VSphere.
- May 27, 2020
When Virtualization Goes Wrong: Lessons from Real Production Incidents
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 …
- 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. …
- February 18, 2020
VMware vSphere Health Checks: Building a Weekly Operational Routine
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 …
- January 15, 2020
Performance Baselining in vSphere: What to Measure and When to Act
“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 …
- April 2, 2019
Migrating VMs Between Datastores Without Downtime
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 …
- April 10, 2018
ESXi 5.5 to 6.5: The Upgrade Path Nobody Documents Completely
ESXi 5.5 reached end of general support in September 2018, creating real urgency to move environments that had been running the same version for three to four years. The upgrade path to 6.5 (the …
- March 19, 2018
Pure Storage Integration with vSphere: Getting the Most from All-Flash
When I first deployed Pure Storage in a VMware environment around 2017, the experience was different from anything I’d done with traditional SAN arrays. The management interface is genuinely …
- 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 …
- September 14, 2017
vSphere DRS: From Manual to Fully Automated and the Lessons in Between
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is vSphere’s automated workload balancing engine. When configured appropriately, it silently keeps your cluster balanced without admin intervention. When …
- January 17, 2017
vSphere HA: Configuring It Right for Small Environments
vSphere High Availability is one of the primary reasons to run VMware over standalone hypervisors. When configured correctly, it automatically restarts VMs on surviving hosts when a host fails — …