Need VMware Admin Daily activities

[vivari]

Hai,

Can anybody please send me VMware admin daily activities.

[Mauro Bonder]

Hello,

Dont have any procedure or documentation about administration daily.

Check http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_admin_guide.pdf

http://vsphere-land.com/news/10-vm-administration-tips-and-virtualization-best-practices.html

may this help.

[EdWilts]

This will vary significantly.  It varies from company to company and from admin to admin.  If you're a small shop with a 1 or 2 servers and a handful of guests, you're probably doing a lot of things besides being just an ESX admin - you're probably a guest admin, a backup and recovery admin, and possibly a network admin.  You may be still at ESX 3.5 or 4.0 and have not even heard about the ESXi 5.0 announcement.  If you're in a very large shop with dozens of ESX hosts, you may not have much of a role in administering the guests behind sugesting standards, likely no role at all in the network, and perhaps no role in backup & recovery unless you're using VMware-specific tools.  You may spending your time working on issues or you may be planning for the future, already deeply involved in the 5.0 beta stream and planning the rollouts to your many environments.

There is no single answer as to what a VMware admin does.

My job is help my company make a larger profit in any way I can.  VMware is just one of the many tools we use.  Some days I'm involved in trivial problems. Some days I help the OS, storage, or network teams.  Some days I get buried in negotiating contracts.  Some days I spend hours and hours digging into performance metrics.  Some days I'm evaluating tools.  Some days I read documentation on how to implement new features or learn about new stuff.  No day is the same.  I work in a $1B company with 5,000 employees.  My day is not going to be the same as "one of the IT guys" working in a 100-person company.  I not only have a VCP but I also have 4 storage certifications and am an RHCE so I can help my company in many ways.

[akanaka]

I agree with Ed that this is a general question and most responses will typically include one of VMware's favorite answers to most questions..."it depends" :smileyhappy:.  That being said, here are a few of the tasks to get you started that I believe are important to the daily health of the environment.  Our environment is over 90% virtualized, but I do wear multiple hats, so what I am, "able" to do versus what I think, "should" be done is always an endless struggle.

Prerequisites:

Overall, you want to have a thorough knowledge of the virtual inventory you are supporting.  You will want to know the answers to the following questions.  How many servers, physical and virtual?  What models?  Hardware specs?  Software versions?  Have you (or your company) decided on a specific ROI for virtualization (number of VMs/Host, etc)?  A lot of this information can be gathered through scripts that can be run on a scheduled basis to give you that 10,000 foot view of your architecture.  These reports will also probably identify some items that need to be addressed, which will add further to your tasks.  After that you will be better prepared to dig into the minutae.

• Check the health of all Hosts and VM objects in vCenter.  Are there any active alarms in vCenter?  Have you set up any alarms in the first place?  Do the alarms automatically trigger notification or any type of incident tracking mechanism?
• Are all vCenter plug-ins functioning properly?
• Do you have any Host Hardware issues?  Alarms, bad memory, power supply or capacity issues?
• Are all Hosts in compliance with Host Profiles?
• Are there any resource bottlenecks?  Memory, CPU, Disk, Network?  Do you have any, or need any, additional tools to have a better handle on this?
• Are you running at your optimum resource levels?  In other words, is the load properly distributed? 
• Are you running out of resources anywhere?  LUNs with low disk space, etc.  Do you need to start looking at budgeting for additional capacity?
• Check for Firmware updates on Host hardware
• Check for ESX Patches
• Check for VM Patches
• Check VMware Tools version
• Run scripts to identify the existence of VMs with snapshots and follow up to see if they are still needed.
• Have you schmoozed with your Storage Admins lately?  A good idea since you cannot get very far without them.

Once again, these are all just a list to get you started and is by no means an exhaustive job description.  Plus any one of the above tasks could result in an issue that gets you side-tracked for days/weeks.

[vivari]

hai ,

Thanks for u r great concern

[stinklyonion]

thanks akanaka for siting and sorting Admin works and daily tasks. this would be for us to be aware that not all concerns can be addressed right away and you should give some time for Admin to give you an answer since daily tasks will always vary on what will happen everyday.