Today I needed to look up the warranty info on one of my ESX servers -- I knew I had it in a spreadsheet somewhere, but it turned to be quicker to just look it up from the console using "dmidecode". The service tag is listed as the Serial Number under System Information.

This works for regular Linux servers too:

[root@myesxserver root]# /usr/sbin/dmidecode |grep -A4 "System Information"

System Information

        Manufacturer: Dell Inc.

        Product Name: PowerEdge R710

        Version: Not Specified

        Serial Number: Hxxxxx1

At an EMC class I took recently, the instructor claimed that in testing she had done, correctly aligning the partitions on a physical Windows server resulted in 30% performance gains.  I'm not sure what, if anything the gain is for aligning the partitions in virtual disks, assuming the underlying VMFS LUNs are aligned (which by default they will be if they're created under ESX 3+ or vSphere).

That being said, this is the advice from the "Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0" guide:

Make sure the system partitions within the guest are aligned. For further information you might want to

refer to the literature from the operating system vendor regarding appropriate tools to use as well as

recommendations from the array vendor.

This is a potentially useful tool -- a powershell script to check the partition alignment of your Windows VMs. (via Scott Lowe )

I haven't adjusted the partition alignment on my Linux VM templates yet. That's on my To Do list, hopefully for some time in the near future. I plan to do some before and after performance testing, and I'll post the results here when I do.

--mds

This is an interesting idea -- instead of running puppet in traditional client-server mode where the configuration is pushed from the server, replacing the puppetmaster server with a git repository, and let the managed servers pull their configs from git.

Scaling Puppet with distributed version control