I got this questions two times this week “What is the benifit of VMware Enterprise Plus?” when I was a VMware customer I went Enterprise Plus right away…Lots of people complained however its great value IMO.   Perhaps the biggest value of Enterprise plus is just the licensing core count increase from 6 to 12.  The current Nahalem EX processors are at 8 cores, and AMD are at 12….Besides this however there are other great features:

1. Host Profiles-  These are used to automate configurations and ensure compliance; VMware is adding more and more configuration parameters that are included in each release.
2. 8 Core SMP virtual machines
3. Network I/O Control this is used to QOS virtual network resources
4. Storage I/O Control- priortization for VMs resources to shared storage, redistibutes vms un
5. Distributed Virtual Switch- Besides trimming down to one switch, and then adding in hosts for consistency a few other benefits…PVLANS, Load Based Teaming, ingress traffic shaping , required for Cisco Nexus 1000v integration

Here is a quick few use cases and review on Pvlans (they were new to me) :

• Communities can communicate with eachother in community and router use case: DMZ with 1 app server and 1 corresponding database server. 
• Isolated- Can only communicate with router  use case:  in a DMZ where you have a standalone webserver that doesn’t have the needs to communicate to other servers in the DMZ as often the case with DMZ; 2nd use case in a desktop vdi enviroment where desktops don’t need to communicate with eachother (This example is from Eric Slueth blog video on Pvlans)
• Promiscous – For routers.

Recently I was helping a customer architect a solution and I went back to the Best Practices for Vpshere and the EVA you can find it here:  http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-2185ENW.pdf

I thought I would make a quick summation and comment as some of it seems neglected in terms of being updated.

1. When creating hosts in commandview create them as Type: VMware
2. Use a single disk group with the same size disks and the largest possible disk group
3. Single Diskgroup sparing is sufficent unless MTTR is > 7 days
4. Don’t use VRaid 6 – Vraid 5 provides adequate redundancy
5. When using disks of varying performance characteristics still use a single diskgroup
6. Balance your VMFS Luns across both controllers for ownership with alternating failback and failover policies  read more here (http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=465)
7. Configure Round Robin advanced parameters to IOPS=1….I dont think HP is right here this was fixed fixed in Vpshere 4 update 1; This shouldnt be necessary
8. When using DR groups, ensure that DR groups managing controllers are spread across controllers
9. Use less than 16 VMDKs per VMFS datastore
10. Use the same lunid per host per lun
11. Create VMFS datastores through Vcenter for proper alignment
12. For heavy i/o load vms use the paravirtualized virtualized virtual adapters for the VM data Luns
13. Verify data drives for windows 2003 machines within os for proper alignment
14. Set Round Robin multipathing on your hosts and then reboot; dont forget to set your Microsoft clusters to MRU here is the quick and easy command:

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp --satp VMW_SATP_ALUA --psp VMW_PSP_RR