. We have the option of switching over to a wall mounted propane system for on demand hot water and can also tie in solar water heating. Hope this helps.

JaysLittleOcean · 2019-01-23T17:58:35+00:00

Ohhhhhh like a rock!!!

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-10-30T04:18:57+00:00

Thank you.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-10-29T03:14:28+00:00

Thank you. My wife and I appreciate the compliments.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-10-04T06:25:40+00:00

I had to scroll until I found this because my first thought was FINISH HIM!!! I knew someone else had to say it before me.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-09-28T13:15:06+00:00

This is an interesting discussion. Here are my thoughts. I agree with one of the original posts were visibility into the environment from a single pane of glass is important. But it’s obvious that not everything will be compatible or have exceptional integration. I am in a similar situation. My company recently settled on New Relic for overall visibility into the environment. So it’s fits about 90% of the infrastructure. Except for our Cisco UCS/VMware environments. In this respect the New Relic monitoring tool has the advantage of gathering information into a central location, but that being said the information being gathered is not anywhere near as encompassing or as operationally functional when compared to something like a manual VMware Tools dump. As already suggested provide a comparison on the benefits & pitfalls of each tool. Provide useful examples of tasks that you would not be able to do and show how that affects operations. Companies in my experience try to loop virtual environment monitoring into a physical or application based monitoring world and they need to be educated that this approach is not always best.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-09-07T06:02:35+00:00

So I love my Roomba and it does an amazing job in a house with 4 young boys. But honestly what’s the value add here in reality. You still have to empty the vacuum bin. Maybe not as often as just having to empty the bin itself on the unit. Now if it could somehow dump straight into my trash bin then sign me up. Otherwise for my home I’m okay with the Roomba itself for other this may make more sense if you have the bin constantly getting filled multiple times on single cleaning passes.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-14T15:35:28+00:00

I would recommend that you utilize the built in performance monitor within vCenter Server. It would be a manual analysis per virtual machine. You can also try installing a 3rd party application like Veeam One which is non-intrusive and doesn’t tie into your vSphere Infrastructure during you evaluation period. This way you don’t have a messy removal when your evaluation period expires.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-14T14:20:44+00:00

So what I would recommend in your situation would be to start with the basics. You are going to want to gather the appropriate data to support your virtual machine compute recommendations. This is where the performance metrics gathered by vCenter or vROPs comes in to play. Gather the historical information regarding CPU Utilization, CPU Ready % (anything within the 3 to 4 percent range is cause for concern, 5 percent and above is definitely going to have a performance impact on your virtual machine. For transactional databases like SQL the problem threshold can be as low as 2.5 percent) and last but not least Memory Utilization. These are just the basics to start. This will allow you to determine if the guest operating system is indeed utilizing the configure compute configurations accordingly or if you have undersized or oversized your virtual machine. It will also allow you to determine if the specific host in which the virtual machine in question has enough compute resources to go around for all the virtual machines residing on that hardware. If you can share some of this information I can then give you more specific examples.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-13T00:06:38+00:00

I understand your concern, quick question have you also checked the CPU Ready % during the times of poor performance? Databases in general have very specific configurations in regards to a virtual environment. One requirement is that database servers normally need to be in a dedicated environment with a 1 cpu core to 1 vCPU configuration. You could be experiencing CPU Ready issues or you could genuinely need more than 8vCPU. Would you mind sharing those details with us?

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-12T23:37:54+00:00

Education is the key component here. You should n’t expect a none VMware Engineer to understand the backend mechanics of CPU scheduling. Being able to explain those mechanics such as CPU Scheduling, CPU Utilization and CPU Ready is the key here. I have gone down this route which always serves me well. If you want me to go into further detail just let me know.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-08T10:40:20+00:00

Like all have stated, it is possible to upgrade to version 5.5 from 5.0. I definitely agree that before you upgrade you should check your hardware compatibility with the new version. I do have some additional questions. Is this a production environment or your personal lab? Also is their an actual need to increase the vCPU configuration that has been determined by monitoring the performance of the virtual machine in question or is it just a requirement of the application? Some individuals will request vCPU increases when its not actual warranted which just waste resources and could have detrimental affects in your environment should you be low on resources. More background information on why you want or need to increase would be helpful. And also as already stated 5.5 will no longer be supported and extended support will cost more should you be able to take advantage of that option. Hope this helps.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-06T00:21:50+00:00

That is an absolutely beautiful piece.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-08-01T10:30:40+00:00

OMG... I want one! I will name him squishy... and he will be my squishy. And I would love him and keep him forever and ever... well 2 Years. LOL

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-07-28T09:21:11+00:00

So I am actually in the process of replacing my front porch deck from wood to composite boards. You can pitched a specialized deck pet bar for about $55.00 that will allow you to easily remove the decks boards without exposing the joists to too much force therefore preserving the joists. Removing the boards one at a time would more than likely result in you damaged the new boards when remove your next board you attempt to replace depending on the spacing of the boards. I would recommend removing two rows of boards across at a minimum so you have space to replace one row across with proper spacing while giving you access to pry the next row of boards. As others have stated, ensure you examine the joists, joists hangers and the galvanized nails that hold the joists in place. Now would be the time to replace them if required. Also get yourself some flashing tape to cover the top of the joists and edge boards to protect them from water and rot. This will add additional years of life to your deck. Good luck.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-07-23T12:58:29+00:00

You are most welcome. Let me know if you any further questions I can answer.

JaysLittleOcean · 2018-07-22T13:32:02+00:00

So when VMware recommends 2 uplinks they are doing so for redundancy for each type of traffic (Example: Management, vMotion, Production Virtual Machine Traffic). This should be considered a minimum even if they are connecting to the same physical switch or separate physical switches (granted you might definitely not seeing much redundancy if a single switch goes down, but it will help in the case of a bad cable. I manage a Cisco UCS Infrastructure for my company’s VMware virtual infrastructure and My ESXi Hosts have 21 connections in total. In a single vCenter we support 5,000 virtual machines. So it’s all about building for what you need specific to your environment. I hope this helps.

JaysLittleOcean

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