Chargeback: The Value Added Pitch

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....

January 7, 2009 · itsahill00

How We Found Our Virtual Networking Mojo

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...

January 7, 2009 · itsahill00

VI3 Value Added: System Deployment

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....

January 3, 2009 · itsahill00