maxmortillaro

I can only agree with you. I wrote the article from a given perspective, and I didn't touch at all on what defines criticality, how to track it, how to handle it. Also, a business critical service for one business vertical may not be for another one. I hope you can comment here when your article is ready so I can get your…

It would depend on how the organization is set up; I didn't cover this specific point but I know that some orgs have segregated infrastructure in certain jurisdictions to remain compliant with local laws i.e. segregated Active Directory forest (or protected child domain): think global financial institutions who operate in…

Great write Matt. I found in the early stages that following the online community on twitter, starting around with VMware, had helped me immensely to understand what is going on. Everybody online have their opinions and favourite companies/technologies and they tend to be vocal when speaking about dose. The correct dose of…

You're correct to point out that noisy neighbours can cause resource starvation, and indeed one needs to make sure that the VMs are effectively idle and not starvated. I've seen such a case where a VM with 256 GB RAM and 32 vCPU was running on an host with 256 GB RAM and 16 physical cores all along with another couple…

As you point out, it's important to properly document processes including task ownership and who are server owners and their eventual deputies for approval. Your mileage may vary on whether you have the bandwidth to perform these activities manually and whether your environment is manageable in this way. What matters is…

I didn't read your article until now but that was an awesome coincidence. I think that must be a common case with IT professionals when looking at movies :-)

Indeed network prerequisites are also crucial. Blame on me -not the network- for forgetting it! One thing I forgot to add is to consider the deployment of new services at the guest OS layer (antivirus, security monitoring etc.). Capacity planning teams and IT in general need to be informed ahead of time of such potential…

Absolutely, I believe there are many interlocks between capacity planning and managing VM sprawl. Putting some rules around how capacity is allocated can also help ease up the burden with capacity planning down the line.

Thank you!

Jfrazier​ rschroeder​ it's probably worth attempting a presentation/demo session w/Solarwinds & not just the VM team, but maybe the team leads for each stream (virtualization, networking, db etc.) and include the managers. People tend to get used to what they have and will reject change without any factual data. There is a…

"We can't win." How accurate is this. It sounds like "Against the power of Mordor, there can be no victory." - And you're so very right. Warning: rant ahead! Working in IT, especially in IT Operations, requires a though shell, a hardened spirit and looking at things with a certain detachment. My experience in almost 18…

Do you mean VMAN or other solutions? You should be able to test VMAN 6.4 without Orion, provided that you have a Windows VM with VIM. Getting buy-in from other teams or larger teams is always a PITA. Sometimes it's better to do a PoC on your own and present results to your team/manager.

I vividly recall on my last truly technical job as a senior sysadmin, where the data center looked horrible cabling-wise. Two years after I left, the company relocated to new premises. It must have been an entertaining job for my former colleagues to map everything manually before the move. Hopefully they hired…

Indeed network prerequisites are also crucial. Blame on me -not the network- for forgetting it! One thing I forgot to add is to consider the deployment of new services at the guest OS layer (antivirus, security monitoring etc.) especially in siloed environments where IT infrastructure teams are splitted (OS layer,…

A solid set of processes will definitely help avoid trouble, yet we have to consider the fact that in most environments these aspects are neglected and VM sprawl has been a rolling snow ball that has accumulated over years. It's IMHO why software assets are such a big help when "taking over" the management of such…