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Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

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vSphere Hosts: Scale Up vs. Scale Out

March 10, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Another confusing debate is around the approach you take when choosing your vSphere Hosts hardware configuration.  Two approaches there: Scale Up (Vertical Scaling) and Scale Out (Horizontal Scaling). Scale Up is to get small number of large powerful servers and that why it’s called Vertical Scaling; because you scale the configuration up to the max. with small number of servers. Scale out is to get a lot of small less powerful servers to achieve same required configuration and it’s called Horizontal Scaling; because you scale the number of servers horizontally, each with low hardware configuration. The common misconception of these two approaches is that people thinks that Scale-out approach indicates using Blades and Scale-up approach indicates using Rack-mounted servers. A fully populated, powerful blade chassis […]

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vSphere Hosts: Blades vs. Rack-mounted Servers

March 9, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 2

One of the political-like eternal debates is the debate around vSphere Hosts Form Factor, which to choose: Blade Servers or Rack-mounted Servers. Both technologies are mature and support high computing power and Hardware Vendors offer both of them now equally. In addition, VMware vSphere supports using both of them and puts no limitation on the form factor of the hosts. They’re dominating now over Tower form factor which began to disappear because of its large foot print and high power usage. Confusing to choose between them, right? Long story short, both options have their own Pros and Cons that should be aligned with your (customer) case and your (customer’s) requirements and constraints. In the following table, a summary of the main differences […]

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Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange 2010/2013 on vSphere 5 Best Practices

February 12, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 1

We’ll talk today about virtualizing Microsoft Exchange on vSphere 5.x platform. Microsoft Exchange is considered the most common messaging system in any business all over the world. From SMB to huge Enterprises and Corporations, they all may use Microsoft Exchange as their messaging and communication system. For most of them, Exchange is considered Tier 0/1 that should be served with highest level of performance and availability. vSphere 5.x is capable of providing such level of performance and availability while reducing Microsoft Exchange footprint with 5x to 10x by consolidating many Exchange roles and nodes on the same physical hardware while providing 100% or more of the required performance. Best practices mentioned here are collected from different sources that are mentioned in […]

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Virtualizing Java Enterprise Applications on vSphere 5 Best Practices

February 6, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Enterprise Software are known to be business-critical and business-oriented software that each company develops its own one to serve their business needs. Today, we gonna talk about Java Enterprise Applications. Java Enterprise Apps are multi-tier Enterprise Software that consists of -generally- from 3 tiers: Web Interface, Application Processing Tier and a Back-end DB. Each tier isn’t a single instance -either physical or virtual-, but each tier consists of a cluster of instances to serve the purpose of the tier. This makes Java Enterprise Applications excellent Virtualization candidates. vSphere 5.x with its enormous features, can deliver the required performance, scalability and availability level for Java Enterprise Applications clusters. With HA, DRS, vMotion and other many features, vSphere Platform can extremely decrease the physical hardware […]

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Virtualizing SAP HANA on vSphere 5 Best Practices

February 5, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Today, we will explore an application that requires high levels of hardware specs to host and highest level of performance, It’s SAP HANA. SAP HANA is one of the most powerful Data Processing software in the world. It’s an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. SAP HANA was supported on vSphere 5.1 for non-production environment and became supported for production in Q2 2014 on vSphere 5.5. Best practices here are gathered from few sources found that are mentioned in References section below. I’ll follow the same schema of my previous posts and relate these best practices to our five Design Qualifiers (AMPRS – Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security) in addition to Scalability. Availability: 1-) Leverage […]

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Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere 5 Best Practices

February 3, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In our next post, we will talk about Oracle Databases as our next candidate of Virtualization. Oracle DBs are known to be heavy duty, Tier 0 or Tier 1 servers that losing it can lead to business disruption significantly. Oracle is a Strategic Partner of VMware. This provides a great support and compatibility of Oracle DBs above or below vSphere Platform. As we’ll see in following sections, Oracle DB is supported as a virtual application above vSphere Platform or as a store for vSphere data used by vCenter Server for example. As Microsoft SQL Servers, Oracle Applications and Database has its own features that are aligned with vSphere features to push Oracle Databases performance, availability and scalability to another level. […]

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Virtualizing Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 on vSphere 5 Best Practices

January 28, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 2

Today, we will talk about Microsoft SQL Server Virtualization. SQL Databases have been in our data centers since 1990s carrying TBs of data that are stored and retrieved by many and many of applications. Nowadays, no business application can run without a SQL back-end DB. This leads to a “Spree” of databases in our data centers, pushing Microsoft SQL Server to be one of our most critical applications that spans both production and non-production regions. The latest editions now are Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and 2014. We’ll talk about how to virtualize Microsoft SQL Server using vSphere 5.x platform and how to leverage new SQL Server features, like: Always-on Availability Groups (AAG) and Data Mirorring, to provide the required level […]