|
|
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. My company doesn't need a VMware Health Check/Assessment; we believe everything is just fine.
A. VMware Health Check is designed to uncover hidden potential and identify risk in your virtualization platform to ensure you’re enjoying the best ROI possible and subscribing to evolving best-practices. Through thoughtful analysis and recommendations, a Health Check can assist you in turning your virtualization platform from “just fine” to “absolutely stellar”.
Q. My company has a full-time administrator; why would we need a VMware Health Check?
A. VMware Health Check compliments your IT talent by leveraging a multi-disciplinary approach and unbiased perspective. In other words, our certified virtualization experts leverage independent experience in server, storage, network, operating systems, applications and much more, which is needed to properly analyze your enterprise virtual environment, holistically. Therefore, we work with all of your administrators that touch virtualization…not just one.
Our service provides you access to VMware-created tools that provide a much more comprehensive analysis that many administrators wouldn’t normally have access to.
Q. We currently work with another Business Partner, why should we work with Champion?
A. Many of our customers work with other business partners as it applies to certain technologies. As a VMware VIP Premiere/VAC Partner, we are leaders in the virtualization space with proven design and implementation experience. It’s like having VMware there, but better!
The rapid adoption of virtualization has produced a varying degree of design and implementation methodologies by other business partners. Our experience has shown that most virtualization solutions are based on “do I have connectivity to my LUN and can I ping an address” [does it work?] vs. “am I getting the best possible performance and ROI from my virtualization platform”. [does it sing?] We focus on the latter. Don’t you want to know where you stand?
As a VMware Authorized Consultancy, our goal is to ensure you’re getting the most out of your virtualization platform regardless of your current business partner or hardware vendor.
Q. We do not have the budget to run a VMware Health Check.
A. We offer 3 types of VMware Health Checks leveraging varying degrees of analysis: Remote, Foundation (on-site) and Enterprise (on-site). For budget conscious organizations, we offer a remote analysis that will quickly tell you if you’re subscribing to best-practices on your virtualization systems and help you unlock hidden potential in your platform. Many organizations leverage our service as a means to strengthen and support upper management cost justification for a more comprehensive analysis service or additional virtualization capital expenditures.
Q. We are skeptical that we will get any real benefit from an assessment, what is the real value?
A. There are several benefits that can be derived from a VMware Health Check. We show you where you can optimize performance, maximize resources through efficiencies, roadmap for future improvements and mitigate risk by leveraging experienced consultants and proven best-practices. Additionally, our comprehensive report can provide a design baseline and offer recommendations that dramatically assist you in justifying additional virtualization capital investments to upper management, where appropriate.
Q. What are the most common problems the VMware Health Check uncovers?
A. VMware Health Check can uncover a myriad of design and operational inefficiencies that plague your virtualization platform. The most common issues we identify are related to platform inconsistencies, network & storage bottlenecks and areas of unseen risk.
Q. Will this assessment help me manage my administrators better?
A. A VMware Health Check is designed to empower your administrators with applicable insights into your virtualization platform. The items identified and recommendations provided in the VMware Health Check report may offer your staff a renewed focus on resolving meaningful issues based on the priorities offered.
Q. What makes Champion different from the other VMware business partners?
A. As a VMware VIP Premier/VAC Partner, we are leaders in the virtualization space with proven design and implementation experience with hundreds of VMware solutions, many of which are Fortune 500 companies. We value our customer relationships and have earned the role of “Trusted Advisor” on most of our accounts.
While some VMware partners tend to just focus on VMware, Champion partners with most major IT vendors which offer our customer the best-of-breed technologies to solve their most challenging IT initiatives—not just virtualization. Our dedicated staff and engineers are well versed in multiple disciplines that span enterprise storage, network, operating systems, applications and much more!
Q. Do we have to take our VMware environment down to complete this assessment?
A. The majority of cases do not require any virtual machine downtime, especially in a VMotion-enabled environment. One of the metrics we manually collect is system BIOS settings, which is the primary reason the system would need to be briefly rebooted—this is an optional metric. Our VMware-approved tools and analysis are passive and require no agents to be installed—they work through existing VMware API’s!
Q. We are concerned that the VMware Health Check is only going to give us information that we already know, is that true?
A. We hope that is the case, however, our customer testimonials have shown that a VMware Health Check was invaluable in identifying additional potential in their virtualization platform, addressing current and preventing future “gotchas” and aligning their infrastructure & budgets to future virtualization initiatives. Virtualization is evolving at a dramatic pace and having the most current perspective will help you avoid common pitfalls.
Q. My company has had a Health Check before and we have found that we don't get a lot out of Health Checks. How is this different?
A. VMware Health Checks are different in that they encompass several technologies wrapped into one report…not just the VMware hypervisor. We work with your server, storage, network administrators and others to approach the analysis from a holistic view and offer recommendations that focus your team on building the best possible virtualization solution that your infrastructure can support.
|
|
|