At the pace that technologies progress, it’s no wonder that many companies don’t upgrade their VMware vSphere environment and benefit from newer advances like auto-space reclamation in the newer VMFS-6.
Don’t feel bad if you are one of the companies that are still running vSphere 6.0 or older. While it’s not advised to be running end-of-life (EOL) versions for your production workloads, it’s all too common to find this, and you’re not alone.
Let’s look at a few examples of this being an issue of running EOL versions.
Potential Issues of Not Upgrading
- Developers tend to move files, both large and small. It’s common for some developers to copy full copies of SQL databases instead of a subset of the data for testing purposes. For the developer, it’s no big deal. However, for the vSphere Administrator, you’ll get bombarded by alerts telling you that you’re either close to or out of space on one or more datastores. This situation will not only affect the user that copied over the data but all the other users that are running dev, test, stage, or worse production workloads on the same datastores. Even if the developer deletes the data, whitespace is not automatically reclaimed.
- As mentioned above, if you have alerts set up, you’ll get your email and smartphone blowing up with alarms that one or more datastores have filled-up. Worse, we’ve walked into environments where alerts aren’t set up, and administrators are scrambling to find out why VMs have started crashing all of a sudden.
- “No problem,” you say to this potential issue. “I’ll just set up SDRS and have VMs move to another datastore when it hits a certain threshold.” Did you know that when you do this, change block tracking (CBT) is reset on your VMs, and the next time that it’s backed up, it now has to do a full backup instead of an incremental? If your backup window is narrow, you’ve now shifted your problem from not having enough space to not getting a backup.
- Maybe you don’t have the issues above. You have proper monitoring in place, your backup window is not an issue, and your developers aren’t copying terabytes of data around. Great! You have no problem running space reclamation on your datastores manually when needed. What if you have hundreds of datastores? Doing this task manually is a significant time waster that could have been used to do something else.
For the company owner, senior engineers, and administrators, time is precious. Don’t waste it doing things that could have been done for you by using the latest version of VMware vSphere. Get your money’s worth.
If you are having issues with your storage area network (SAN), datastores, or VMware vSphere environment in general, send an email our way and let us know the trouble you are experiencing. We’ll be happy to help you.