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
ESXi host upgrades via vSphere Update Manager (VUM, now Lifecycle Manager in newer versions) are routine operations that usually go smoothly. When they don’t, the failure modes can range from easily recoverable to genuinely painful. Here’s what I’ve encountered and how to handle it. Before You Start The things that should happen before any ESXi … Read more
Most VMware backup configurations I inherit were built by someone who configured jobs, set a retention period, and moved on. There’s no formal connection between what the backup policy does and what the business actually requires. SLA-based backup design makes that connection explicit — and it makes conversations about backup adequate or inadequate into evidence-based … Read more
VMFS (VMware File System) is a clustered filesystem that lets multiple ESXi hosts access the same LUN simultaneously. It’s reliable, well-tested, and handles concurrent access through distributed locking mechanisms. But VMFS corruption does happen — typically due to storage controller issues, firmware bugs, incorrect multipath configuration, or storage array problems — and knowing how to … Read more
Storage vMotion is the capability that makes VMware environments operationally flexible — you can move a VM’s virtual disks from one datastore to another while the VM continues running, without any user-visible downtime. Understanding how it works and what can go wrong makes it a tool you can use confidently. How Storage vMotion Works Storage … Read more
If the Distributed Firewall is NSX-V’s most-used feature, the Edge Services Gateway (ESG) is its most confusing. ESGs are software-defined appliances that provide routing, NAT, load balancing, VPN, and perimeter firewall functions. They’re powerful, but the design decisions around ESG sizing and topology have long-term consequences that aren’t obvious when you’re setting one up for … Read more