Production incidents in virtualized environments have a different character than physical infrastructure failures. The failure radius can be much larger (one host failure impacts many VMs), the failure modes are sometimes subtle, and the time pressure to recover can lead to decisions that compound the original problem. These are some of the patterns I’ve seen, … Read more
Enterprise VMware environments have tools like vRealize Operations for capacity management. SMB environments running five to twenty ESXi hosts typically don’t — and they don’t need to. Good capacity planning is achievable with PowerCLI, a spreadsheet, and consistent measurement discipline. The Three Resources That Matter For most VMware workloads, three physical resources constrain capacity: CPU, … Read more
The best VMware environments I’ve managed didn’t stay healthy by accident — they had a consistent operational review process that caught problems before they became incidents. A weekly health check routine doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it does need to be consistent. The 15-Minute Weekly Review Every Monday morning before business hours, I run … Read more
“The VMs are slow” is the most common call I get about VMware environments, and it’s almost never useful information on its own. What I need to know — and rarely have if nobody’s been tracking it — is what “slow” means relative to baseline. Performance baselining is the practice of capturing normal behavior metrics … Read more