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Real Thin Provisioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

PostDateIcon November 4th, 2009 | PostAuthorIcon Author: Rich Brambley

I’ve already mentioned (and posted) about the vSphere Blog Contest current topic of thin provisioning, but I’ve been thinking about another “product” that has always functioned thin provisioned – The VI administrator. That’s right, I’m talking about the guys and gals that manage all the hypervisor hosts, the server and desktop virtual machines, the networking, and the storage.

Have you thought about the systems to administrator ratios we work under these days? Sure, server consolidation to virtual infrastructure has enabled doing more with less, but is there a better way to explain thin provisioning and over allocation than by looking at the small teams responsible for the virtualized data center? I say not!!

This is my small VM /ETC tribute to the ones who truly are “thin provisioned and over allocated”.

vmetc thin provisioned

Do me a favor, leave a comment letting everyone know how many administrators are on your team and how many VMs you are responsible for. I expect the numbers to be staggering!

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PostCategoryIcon Posted in storage, vSphere, virtualization, vmetc.com | PostTagIcon Tags: , , , ,
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  • Chris
    It was 3 part time virtualization admin for 600-700 QA/Dev VMs and ~150 production VMs across two locations, 4 clusters, and 23 servers.

    After filling a datacenter 3 years earlier than projected the company is going whole hog on virtualization. There are 4 dedicated Virtualization engineers for high level stuff while the existing windows and unix sysadmins will be doing most of the day to day work on systems, like cloning from templates. Anything the sysadmins did on a physical they'll do on a virtual. The plan is to P2V around 2000 existing servers this year and anything new is likely to be a virtual. We'll be busy, but up front we're spending a lot of time deciding which tools to use to manage the environment. Once that's done we should be less busy.
  • Cool shirt!
    About 30 hosts and 400 vms with 3 admins. Doing everything from design to building vms. PowerCLI to the rescue!
  • Thanks Hugo!

    I need to recalculate the avg vm to aim ratio .....

    Sent from my iPod

    Rich Brambley
    http://vmetc.com
    http://www.gestaltit.com
  • Thanks for all the comments so far. I need to sit down with the calculator and come up with the average ratio again!
  • jsehlmeyer
    I'm the only VI Admin, which takes care of:
    3 Hosts
    100 VMs
    4 SANs
    Entire Org's Networking
    And the Web Programming

    Plus another half dozen or so physical servers.
  • Dracolith
    5 admins total (1 VM/Storage/*ix admin, 2 Windows/physical server admins, 2 Network ops that can do VM/Unix stuff in an emergency)
    Well this is embarassing... , but I lost count of physical hosts at some point. around 17 VM hosts in local DC. 2 more virtualization hosts at geo-distant locations.
    About 8 VM hosts at managed customer sites, which aren't touched or looked at that often (though).

    5 Virtualization platforms in use (5 VMware Server 1.0, 3 VMware Server 2.5, 2 OpenVZ (Centos 4) hosts, 8 ESXi3 On Dell PE2950s, 4 ESXi 4 , 3 ESX3.5 , 2 Citrix XenServer 5.5); not counting VMware Fusion on other admins' desktops, running XP VMs, needed for SecureCRT and running the VI/VMware server/Xen clients.

    No centralized view of the overall environment, but there are approximately 150 VMs.
  • mhurley
    1 admin
    88 Hosts
    580 VMs
  • mhurley,

    Thanks!
  • Rich, that is fantastic and almost unfunny because it is so true! I can't give exact numbers, but we run approx. 100-200 hosts per admin and around 400-600 VMs per admin.
  • Sometimes the best laughs come from reality! Thanks for the numbers.
  • bezell
    2 Clusters of 3 ESX hosts, 50 VMs
  • bezell,

    To clarify: 6 ESX hosts and 100 VMs total? Thanks.
  • bezell
    So far 50 total. We SAN-SAN replicate many hosts and use SRM for many.
  • That shirt is full of awesome. I can't comment specifically on numbers, but the word "Lots" doesn't quite fit anymore.
  • Cody,
    I am sure your VI is massive. If I only knew! Thanks!
  • 1 VI Admin (guess who?) 11 Hosts 4 clusters 300 VM's
    And of course AD infrastructure which takes up a small part of my day :)
  • Maish,
    Thanks!
  • mgrennan
    At my current job we are 2 and have 40 VM systems. At hertz.com (I was layed off) they are 5 and have 200 Physical and 200 VM systems.
  • Thanks
  • mgrennan
    At my current job we are 2 and 40 systems. At Hertz.com (I was layed off) they are 5 for 400.
  • william bishop
    I should clarify, only 2 of us actually administer the environment to any degree, 5 members in the team build servers on the clusters (server admin team).
  • William,

    5 members for all of those servers .. whether administering or not. I'm curious about your thoughts on VM Sprawl - like Abe too.
  • william bishop
    rbrambley, VMsprawl is a huge problem with us...people come to us more frequently, because we no longer have a 2 week lead time (or longer), but rather minutes. The 2 of us that do the VI work spend probably 20% of our week on vmware admin duties alone...the rest of it is our other work (I am the storage admin, vmware admin, server admin, and the team lead (project planning and paperwork mostly). It's not as time consuming as I feared, but we've been overloaded from the beginning. It's far better than physical servers in any case, I replaced my virtual center yesterday, and it was an all day affair, because it was hardware. If it had been virtual it would have been at most a couple hours.

    Sprawl is a huge problem and no one seems to be inclined to rein it in at all.
  • william bishop
    5 of us. over 3000 guests, 113 hosts. 20 clusters
  • Abe12345
    Heh.

    Here to screw up your stats - and I kid you not.

    1 Admin - me. 3 clusters. 19 Servers. 843 guests. And a partridge in a pear tree.
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