Discover the value: VMware Health Check from a VCP

By Tom McDonald | Apr 29, 2011 11:14:00 AM

With a VMware vSphere Health Check, one of our VMware Certified Professional consultants (VCPs) will work with your IT team and assist them with configuration and management of VMware vSphere by providing knowledge and guidance on best practices. If you're running the latest in VMware software, it is important that you are getting the most out of your environment. By working closely with your IT department our VCP will be able to provide concrete recommendations that will optimize your virtual IT infrastructure.

WHY THIS MATTERS:  Over time, adding new VM's and changes/upgrades to your virtual environment alters the efficiency. Having a VMware Health Check ensures you’re not over/under utilizing resources and your environment is staying within VMware’s best practices guidelines. Its a good idea to have a VCP check your environment every 6 to 12 months or a couple months after any major upgrade or change to the infrastructure. This ensures your infrastructure is well maintained and that any problems are realized before they require a major overhaul.

 

Benefits

• Optimize VMware vSphere performance
• Maximize resources through efficiencies and roadmap for future improvements
• Mitigate risk by leveraging experienced consultants and proven best practices

Deliverables 

• Collect data and conduct assessment of VMware vSphere (up to four ESX™ hosts)
• Identify potential opportunities to optimize configuration and improve performance
• Hold an interactive workshop to facilitate knowledge transfer on VMware vSphere best practice

Scope

• Up to two (2) days on-site, and one (1) day off-site to create assessment report
• Health Check includes up to four (4) ESX hosts
• Maximum of five (5) participants for interactive workshop
• Contact your local VMware representative for pricing information
• VMware vSphere Health Check will be delivered by a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) consultant 

Requirements

• Existing VMware vSphere including VMware ESX
• Administrator (root) access to VMware installations
• Conference room with projector and networked desktops/laptops running MS Windows® 2000 or higher

You've made an investment in your virtual infrastructure, so ensuring that you are getting the most out of this investment is key. By having a VCP consultant optimize your environment you not only ensure that vSphere is running to the best of its abilities, but also gives your IT the knowledge and training to maintain the virtual infrastructure.

Go Here to get the WhitePaper Outlining the Health Check processs and VMware best practices that are reviewed

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Downtime not an option? Learn the basics of VMware's Fault Tolerance and what you will need to get up and running

By Tom McDonald | Mar 25, 2011 11:32:00 AM

Is a server crash not an option for your company? Is having your server up and running the life and soul of your business? Then you may want to consider VMware’s Fault Tolerance (FT) feature. VMware Fault Tolerance is a step up from VMware High Availability (HA), with High Availability being VMware’s backup for a VM crash, if a server running a VM happens to go down then the host reboots on a different host. This allows for only a minute or two of downtime as the Virtual Machine starts up on a new server and the primary host that has crashed is restarted, if possible. This is extremely useful and can keep a business functioning with only a moment of downtime. What Fault Tolerance does is eliminate that couple minutes of downtime so that even if a server crashes, nothing is felt by the user. This feature gives companies that can’t stop functioning, even for a minute, the security they need to run their businesses.

How does FT work? Well with HA there is a primary server who runs the VM and a dedicated secondary host that is there in case of failure, if/when that failure occurs the secondary host is started and the VM is restarted on the new host. The failure is detected by using VMware’s heartbeat function that pings the server every second to ensure it is still active on the network, if the host stops responding it is considered to have failed and the VMs are moved to a new machine.  FT continues this trend, but instead of waiting for a host to fail and then restart it uses vLockstep to keep both hosts in sync that way if one was to fail than the other would continue running without having the user notice the server failure. By sharing a virtualized storage, all the files are accessible to both hosts and the primary host updates the secondary host constantly in order to keep both hosts RAM in sync. FT has a few rules to ensure it works properly:

  • Hosts must be in an HA cluster
  • Primary and secondary VMs must run on different hosts
  • Anti- affinity must be enabled (A configuration that ensures that the VM cannot be started on the same host)
  • The VMs must be stored on a shared storage
  • Minimum of 2 Gbps Nics, this is to allow vMotion and FT logging
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By Tom McDonald | Mar 9, 2011 10:46:00 AM

VMware HA (High Availability) is a major step in setting up a disaster recovery objective. With HA enabled, each ESXi host checks in on the other hosts and looks for a failure, if a failure should occur the VMs on the failed host are restarted on another server. To enable HA on your network a few prerequisites are required; All VMs and their configuration files must reside on a shared storage, this is required so that all the hosts have access to the VM if the host running it should fail; Each host in a VMware HA cluster must have a host name and a static IP, this will guarantee that each host can monitor each other without having false positives on failure if a host changes IP address; Hosts must be configured to have access to the VM network; Finally VMware recommends a redundant network connection, if a network card should fail this would allow communication to the host it is associated with, without this redundancy the host would seen as failing.

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