We are going great guns in getting proven practices on VIOPS; people are finding new uses for them - lately, Guy Chapman of Sungard has been using VIOPS for peer review. His latest Re: Trusted SSL certificates - request for peer review has involved VMware security engineers, PSO, SEs...

The VIOPS team thinks there is another use for document on VIOPS - Resources. The idea here is to build on Eric Siebert's vmware-land.com page of links.

Why do this in VIOPS?

• We think this captures the essence of what we are trying to do with this community - provide a space where community members can help each other, and with VIOPS have a direct channel to VMware staff - which also works the other way! (where else do you get that?).

• Leverage the high-quality of expertise out there without having to have articles imported/re-written for VIOPS - with the added bonus that, if it is linked to from VIOPS then the community is saying that the external article is good quality. If a resource is bad quality, the community will remove it. Therefore, this new resource feature is self-policing.

The first example of a resource is Resources: Virtual Machines

Check it out, let us know what you think by commenting on the doc, or posting a new discussion.

Desmond Chan has provided another proven practice - great work, Desmond! This one is Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter.

This is taken from a case study we have worked on with a global customer - you can see by the map image in it, their WAN was truly world-wide and I think this proven practice pulls all the key learnings from that project.

Feedback on this proven practice is already very positive, and I hope it's the start of a series of ROBO discussions and proven practices.

Steve

Click here to read previous blog posts in the Management Zone

Metrics are essential for developing the best virtualization solution for your organization: we’ve all heard the mantra, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”.

But metrics aren’t easy, especially if you are starting with a blank piece of paper and trying to work out what to measure and how to measure it. If you read up on the subject of metrics, you will find some heavy tomes on how to design metrics with a lot of detail that, quite frankly, you don’t have time to work through – and after all, surely someone has done this before?

At VMware we have a unique view across business verticals and sizes of organizations when working with our customers, and every week we hear questions on metrics: What should I measure? How should I measure it? Are my metrics good compared to my competitors?

The proposal document “VMware Super Measures” is the start of a collaboration attempt on the VIOPS Pilot Project to develop some simple, effective and industry-common metrics that help you:

1) Measure your success, or failure, with virtualization. An example might be surpassing, or missing, virtualization targets.

2) Prioritize focus on your efforts. The metrics focus on the business and the customer, not on technical aspects, and this focus is a critical success factor for virtualization

3) Implement metrics as soon as possible. The earlier you start collecting metrics, the more management information at your disposal to make better decisions.

You can collect metrics without acting upon them, even though that would be defeating the point. But if you do anything after reading the Proposal, I would appreciate a comment, a suggestion, your point of view, and if I may dare, some contribution from you to improve the proposal so we can develop it into a practice for the benefit of the whole community.

Thanks

Steve