Comments on: Real Thin Provisioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:03:05 +0000

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.

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:14:29 +0000

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

By: Hugo Peeters

Hugo Peeters — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:11:15 +0000

Cool shirt!
About 30 hosts and 400 vms with 3 admins. Doing everything from design to building vms. PowerCLI to the rescue!

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:09:43 +0000

Thanks for all the comments so far. I need to sit down with the calculator and come up with the average ratio again!

By: william bishop

william bishop — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:25:39 +0000

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.

By: william bishop

william bishop — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:25:39 +0000

Sprawl is a huge problem and no one seems to be inclined to rein it in at all.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:47:00 +0000

I’m the only VI Admin, which takes care of:3 Hosts100 VMs4 SANsEntire Org’s NetworkingAnd the Web Programming

Plus another half dozen or so physical servers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:41:00 +0000

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.