In conversations with VMware professionals about the problems they face, I often hear about configuration problems.

A small sample of problems that get mentioned include:

• VMs with active connections to “internal-only vSwitches
• VMs with CPU affinity set
• Clusters with DRS and/or HA disabled
• Clusters with incompatible hardware
• Old VMtool versions

I often hear comments along the lines of, “There are tons of configuration parameters, and I have to hunt and peck through lots of dialog boxes to see them.  Sometimes it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” 

This made me wonder just how many VI configuration parameters exist.  I asked one of our engineers who is familiar with the SDK to look into it.  He told me that roughly each host has 900+ parameters, each VM has 550+ parameters, and there are 1,900+ other parameters.  This means that a relatively small installation with only two clusters, six hosts, and 60 VMs will have more than 35,000 configuration properties, and large installations can have hundreds of thousands.   

Tripwire’s ConfigCheck and OpsCheck utilities help from a security and VMotionability point of view, but the configuration overload appears to warrant a more comprehensive solution.

ConfigCheck, OpsCheck, Virtualization management, vMotion

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 3:36 am and is filed under Virtual Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.