Lots of backup products leverage this capability to provide virtual machine backups. However snapshots as great as they are can be the bane of a network administrators existence too.

You see sometimes snapshots can get corrupted or orphaned from the backup process and they don’t get removed properly. The network administrator doesn’t notice this and then the snapshot ends up running forever and going out of control. This can lead to an outage on the server.

How do we fix this? Constant monitoring! Put into place monitoring and best practices to make sure unused snapshots and orphaned snapshots are cleaned up. This will keep your virtual environment in a healthy state!

-RP

Generally you license based on a certain amount of cores, and if you exceed that, you buy a license to upgrade you to more cores. However you cannot split cores in a license across multiple processors.

6 core processors are great for virtualization, and that coupled with the ability to put large amount of memory in servers these days will make for some very powerful virtual environments.

You can read more about VMware’s multi-core licensing policy here.

-RP

Earlier this year in September, VMware transitioned to per VM licensing for some of their products. Other products stayed with their original licensing model. This can get confusing for customers so VMware has it all nicely summed up on their website on how things are going to work going forward.

I am personally not a fan of per VM licensing because then that hampers selling customers on the multiple VM’s message, but on the positive side it should reign in VM creep.

Anyways you can read more about the changes here.

-RP

You can make a ball park guess and just eyeball it, but that isn’t really a technically sound way of proving things to your boss when it comes time to budget. Instead what you need is a tool that can help you with this process.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ can do just this. It will provide you with reporting the outlines exactly how you are using your capacity. This is an easy to setup and use tool that no administrator should be without. You can read more about it here.

-RP

Well based on the apps and data you have, some of them might work in the public cloud or some might work in the private cloud, other might work in either. The question is what should you do? Well at the end of the day for most customers it comes down to data security.

Does your data have specific regulatory requirements around security where it’s not allowed in a public cloud? If so, then you really don’t have a choice in the matter and you have to go private. However there are other reasons you might want to stay private. If you have an IT team already that already knows the ins and outs of your business, you can leverage there skills to maintain your own private cloud.

So in the end there really isn’t a right or wrong answer, it’s more about what is right for your individual business.

-RP

In some companies this isn’t a requirement, but in a lot of companies it is. The ability to determine which department is using up your compute resources.

Well using VMware products you can easily make this happen! VMware vCenter Chargeback is a great product and you can read more about it here. You can also take it to the next level with VMware vCloud Director.

-RP

Well recently announced from Veeam is Veeam SureBackup which contains a lot of the same features from Veeam that you have grown to know and love, but also contains the ability to check backups without going through a lengthy restore process.

You can basically do a recovery verification by starting up the virtual machine from the backup file and verify that it works. Now that’s cool! You can learn more here.

-RP

There are a few scripts out there that will do this for you and a few free programs that will show you the free space. But how do you get it to check and then email you an alert if you go past your set threshold? Veeam of course!

The good people at Veeam have a product called Veeam Monitor, which will not only monitor your storage but also monitor a myriad of other VMware related things. Features such as hardware monitoring and performance analysis will also help you with your VMware administration duties.

You can check out the free version of Veeam Monitor here and if you like it you can then opt to purchase the full product.

-RP

A common mistake is to think you only need enough free space for the size of the VM itself and not much more. Well if you do that you’ll quickly find out the hard way that you should have allocated more. You see VMware needs space for things such as snapshots and space for emergency situations where you might need the space for shuffling things around from LUN to LUN.

The general consensus for free space on a VMware LUN is 10% to 20% free space. This isn’t just for snapshots, but also to account for any emergencies you might have to deal with on a VM where you need the free space. So if you don’t have  10% to 20% free space, then essentially you should treat the disk as full for all intents and purposes. 20% can be considered on the conservative side but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious.

I have heard people say 10% to 15% is good enough but only if you have very strict snapshot policies to ensure that you are monitoring the disk space closely.

-RP

VMware converter version 3.0.3 is the version I used and it installed into Windows NT just fine (reboot required). Then I was able to launch the application and connect to my ESXi server and launch the conversion of the physical machine.

This means I was able to do a hot clone of Windows NT 4. I hate working with NT boxes but at least we have an easy method to virtualize them. A lot of NT servers out there are on ailing hardware that is not on warranty so having a method to hot clone them is always a good thing!

-RP