Entries from Eric Sloof

Maintaining an agile data center infrastructure tends to be a source of headaches for IT leaders and administrators. It doesn't have to be.

Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) evolves the way that compute, storage, and management are delivered and provisioned to help you cut operational and capital costs, increase information technology (IT) and business agility, and improve application performance.

Get this free guide to learn how to: 

• Modernize your data center 
• Understand why you need Hyperconverged Infrastructure 
• Deploy a multi cloud platform

Metric is essentially an accounting of systems in operation. To understand the counter properly, hence requires a knowledge of how the system works. Without internalizing the mechanics, you will have to rely on memorizing. In Iwan 'e1' Rahabok's case, memorizing is only good for exams. So grab a cup of your favorite drink, and take some time to truly understand the reasons behind the metrics. You will appreciate the threshold better when you know how it was calculated. 

vSphere ships with many metrics and properties. If we take object by object, and document metrics by metrics, it would be both dry and theoretical. You will be disappointed, as it does not explain how your real world problems are solved.

This book begins with you. It focuses on the problems you are trying to solve when running your operations. It looks at all the use cases and breaks down the metrics from there, which helps you appreciate why the metrics are layered in such a manner.

At 300+ pages, it’s not a light reading. To keep the book size manageable, Iwan has excluded some metrics. To see the full list, see VMware Operations Transformation, 4th Edition. This 900-page book is also open-source and free. 

https://www.vmwareopsguide.com/

This book, Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

This book consists of the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
• Chapter 2, “ESXi and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESXi™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.
• Chapter 3, “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.
• Chapter 4, “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding infrastructure management best practices.

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VMware vSAN 8 can lower HCI TCO by up to 40% through a variety of new capabilities, and this is achieved in no small part by increasing usable storage capacity by up to 70%.These improvements are delivered through a new single tier architecture, RAID-6 Efficiency with RAID-1 performance, improved compression, and compute and performance optimization.

In this paper, VMware seeks to show how vSAN 8 with Express Storage Architecture can deliver lower storage TCO in several common deployment types, focusing primarily on capital cost differences between the previous generation of HCI – the original storage architecture, or OSA – and current generation. However, vSAN 8 can also deliver significant cost savings as compared to traditional external storage for both CAPEX and OPEX; we provide a high-level summary in this paper, but it is not the focus.