Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

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

Many business’s IT infrastructures are based around this set up, with the operating system bound to a specific set of hardware and a specific Application bound to that OS. From there the server runs at about 5-10% of its capacity for most of the day with it peaking only during heavy usage. The data has to be backed up to a local SAN for recovery purposes, generally needing special software to be employed to ensure its being backed up fully and efficiently.

If this is a vital server and has a disaster recovery and business continuity plan implemented with it to ensure that downtime is kept as low as possible, then it will have an identical server installed for failover. This server is only used if the original server fails, but is still uses power and space. Not only that, but this server has to be the same identical model, containing the same hardware configuration, firmware, and local storage to ensure immediate complete compatibility with the original server. This adds cost as you need to have a second set of the hardware and it has to be that same model, limiting upgrade paths for the business.

This set up generally falls into the “Boot and Pray” model of disaster recovery, as the complexity of the set up causes the admin to hope that it works rather than being able to guarantee a smooth transition from server. This has to be done with every vital server that needs to have a redundant back up and each one has its own unique set up, creating a large amount of complexity that is involved with managing all these different machines. This complexity increases the company’s RTO and RPO and makes recovering a much larger ordeal.