In the busy world that most IT admins live in, it can be pretty hard to carve out even twenty or thirty minutes to watch a training video. So when we sat down with some of our favorite bloggers to put together a couple comprehensive training videos that were a bit longer, we made sure we could also have a set of short form videos on very targeted topics.
We have a set of seven initial videos that I call our “Two-Minute Tutor” video series. Not being known for subtle naming, you probably already guessed that these videos are all about two minutes long and show you how to evaluate or troubleshoot common virtualization or storage issues.
The first two I’d like to highlight are focused on storage I/O analysis, which really go hand in hand. The first video “Storage I/O Latency Impact Analysis” focuses on management of a VMware datastore with high storage I/O latency and drilling down on that datastore to gather more details. However the focus of this video is how you can map that datastore to hosts, clusters, and VMs that are dependent on it. Once you have the environment map, it is easy to find related resources that are either causing the problem or being affected by the problem. Check out the video here:
Virtual Storage I/O Latency Impact Analysis
The second storage I/O latency video is “Storage I/O Throughput Analysis.” Given that you’ve mapped and understand the effects of a virtual storage I/O latency problem, this video walks you through the steps to identify the drivers of storage I/O for a datastore. After drilling down on the datastore, the video shows overlaying the VMs hitting that datastore so that you can see which VMs are driving storage I/O, spikes in I/O, etc.
Virtual Storage I/O Throughput Analysis
Other Two-Minute Tutor videos include:
Troubleshooting VM Host I/O Latency
VMware Memory Ballooning and Swapping Troubleshooting
Mapping to Find Virtual Resource contention
Identify Zombie or Idle VMs
Identify Capacity Bottlenecks
We would appreciate feedback on the videos and the usefulness of their short format. We’d also like any input on other virtualization or storage topics you think would be useful.