SMB.
- March 9, 2020
Capacity Planning for Small VMware Environments Without Enterprise Tools
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. …
- July 31, 2018
vSAN for Small Business: Is the Complexity Worth It?
VMware vSAN entered the mainstream around 2016 as a hyperconverged storage option — using local drives in ESXi hosts as a shared storage pool, eliminating the need for a dedicated SAN or NAS. For …
- October 30, 2017
vSphere Clusters: Common Misconfigurations in SMB Deployments
vSphere cluster misconfigurations don’t always cause immediate problems. Sometimes they sit dormant for months before a host failure or upgrade event triggers a failure mode that the …
- July 11, 2016
When to Add vCenter: The Decision That Changes Everything
Running standalone ESXi hosts is a common starting point for small businesses. It’s simple, cost-effective, and covers a lot of ground. But there’s a clear inflection point where …
- February 8, 2016
Starting with ESXi on Bare Metal: Hardware Selection for Small Business
The question I got asked most often when starting ESXi deployments for small and mid-size businesses: what hardware should we buy? The honest answer is “it depends,” but there are enough …
- March 31, 2015
XenServer vs VMware ESXi: A Practical Comparison for Small Business
I’ve deployed both XenServer and VMware ESXi for small-to-medium businesses, sometimes switching between them for the same client as their needs evolved. The right choice depends on several …
- February 10, 2015
Getting Started with XenServer 6.5: The VMware Alternative I Actually Liked
In 2015, I was working with a mid-size client who needed to virtualize roughly 20 servers on a budget that made VMware’s licensing difficult to justify. They’d looked at Hyper-V but …