VMware Operations

What are your operational procedures for your VMware environment. I often get asked, "Rod, now that I have my new VMware environment, what do I need to do to run it on an ongoing basis?" To me this comes down to two things.

Monitoring

Your monitoring system provides the following functions for you.

• Ensures that you are alerted to any pending problems
  
• Allows you to investigate the current and historical state of your environment to assist in trouble shooting
  
• Provides uptime and usage information for management reporting
  
• Provides capacity management projections
  

Here is an example list of elements for monitoring.

• Free space of Datastores
  
• Free space of Service Consoles
  
• List of orphaned snapshots
  
• List of long running snapshots
  
• Failed (automatic) VMotions
• VMware tools running in hosts
• Size of VC database
  
• Monitor CPU READY (ms) or CPU %READY per VM per host
  
• Monitor %CPU BUSY percentages per VM per host
  
• Monitor network and disk I/O usage per VM per Host
  
• Monitor service console memory swap usage
  
• Monitor VM balloon memory and swap usage
  
• Host downtime reporting
  
• Server hardware faults (power supplies, fans, IO cards, disks, CPUs, RAM)
• SAN hardware faults (disks and vendor specific)

Your monitoring will certainly consist of VMware vCenter Server and also your hardware monitoring platform.  Often these are supplemented by a VMware specific product like Vizioncore vFoglight, Veeam Monitor or Nimsoft.

Management

Your management processes and procedures provide the following functions for you.

• A list of maintenance activities to perform on a periodic basis
• formal heath check
  
• update templates with patches and updates
• A list of operational procedures on how to perform standard maintenance and trouble shooting tasks.
  
• A change management impact matrix to detail the potential impact and risk of a particular type of change.
  

Here is an example list of operational procedures.

• The procedure to create a new virtual machine
  
• The procedure to place a new virtual machine within the virtual infrastructure into a Production state. This may be identical to the physical server commissioning procedure.
  
• The procedure to place an ESX server into and then out of maintenance mode, migrating the guests onto other ESX Server hosts.
  
• The procedure used to contact VMware for support. It should include contact information and specify contact methods as well as means of collecting information.
  
• The procedure to add a LUN to an existing ESX server cluster.
  
• The procedure to patch a template used for creating virtual machines.
  
• The procedure to create a snapshot of a virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to restore the virtual machine state to its previous state at the start of the snapshot.
  
• The procedure for investigating user reported virtual machine performance issues. What to check and how to respond.
  
• The procedure to add a disk to an existing virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to expand the size of an existing disk for a virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to shrink a disk used by a virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to remove a disk from a virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to decommission a virtual machine.
  
• The procedure to migrate (VMotion) a virtual machine between ESX Server hosts in the same ESX cluster.
  
• The procedure to build an ESX server.
  
• The procedure to add an ESX server into an existing ESX cluster.
  
• The procedure to migrate a virtual machine between ESX Server hosts in the different ESX clusters (i.e. between datacenters).
  
• The procedure to confirm that a SAN link is active, to be used after a SAN link has failed and been restored.
  
• The procedure to confirm that a network link is active, to be used after a network link has failed and been restored.
  
• The procedure to enable the network group to troubleshoot user reported network / performance issues.
  
• The procedure for backing up/restoring VMs (VM-level and file-level).
  
• The procedure for backing up/restoring VirtualCenter database.
  
• The procedure for backing up/restoring license server files (or keys).
  
• The procedure for restoring VirtualCenter Server.
  
• The procedure for restoring ESX hosts.
  

Do you have any elements you also find important for Operations? Post in the comments.

Rodos