Why You Need to Schedule a vSphere Health Check Today

Static, stationary, inactive – it’s doubtful any of these terms describe your organization’s vSphere deployment. In actuality, hosts and virtual machines are always on the move, with some changes occurring as often as daily. The ripple effects of these movements can be felt across IT environments and organizations as a whole and can make it tough to keep vSphere running at an optimal level.

Businesses looking to maximize their vSphere investment would be well-served to schedule a vSphere Health Check with the Arraya Solutions’ Virtualization team today. These assessments analyze existing vSphere deployments and compare the findings against VMware’s own best practices. This information can give companies clear, actionable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their environment and what steps to take next.

What does a vSphere Health Check look like?

A vSphere Health Check is, at most, a three-day engagement. Only one of those days requires a member of Arraya’s Virtualization team on site, while the other two days are conducted remotely.

The first day is onsite and it’s geared towards information-gathering. The Arraya staffer will talk with the customer to learn more about their goals with their vSphere deployment, as well as any concerns they have or issues they’ve noticed. These conversations will help steer the rest of the Health Check.  While onsite, the Arraya staffer can perform an inspection of the customer’s physical data center. Following that, he or she will run a utility to analyze the customer’s virtual environment. The data uncovered by this tool will be translated into a full report.

Day 2 takes place off-site. The Arraya team member conducting the vSphere Health Check will review the report generated by the utility and use the knowledge of the customer’s environment gathered during Day 1 to validate and organize it. Results pertaining to any issues the customer identified as top priorities can be highlighted in the report. If any possible false alarms are sounded, the Arraya employee can investigate and – if appropriate – indicate them as such in the final version.

Day 3 is once again offsite and it involves a conference call between Arraya and the customer. Our team will walk the customer through the final version of the report. If any issues are uncovered that require follow-up conversations, those can be planned for as well.

How to prepare for a Health Check

Preparing for a vSphere Health Check is easy enough. The only real technical requirement – outside of having vSphere – is ensuring Arraya’s staffer has access to the vSphere environment.

Before the Health Check, a customer’s IT team and stakeholders should spend a little time discussing their environment and what they want to get out of the Health Check. This isn’t mandatory and it’s possible to perform a broad scale Health Check. However, the benefits of Health Checks tend to be amplified when the Check includes at least some amount of customer direction.

What happens next?

Once the Health Check ends, the customer will get to keep the final version of the report. This allows their team to go back through it on their own, discuss it even more in depth, and save it for their records.

Within the report, suggested action items are graded on the following scale:

• P1: Red – Item requires immediate attention
• P2: Orange – Item is of potential concern and may need additional investigation
• P3: Yellow – Item doesn’t adhere to accepted VMware best practices, yet doesn’t present a high risk
• OK: Green – Item meets VMware best practices
• N/A: Gray – This item doesn’t apply to the customer’s environment

Of course, the Arraya Virtualization team will be ready to assist in any way necessary following the Health Check. Our team can make recommendations on performing the upgrades or fixes called out by the Health Check. We can also work directly with the customer to execute the upgrades and new deployments.

Schedule your vSphere Health Check today

Considering the fluctuations common to most vSphere deployments, regular Health Checks are a must to keep them running at the highest level. Interested in seeing what you might learn about your business’ virtual environment? Visit us at http://www.arrayasolutions.com/contact-us/ to schedule your Health Check or to connect with a member of our Virtualization team about another topic.

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