Real Thin Provisioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin
November 4th, 2009 | 
Author: 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”.
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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Posted in storage, vSphere, virtualization, vmetc.com | 
Tags: storage, thin provisioning, virtualization, vmware, vSphere
bezell,
To clarify: 6 ESX hosts and 100 VMs total? Thanks.
So far 50 total. We SAN-SAN replicate many hosts and use SRM for many.
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.
1 admin
88 Hosts
580 VMs
Sometimes the best laughs come from reality! Thanks for the numbers.
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.
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.
Thanks for all the comments so far. I need to sit down with the calculator and come up with the average ratio again!
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 …..
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Rich Brambley
http://vmetc.com
http://www.gestaltit.com
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.