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....