Blade Watch

I was having lunch with Chris the other day and he was telling me about their new VMware farm which is going live. By live I simply mean that the service is becoming available and ‘production’ to the application teams. I was asking him if he had made any special preparations in order to make their VMware farm production ready (just out of interest) and he said the following:

1. Ensure that there is adequate redundancy/capacity within the farm, should a few ESX servers fail, can we cope, can the virtual machines be failed between ESX hosts, are all the networks in place and the hardware service level agreements established.
2. Make sure the environment is backed up on both levels, first of all we need to backup the individual hosts, the disk images so to speak, secondly we need to backup the data within those virtual machines, with the ability to restore data validated and signed off.
3. Monitoring is key – check that the ESX servers are monitored by the hardware monitoring tools and their own monitoring tool like HP OpenView.
4. Business buy-in and service level agreements, help desk processes and procedures written and agreed so that everyone understood what was included, what they could have, the ‘limitations’ and the processes.  In particular
   1. Virtual machine upgrades – help desk process
   2. Virtual machine monitoring – what happens if your virtual machine is using ‘too much’ cpu/memory in the farm – the process for managing expectations/performance
   3. The billing had to be in place – what’s the cost of a virtual machine in terms of support, and if I want more memory, how much does that cost – Per CPU/per Gigabyte/per MB RAM.
   4. Agreed support concepts and ownership – who owns the ESX servers, where the unix/windows teams sit, and how this translates for support and escalation issues.
   5. Baseline monitoring standards – what is monitored, what reporting is available.

I have removed anything that might illustrate Chris’ identity and I hope I haven’t missed anything from our conversation, if you have any thoughts, email me.

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