Virtualization Housecleaning 101
What's great about virtualization is the fact that we can change just about anything we want with minimal impact to production workloads. It's partly due to functionality from hypervisors and management software, but the human factor plays a big part. Here is a quick housecleaning checklist to review through a vSphere environment (and applies to versions of vSphere and VI3), to catch the small things that may have accumulated over the years:
Datastore contents: How many times have you put a powered-off virtual machine in a special folder, on a special datastore or held onto just a .VMDK in case you ever needed it? There are a number of crafty ways to find these, including using a product like the VKernel Optimization Pack to find unused virtual machines. Also keep your eyes open for the “Non-VI workload” error message from last week's blog post.
Reformat VMFS: I know there is no hard reason to upgrade, but it is annoying to see a smattering of volumes that are created as storage is added and ESXi (or ESX) versions are incremented. Evacuating each volume with Storage vMotion and reformatting will bring every volume up to VMFS 3.46 (assuming version vSphere 4.1 is in use). This would also be a good time to reformat each volume at the 8 MB page size, as there is no real compelling reason to be on 4, 2 or 1 MB sizes.
Check for antiquated DRS configuration items: Rules that are not needed any more, resource reservations that were a temporary fix, or limits that may not need to be in place can put extra strain on the DRS algorithm.
Reconfigure drive arrays: If you have been wishing to reformat a drive array at a different RAID level (such as RAID 6 instead of RAID 5), the previous datastore step may create a good time to correct this.
Reconcile all virtual machines with lifecycle and approval: We've never stood up a test virtual machine as an experiment, have we? Make sure all experimental machines are removed or that they still need to exist.
Permission and role reconciliation: Check that the current roles, active administrators, permissions and group setup are as expected.
Template and .ISO file cleanup: Do we really still need all of the Windows 2000 and XP virtual machine templates? Chances are at least one template can be removed.
Update templates: For Windows updates, VMware Tools, virtual machine version, etc.; these configuration elements can quickly get obsolete.
Change root password: Probably a good idea if you've had staff turnover at some point.
Do you have any additional housekeeping items? Share your periodic tasks here.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 10/12/2010 at 12:48 PM