Engineering capabilities
- Cluster and storage design
- HA and vMotion planning
- Capacity governance
- P2V migration
Cloud & Virtualization
VMware
vSphere / ESXi environments designed for consolidation, availability and controlled resource allocation.
Security & hardening
- Isolated management network
- Host hardening baselines
- Role-based administrative access
VMware vSphere reference architecture
Availability comes from the design of hosts, storage and networking together u2014 not from the hypervisor alone.
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01
Management
- vCenter Server
- Isolated management VLAN
- Role-based access
Management plane separated from workload traffic; administrative roles least-privilege and reviewed.
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02
Compute cluster
- ESXi host 1
- ESXi host 2
- N+1 capacity headroom
Cluster sized so a single host failure does not exhaust resources; HA and DRS policies documented.
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03
Storage
- Shared SAN / NAS datastore
- Multipathing
- vSAN option
Redundant paths to storage; performance tiers matched to workload profiles.
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04
Networking
- Distributed switch
- VLAN-backed port groups
- Redundant uplinks
Separate networks for management, vMotion, storage and workloads.
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05
Protection
- Application-aware backup
- Replication target
- Restore testing
Snapshots are not backups: independent backup copies with tested restores and offsite retention.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need shared storage for high availability?
For classic HA and vMotion, yes u2014 shared storage or vSAN. Without it, hosts cannot recover another host's VMs automatically, and availability has to come from application-level clustering instead.
How do you size a cluster?
From measured CPU ready time, memory active use, IOPS and growth, plus N+1 headroom for maintenance and failure. Sizing from vendor spec sheets alone usually over- or under-buys.
Are VM snapshots a backup?
No. Snapshots depend on the same storage and degrade performance if left in place. Backups are independent, verified copies with retention and an offsite or immutable target.
Can you migrate physical servers into vSphere?
Yes. We inventory dependencies, convert or rebuild in waves, validate application behaviour on each wave, and keep the physical source recoverable until sign-off.
Scope the work before you commit budget
Send the environment details and get an engineered proposal with assumptions, risks and a rollback path.