Free Resources
Best resources, Lab tests, Optimizations, Deep Dives and How-to’s in PDF format – I’ll keep on this page easily accessible from the front page of my blog, since a blog post don’t stay long time on the front page and gets buried with newer blog posts. So instead to search them all around the blog, I thought it’s better to put them as a page where you’ll find all the links to each Resource paper. This page will be update each time I’ll put a new Free resource online.
Top 7 VMware management challenges – Virtual Infrastructure brings new challenges that does not exists in physical world. If you ignore them, you might soon be facing a serious nightmare and disorder. Your neat and clean Virtual environment after 6 month of use might look like a mess.
Some might think that VMs are free. They are not. The actually cost money, because you need to have a host with real CPU, real Memory, you need shared storage to implement HA (High Availability) etc….. You know, there are ways on how to prevent VM sprawl….
The Free E-book is Written by Eric Siebert.
A quick quote from the E-book
“Veeam ONE provides tools that can help you identify and stop VM sprawl so your virtual environment doesn’t become a virtual junkyard. This can be done via reports and dashboards that track resource usage and idle virtual machines, as well as mechanisms for categorizing virtual machines and documenting the virtual infrastructure.”
Analytics Required to Successful Manage Performance and Capacity in Cloud Environments - Managing Virtual Infrastructure instead of just physical servers one by one is challenging. One must make some decisions on where to best place the workloads or how much physical server and storage capacity to provision for new VMs…
What’s the best sizing for new VMs so they’re not oversubscribed with memory, disk or CPU…? Identify the “sleeping VMs” which do nothing, orphaned VMDKs, Snapshots, logfiles…
New e-book from vKernel – Written by Greg Shields. In the e-book you’ll be able to find out that for example the Monster VMs which has been introduced in vSphere 5 and which permits to create and use VM with 32 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of virtual RAM. But what’s the impact on HA and the overall memory management for the cluster/host the VM is running in?
Greg shows some examples of configurations for memory and what would this kind of VM need to fail-over safely to another host etc… Are they any alternatives to monster VMs? Sure they are. Read more ->
This new E-Book written by Bryan Semple from vKernel is showing some base elements which needs to be taken into consideration when establishing pricing for Private Clouds. Since the VMs are not Free, the right pricing has to be established. How to find out which price is right for your business.
Public or private clouds needs take into considerations 3 main elements:
- Product or service cost
- Value
- Competition
Those 3 key elements represents a common and balanced approach. Read More – >.
V-Index.com – A free Whitepaper to Download - What’s the percentage of VMware Hypervisor used by clients? How Many of them uses Citrix or Hyper-V?What’s the Virtualization
What’s the average perceived virtual server to physical server consolidation ratio. You’ll learn that it’s not 25VMs per server…. -:)
Updated Quarterly, you’ll find out in the latest V-Index …
Essential Check List for VMware Disaster Recovery – You probably have a large portion of your environment virtualized with VMware, but it’s likely that you have some business critical systems that remain on physical systems because of their importance. Unfortunately, placing your business critical systems on physical servers because they’re important is a mistake.
If they were that critical to your business, don’t you think that providing the ultimate DR solution for them would be your organization’s starting point? These critical systems should be virtualized to experience the full benefits of virtualized DR, but not every application owner and DBA fully understands our virtualized DR zealotry. You’ll need to communicate the benefits inherent to today’s virtualized DR to these application owners to win them over. Download for Free
Continuing to Reap the Rewards of Virtualization -
Balance and Efficiency. This illustrated e-book tells you more about interesting scenarios for sizing servers. With a clear examples. Also by using the monitoring solution bundled with Veeam One can show you exactly what’s going on in a real time or in what-if scenario.
If your RAM utilization is 4%, you have plenty of room to grow, but if you have no intention of growing that is a lot of expensive RAM going to waste. Bear in mind that more is not always better and the optimal strategy is to instead right-size your virtual environment. Download for Free
Automating Cloud Infrastructure Operation Management For Financial Return - This eBook explores the key challenges facing service providers as they scale out “Cloud Infrastructure as a Service” and how these can be addressed by leveraging next-generation infrastructure operations management solutions that provide the intelligence, automation and orchestration capabilities to automate service delivery processes and deliver greater financial returns.
The business model of Service Providers is founded on the basis of being able to remove cost from IT service delivery processes whilst providing the same or better quality of service, thus enabling their customers to focus on their core business activities. Read More – >
VM Memory Sizing Considerations.
What are applications which are “memory hogs”? In fact those applications are designed to reserve (cache) all available memory when they start. In a virtual environment it’s not a behavior which one would prefer though… How to find the way out?
You’ll need to take into account the Reservations and Limits as well.
In fact, by knowing exactly how much your application need memory you can properly size the VM and configuring resource controls if necessary. Read More – >
Five Capacity Management Challenges for Private clouds.
VKernel’s research has shown that properly monitoring capacity in real time involves collecting over 20 metrics per VM at least 10 times per hour, and keeping this information for at least 30 days.
A 100 VM environment would require about 17 million data points to accurately monitor capacity in the environment.
Read More – >
Top 5 VM Performance Problems.
In the Whitepaper you’ll first read the explanations where are the usual location of performance issues, and see that the resolution is not always evident in Virtual Infrastructure in general. There are some caveats to know to find the problem first and then resolve.
VMware Recovery Revolution.
Restart a failed VM directly from a backup file in under 60 seconds: Veeam Backup & Replication v5 introduces new vPower technology that allows a VM to be booted directly from a backup file without first
restoring the VM to its original form to meet tight RTO requirements.
Read more – >
See which criteria to use when selecting the solution of Real-time monitoring for a virtualized datacenter.
To be able to successfully monitor, but also take corrective and proactive actions to avoid bottlenecks one has to implement a solution which permits all this. But which criteria to take into account? Check this Free E-book from VMturbo and see yourself.
Read which metrics are crucial to avoid VMs which are under optimized.
CPU, Memory, Storage utilization, Disk I/O latency…… all those metrics play an important role in your virtual infrastructure running under VMware vSphere. There are 4 of them which are really crucial to follow. One of them is memory. Memory is typically the most constricted host resource, and the most likely to begin suffering bottlenecks if proactive monitoring is not in place.
7 Expert Tips for Managing Remote vSphere Infrastructure.
Find out how to manage effectively remote vSphere installations. The ROBO – Remote Office Branch Office. The PDF starts from the beginning – the licensing options and optimization possibilities. Then through the management options, patching strategies, backup and DR options depends of the quality of your WAN links. See how Christian Mohn, a Virtual infrastructure admin from Norway manages VMware vSphere Infrastructure for large shipping company in Norway.
