Tweet Memory Virtualisation Basics When an operating system is installed directly onto the physical hardware in a non-virtualised environment, the operating system has direct access to the memory installed in the system and simple memory requests, or pages always have a 1:1 mapping to the physical RAM, meaning that if 4GB of RAM is installed, [...]
Tweet Windows virtual machines require more memory with each passing release and software demands on memory are becoming larger all the time. In a vitual environment it is quite simple to increase the amount of virtual memory granted to a virtual machine, especially with features such as hot add. The ability to dynamically increase the [...]
Tweet As technology progresses, storage requirements grow. It seems to be a never ending pattern. I remember only a few years ago the maximum configurable LUN size of 2TB seemed huge. Now it is common to have many LUN carvings making up tens of Terabytes of SAN storage. The downside to all this extra storage [...]
Tweet Memory in a virtualised environment is split up in three memory types. Virtual Memory – Allocates memory through a syscall to the operating system. This runs at the application level in the same way on virtual machines as in physical machines Physical Memory – Runs at the OS level. In simplistic terms it uses [...]
Tweet Virtual machines are made up of the following files. vmname.vmx – Config file vmname.vmdk – Describes charateristics vmname-flat.vmdk – (hidden by default) Contains the data vmname.nvram – VM BIOS vmname.log – log file vmware#.log – VMware log file vmname.vswp – Virtual machine swap file on the ESX(i) host vmname.vmsd – snapshot descriptor file Limits [...]
