Category Archives: IT Operations & Infrastructure
vCenter Single Sign-On sits on the critical path for administrators, automation, and integrations that need to authenticate to vCenter Server. When login becomes slow or unreliable, the problem may be inside vCenter, but it may also be in Active Directory or LDAP, DNS, certificates, time synchronization, external identity providers, group expansion, or network paths between […]
vSphere virtual machine encryption protects VM data through policies and keys managed by vCenter and a configured key provider. The cryptography is important, but the operational control plane is the key-management relationship. If the required key provider is unavailable or incompatible with a host, encrypted workloads can become difficult or impossible to power on, migrate, […]
A vSphere Distributed Switch solves a coordination problem that becomes painful as a virtual environment grows: the same network intent has to exist on many ESXi hosts, yet a per-host switch model makes every host another place for VLANs, teaming policies, MTU settings, and port-group names to drift. A distributed switch moves that configuration into […]
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler can balance workloads across cluster hosts, but many environments need placement rules that are stronger than pure resource optimization. Licensing boundaries, fault-domain separation, application dependencies, hardware characteristics, and compliance requirements can all require some virtual machines to run together, apart, on a defined host group, or away from a host group. […]
vSphere High Availability can restart virtual machines after an ESXi host failure only if the surviving cluster has enough usable capacity. Admission control exists to protect that capacity before the failure occurs. It can block new power-ons or other operations when accepting them would reduce the cluster below the configured failover target. For 2V0-17-25 candidates […]
Architecture principles are useful only when they influence decisions. A statement such as “reuse before buy before build” or “data is a shared asset” can sound authoritative in an architecture repository, yet contribute nothing if project teams cannot tell how the principle changes design choices, exceptions, funding, or governance. TOGAF treats principles as general rules […]
Change enablement is easy to misunderstand as an approval ceremony. Teams submit a ticket, a change advisory board reviews it, a meeting happens, and somebody decides whether production may move. That model can create evidence of control while still doing a poor job of controlling risk. The more useful question is whether the organization can […]
Guiding principles are useful because operations rarely present a perfect textbook situation. An incident arrives while a release is in progress. A security control increases support effort. A team wants to automate a workflow that is still poorly understood. A customer asks for a workaround that conflicts with a standard. In these moments, a long […]
Incident management and problem management are closely related because both respond to service failure, but they optimize for different outcomes. Incident management is concerned with restoring normal service or reducing the impact of an interruption. Problem management investigates the underlying causes and conditions that create incidents, then helps reduce the likelihood or impact of recurrence. […]
ITIL practices are often taught as named capabilities: incident management, problem management, change enablement, service configuration management, monitoring and event management, service desk, service level management, supplier management, continual improvement, and many others. Real services do not experience those practices one at a time. A customer-visible failure can create an event, incident, major-incident response, problem […]
A value stream is not a diagram of departments and it is not a renamed process map. It represents the sequence of activities through which an organization responds to a particular demand or opportunity and creates value for stakeholders. That perspective changes service-management design because the unit of analysis becomes end-to-end flow rather than the […]
The ITIL Service Value System is a model for how an organization’s components and activities work together to facilitate value creation. It brings together guiding principles, governance, the service value chain, management practices, and continual improvement. The model is intentionally broader than a process library because services are produced by an interacting system rather than […]
The Architecture Development Method is often drawn as a circular sequence of phases, which can tempt teams to interpret TOGAF as a large waterfall. The method is more flexible than that picture suggests. The ADM is iterative across the whole cycle, between phases, and within phases. Scope, level of detail, time horizon, and use of […]
An enterprise can own the TOGAF Standard, train architects, buy a repository tool, and still have a weak architecture function. Architecture capability is the organizational ability to develop, govern, communicate, and sustain enterprise architecture in a way that influences real decisions. It depends on people, roles, governance, skills, methods, information, tooling, stakeholder relationships, and integration […]
MetroCluster is not simply a replication feature. It is a site-resilience architecture that combines ONTAP clustering with synchronous data mirroring so workloads can continue when a storage site or major site dependency is lost. That makes its design much closer to a disaster-recovery operating model than to a normal backup schedule. A useful starting point […]
