
When it comes to any IT solution, maintaining and reassessing the right setup is nearly as important as choosing the right solution in the first place. Unmaintained IT environments aren’t just a hazard when it comes to functionality but can also become a security risk. Healthchecks can identify and warn you about faults before they become a big problem.
There are some great photos on Google that you can find of comms rooms that were perfectly well designed when they were first implemented, but as demand, capacity and customer requirements grew, another cable was added, and then another, the tidy comms room turned into a cluttered Spaghetti Bolognese of a wiring cabinet.
And when you then need to go and troubleshoot a fault, your chances of success are close to zero, even if you were the engineer who installed all the cables and has an idea of how the labelling methodology works.
The thing with this situation is that when you look at your comms cluttered room, you can see at first glance that there is a problem afoot. In the world of virtualisation, things aren’t quite so clear, but the problem is almost identical.
It was fine when I last looked…The problem is that it just wasn’t built for that!
In the analysis phase, the instructional problem is defined, instructional goals and objectives are established, and the learning environment and the learner’s prior knowledge and skills are identified.
In recent months, we have seen a huge increase in customers looking for the Flint consulting team to undertake a health check of their VMware environments due to functional and performance issues starting to become evident.
This isn’t due to any fault in the original design or the overall VMware solution. The challenge in 9 out of 10 cases is that the solution was designed to do a different job to the one it is now being asked to deliver. It’s like a sports car suddenly being asked to deliver larger parcels for Amazon.
We typically see that following the initial installation, the environment grows, hosts are added, software versions are updated, the environment is used daily and is superficially maintained, and configurations are done. The environment grows far beyond what it was configured for. Very rarely, we see clients take a step back and ask themselves whether the initial solution and environment – even if it’s running correctly – still fits its purpose.
In some cases, we also see the occasional bad configuration or design decision creep in over time. When this is combined with new features that are included in the routine version upgrades that were not really part of the initial service, problems start to occur
Our VMware Health Checks Highlight & Fix Faults Before They Become a Problem
In our VMware Health Checks, we identified various reasons why VMware environments that have grown organically, maintained or not, are running optimally or not. The main ones are:
- No or limited number of updates since the initial implementation,
- older versions of VMware tools,
- the distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) no longer functioning,
- or the environment has grown far beyond what it was initially meant for,
- overprovisioning of VM resources wasting CPU and Memory resources.
Through our VMware Health Checks, we gain an understanding of our client’s current environment and the state thereof, and map this against their business requirements. This analysis gives us the insights we need to effectively propose an update to the environment or fix any concerns or problems found via the health check. We also offer our clients the option for Flint to implement these changes for them, offering them a worry-free all-around service.
Additionally, our engineers can propose new features not being used within the VMware environment and position automation to help optimise and future-proof the solution and its health. If needed, we can implement this through a managed service, so our clients can focus on their core business and offload the automation, optimisation, and operation of their virtual environments to Flint.
Any more questions about our VMware Health Checks and other VMware-specific services? Please download our VMware Virtualisation datasheet or message our experts today!