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jslarouche
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMware Health Check worth it?

Hello all,

We are looking at bringing in Vmware to complete a Health Check on our environment specifically on reliability.. Has anyone gone thru this exercise with them? Worth it? Dislikes? 15,000$ for a week is a lot of money so just wanted to see what the community has to say about this offering by Vmware and any experience feedback would be great.

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

I believe the Health Check is just a dump of your current configurations and comparing with their best practices/recommendations from what I remember in the past. You could also have a take look at this Health Check I wrote that provides some details about your environment: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9420 There are some sample pages that gives you an idea of what you can get.

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William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

I think it's most definitely worth it... then again I'm a VMware employee and I deliver services like this. It's a great opportunity to get someone in with a broad knowledge of VI3 environments. They will check your environment against our best practices and hand over an extensive report. They will engage with you / your engineers to make it an interactive session...

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator

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azn2kew
Champion
Champion

VMware Health Check service is worth every penny if your organization is packed with bunch of VMware hosts. If you have problems with maintaining and standardize your host build procedures and provisioning virtual machines I would start enforce them asap. I would read all VMware best practices guides online and VMworld.com and apply them accordingly as much as possible. You can use 3rd party tools to monitor your ESX environment or Health Script from William Lam does really good job in generating the reports, and your IT team can tackle it and resolve any related issues. If you have 6-12 IT staff and you can break them apart and have them work on certain piece of administration and support and then collaborate with their efforts to maximize and secure your ESX environment.

Here's my 2 cents:

1. Make sure your ESX hosts are consistent in configuration and settings

2. Provide maximum security in mind using CIS, STIG, VMware, Tripwire guides

3. Secure your VC environment and administration access and granted granular permission per group/users

4. Secure with dual layer of firewalls if possible or using virtual firewall like Altor Networks Firewall Appliance great a for ESX/DMZ scenario

5. Have a standard procedure for provisioning virtual machine and approval process with great change management process as well.

6. Use 3rd party managemen tools to enhance the monitoring, management and provisioning such as (chargeback, virtual machine sprawls, and performance monitoring)

If you have the above items in place, I'm sure your ESX environment would be healthy enough to maintain operational and securely without any expense from any consulting company like us.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Stefan Nguyen VMware vExpert 2009 iGeek Systems Inc. VMware vExpert, VCP 3 & 4, VSP, VTSP, CCA, CCEA, CCNA, MCSA, EMCSE, EMCISA
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JonRoderick
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

It's been about a year since we had a health-check delivered by VMware and on balance, I'd say it was worth it.

As a previous poster has said, it was basically a comparison of our setup against VMware best-practice but is was a useful chance for us to talk around some infrastructure questions we had regarding future developments. From this we produced a list of infrastructure changes that helped form our work-list for the coming year - we haven't achieved them all (even a year later) but they helped get management buy-in on a number of areas we would have struggled to convince them on otherwise.

My only gripe is that the delivery of the health-check was a bit lop-sided; the engineer spent much of it gathering data (3 days our of 5 perhaps) - my experience of other health-checks ( the Microsoft Active Directory check, for example) is that there is much more interaction between the engineer and the customer whilst gathering the data - I would like to see more of this next time we run one.

Hope that's useful.

Regards

Jon

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Anonymous
Not applicable

I'm curious to know what you, as an end-customer is most interested in a Health Check. I am with VMware, and we want to evolve this offering, and would like to know what your expectations and requirements are. i don't want to ask too many leading questions, but some things to consider are:

1) Is it peace of mind?

2) Reduce risk?

3) Improving performance?

4) Show your management the results to help expand your environment?

But please be open with your thoughts.

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msemon1
Expert
Expert

I think it is definetly worth the money. VMware does an indepth analysis of your current environment in relation to best practices. What I am interested in is after they leave and using products such as Akorri or Vkernel to proactively monitor our VMware environment. Anyone like to comment on some of these products? Are they helping others to proactivley monitor their environments?

Mike

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Anonymous
Not applicable

You have an intereting point. I think there is a need to do proactive performance monitoring, but to me, that's an issue of resource utilization, load management.

I think most people are interested in a Health Check for pure configuration issues (a common pre-ESXi example was setting enough service console memory).

If people really want to get a health check as a way to gauge proper performance, that would be of interest to me.

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