Management Blog

New Logging Community

schambers — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:55:24 GMT

Managing logs - VC, ESX, Guest - is a challenge that you have to address if you are be classed as a high performing center of excellence for VMware Infrastructure.

There are many methods and tools on the subject, but there are many folks who don't have a good grasp of the topic and some who don't think it's important: it is important! It's a core competency of running VMware Infrastructure.

I couldn't find a good, central resource on this topic and there are some folks out there in the vExpert community who are already thinking about this (Texiwill and Roger Lund for starters). So I have kicked off with a new community on VIOPS to focus these discussions around:

1. What are the requirements for log management?

2. What logs should be collected?

3. How should the logs be collected?

4. How should the logs be analysed?

5. Create a log management roadmap and benchmark

If you are interested in Log Management, perhaps you are a vendor with a solution, or a customer with a question - let's meet in the Logging zone!

Steve

VIOPS Capacity Management Webinar - one day to go!

schambers — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:16:21 GMT

Hello folks, reminder that the VIOPS Capacity Management Webinar is now just one day away - if you haven't registered yet, please follow the link below.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 8:00 am PDT / 3:00pm GMT

(Pacific Daylight Time is GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

The webinar is the first of its kind to provide practical capacity management expertise from recognized industry experts, specifically for VMware Infrastructure - don't miss it!

Do we need a dedicated Storage zone?

schambers — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:17:42 GMT

Storage topics are popular! If you check the topics in this Management zone, and of course the ones in the Availability zone, then storage topics are very common.

In this Management zone, Jeremy Waldrop has just added a new document on Integrating CLARiiON iSCSI with ESX with some great screenshots. This complements the other papers from Cormac Hogan at VMware with other examples of storage integrations.

Over in Availability we have the excellent VCB integration documents for Chris Skinner... Network and Storage are two fundamentals of virtualization and I'm loath to create their own zones because they are a common part of all the other zones... but on the other hand, maybe it makes more sense to the community to have their own zones?

What do you think? Start a new discussion thread if you have a view either way...

Steve

New type of document on VIOPS: Resources

schambers — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:39:26 GMT

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.

Capacity Management - three new proven practices from Metron

schambers — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:19:11 GMT

One of the hottest topics in virtualization is Capacity Management - if you have more ESX Servers than you have fingers, then this will not be a shock to you! Gone are the days of deploying physical "one-app, one-server" machines that are way over-specified and massively under-utilized (our database of billions of CPU utilization records shows an average Windows server is 6% utilized). Wave bye-bye, everyone

Being able to get more from less means you also need to have a way of working out what more and less actually is, and just to make things interesting these are changing all the time. So the "old" mainframe and midrange approach of capacity management has come to the fore again -
but in the Intel world, who does capacity management? What is the process they follow? What tools do they use?

Three consultants from Metron have each written a capacity management proven practice, based on their experience in the field and using their Athene product - check these out:

Proven Practice - Resource Pool Capacity Management with Metron Athene from Robert Ford
Proven Practice: Capacity Management Reporting for VMware Clusters with Metron Athene from Nick Varley
Proven Practice - Creating a VMware Capacity Management Dashboard with Metron Athene from Jamie Baker

Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter

schambers — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:34:45 GMT

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

Automated Release Management with Stage Manager

schambers — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:25:27 GMT

Desmond Chan, who has graciously taken up ownership of the Management Zone (thanks, Desmond!), has just published a Proven Practice: Evaluating VMware Stage Manager Use Cases.

This is in response to many requests from folks on "How do I work out if Stage Manager is for me, or not?". Desmond explains the System Requirements and the Use Cases, and what to do next. This is a standard evaluation procedure that should be useful - if not, speak up (but if it IS useful, please tell Desmond!).

Do you need more evaluation guides like this? What about a proof of concept guide? Post a question / request / idea in the Management Zone forum and let's do something.

Steve

VMware Super Measures

schambers — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:13:22 GMT

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