How to Avoid a VMware Crash: Defuse Your vSphere Ticking Time Bomb

What happens when VMware vSphere is not properly designed, built, and supported? The plain and simple answer… a VMware crash!

You could prove my point the hard way which could cost you your job if the virtual servers responsible for your company’s bread and butter ever do crash because of bad management…

I’ve written VCP For Hire: A Manager’s Guide for Hiring vSphere Virtualization Engineers and Administrators to help IT Managers. (Kindle)

Virtualization Skills

In VCP For Hire, I explain what skills and experience are recommended to properly design, build and support a healthy VMware vSphere environment.

I identify many of the pitfalls that can or will eventually; go wrong in a vSphere environment. He experience firsthand in 2008 when VMware released the ESX 3.5 update 2 patches that crashed 1000’s of virtual servers. Production, QA, or Development, when the time bomb (update 2) triggered, servers turned off and would not turn back on. This problem was quickly fixed with another patch but only after the inconvenience of many hours of downtime, and the impact of production environments everywhere going dark until the new patch was installed.

Virtualization Problems from ESXi Mismatch

I also write about the problems resulting from mismatching ESX/i versions and misconfigurations that only show up after hours or days of troubleshooting that generally follow a server crash that seemingly has occurred for no known reason.

For example, vCenter running out of disk space because it’s still running  MSSQL-Lite on local disk, or ESX/i running out of disk space for logs because ESX/i is running on local disk. These are only a couple of the obvious glitches that could crash your environment on the VMware side. Also, consider that: server hardware, storage, and network equipment can blow up too.

Other examples are 20+ VMs crashing because the data-store they were sharing over-fills because nobody noticed the VMs were thin-provisioned and have outgrown the LUN, or 50+ VMs in production dropping network connections during prime business hours because the network switch they share is oversubscribed due to backup traffic running on the same VLAN as data traffic.

How to Avoid a VMware Crash

The reason I wrote VCP For Hire is to help managers understand their importance and highlight the critical issues that can occur. It’s a preventive guide that focuses on finding expertise capable of preventing time bombs from exploding or at least having qualified engineers and administrators that can rescue VMs if something disastrous happens.

Bad Practices, Bugs, Misconfigurations

Between software bugs, software and hardware misconfigurations, firmware bugs, poor deployments where good or best practices were not followed, or various other possibilities, infrastructure managers can never be too safe with all the opportunities there are for VMware vSphere to go BOOM!

Added Value to VMware vSphere

The value-add VCP for Hire gives a manager is leveraging the experience of someone who has seen and understands what it takes to build a successful virtualization support team. This eBook will help to avoid many of the mistakes and problems lurking due to a lack of expertise by providing the keys to properly size up talent.

VCP For Hire is not a technical how-to guide, it’s an eBook on what is needed to ensure the experts who have the “how-to” to handle, or at least avoid, the not-so-obvious.  This eBook outlines skill requirements and provide detailed job descriptions to help define staff roles and responsibilities. It will give managers the EDGE!

As much as I enjoy working with and promoting VMware Products, I understand if not properly handled – just like NITRO – it can become very unstable and explode taking the most valuable production services with it. Are you prepared? Tick! Tick! Ti…

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