Every team I talk to is calling the move from VCF 5.x to VCF 9 an “upgrade.” It isn’t. Calling it that sets the wrong expectations and gets people in trouble. VCF 9 is an architecture change wearing an upgrade’s clothing — and the sooner you treat it that way, the better your plan will … Read more
Having led this migration at enterprise scale, here’s the real playbook — including the gotchas that aren’t in VMware’s documentation.
Everyone’s talking about VMware alternatives after the Broadcom acquisition. But Hyper-V has quietly become a very solid option for certain workloads.
vCenter’s built-in alerting is fine until it isn’t. Here’s how I replaced it with a lightweight stack that actually tells me what matters.
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
If you manage VMware infrastructure and you’re not using PowerCLI, you’re doing the same tasks manually that a few lines of PowerShell would automate. PowerCLI is VMware’s PowerShell module for vSphere management, and once you get comfortable with the basics, it becomes an essential tool for everything from inventory reporting to bulk configuration changes. Getting … Read more
Traditional disaster recovery required a physical secondary site — a co-location facility or branch office with matching hardware that could run your workloads if your primary site failed. For small and mid-size businesses, the cost and complexity of a traditional DR site is often prohibitive. Cloud-based DR, using Veeam with Azure or AWS as the … Read more