We had some storage issues. We still have some storage issues, but it’s getting better. Here’s what we’ve fixed: Overbooked storage Storage Switch Failure Tolerance Adapter Failure Tolerance Overbooked Storage Units The most immediate issue that could be addressed was the storage bloat. This did not require additional hardware. Previously, our storage allocated for VMware was as follows: VMFSLun1 (600 GB) VMFSLun2 (900 GB) All 30 virtual machines the university ran (46 individual virtual hard disks) were running on two LUNs....

Our chargeback policy for virtual machines was not clearly defined. To encourage adoption, the provisioning fee for a virtual machine was $500 regardless of system requirements. In lieu of a host being added and other considerable investments being made hardware, the chargeback policy needed to be revised. Virtual Machines within our matured Virtual Infrastructure cost more to provide but add a considerable amount of value. After a bit of reading at vmMBA and watching BM15 Managing Chargeback with VMware Infrastructure 3 from VMworld 2007 we decided to go with a tiered chargeback method....

Switch and Network Adapter Fault Tolerance Each of the VMware ESX hosts that we had were equipped with dual Network Adapters (NICs). With a typical physical server, two NICs could demonstrate fault tolerance. However, for ESX hosts the dual NIC is not fault tolerant. VMware ESX has three major types of traffic: VMkernel – used for vMotion, which allows host downtime without an interruption of service Service Console – initiates vMotion, serves as the primary venue of managing Virtual Machines...

One of the things I have to do as a Virtual Infrastructure Administrator is evangelize value added with virtual machines. What are my stakeholders going to get out of this? Where’s the value added? Why should we use a virtual machines instead of physical machines? Here’s my explanation of some advantages and value added using VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 from a system deployment standpoint. This post will show a “before and after” view of system deployment....

Welcome to Virtual Andy, a weblog that will discuss challenges with implementing virtualization. I’ll discuss the technical and business challenges that our organization has run into with virtualization. There will be a good mixture of ROI and Excel Spreadsheets with some technical diagrams and scripts. I am relatively new to the virtual world, as I have only been working with VMware products since 05/2008. VCP4 in May 2010.

My post on VMware Consolidated Backup has gotten a decent amount of traffic. If you’re using ESX and not considering VMware Consolidated Backup, this video explains it all.

This has been a pretty fun project at work and I think it could benefit a lot of people, so I’ve decided to post a modified version of my documentation. It’s a DRAFT and not quite yet in production. I’m still working through a lot of the process. Here’s what I’ve learned… There’s an awful lot of noise (and even worse, quite a bit of actual material) to wrap your mind around when doing a Disaster Recovery plan for virtual machines....

Not really a one-liner when you try to make it readable… With help from halr9000… Calculate disk usage of all Linux Guest Virtual Machines: [sourcecode language=‘jscript’]get-vm | where { $_.Guest.OSFullName -match “Linux” -band $_.Guest.state -eq “Running” } | Get-HardDisk | measure-object -sum CapacityKB[/sourcecode]

I was about to delete a ton (more on that later) of VMware ESX 3.5 snapshots in our maintenance window. After some quick Googling, I found Delete all Snapshots which made me hold off on it until I had some more information about our snapshots. This number will just increase daily until they’re committed. So in order to plead a case with our SAN admin, I’ve got to have some information....