Tuesday, June 17, 2014

vCenter Operations Manager - Capacity Planning

Most companies have a high reliance on the operations infrastructure that they have created. Outages of phone systems, e-mail, customer facing applications, and ERP systems can cripple a company.

Capacity management includes establishing and maintaining a safe and reliable amount of resources to meet the business demand. Demand management is an important component of providing reliable computing services. It requires a variety of non-IT oriented skills and knowledge, and is therefore an often-neglected area. However, it is becoming significantly more important as virtual machine growth weighs down IT staffing ratios and infrastructure budgets. For large organizations, most capacity management is done with spreadsheets; fortunately vCenter Operations Manager provides information to better account for the needed resources and capacity.

Enhancing data for capacity in vCenter Operations Manager involves finding opportunities for resource optimization and cost savings. On the Planning tab of VMware vCenter Operations Manager, you can monitor the use or resources and the available capacity in your virtual environment, and plan for capacity upgrading or optimization. On the Reports tab, you can create a report to capture the details relates to current or predicted resource needs and export that report to a file.




Friday, June 13, 2014

VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions (BDE) 2.0

What's vSphere Big Data Extensions?

VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions (BDE) is a feature within vSphere to support Big Data and Hadoop workloads. BDE provides an integrated set of management tools to help enterprises deploy, run, and manage Hadoop on the vSphere platform. Through the vSphere vCenter user interface, enterprises are able to manage and scale Hadoop seamlessly. By combining with vCould Automation Center, we can also provide an on-premise Hadoop as a Service solution for Hadoop users.

What's new in BDE 2.0?


Support for the latest Distributions of Apache Hadoop 2.0 Software. In additon to the previously supported Hadoop distributions, Big Data Extensions users may now also deploy and manage Apache Bigtop 0.7.0, Cloudera CDH5, Hortonworks HDP 2.1, MapR 3.1, and Pivotal PHD 2.0.


CentOS 6.4 Operating System for the Hadoop Template Virtual Machine. The Hadoop Template Virtual Machine now uses CentOS 6.4 as its default operating system. This provides an increase in performance, as well as native support for all Hadoop distributions for use with Big Data Extensions.


Friday, June 6, 2014

vSphere Performance Troubleshooting




I wanted to follow my previous two posts with vSphere Performance Troubleshooting. There are three golden questions when doing general performance troubleshooting.
  1. What are the symptoms?
  2. When did it work last?
  3. What has changed since it worked?
Don't let the user speculate on the root cause of the problem. Get a specific description of what they are doing and specifically what symptoms they see. Make sure you have an open mind, consider all the components involved, while focusing on the symptoms.

Performance issues are very subjective, it basically comes down to the fact that the end user is not happy. When diagnosing performance problems in vCenter, vCenter Operations Manager, or esxtop there are thousands of metrics you can look at for issues. But, very few of them are going to actually tell you, "Is the user happy?"

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