VMware Partner · Egypt
Virtualisation that someone is still accountable for after go-live.
Hypervisor clusters designed, hardened and operated, from HPC and GPU workloads to industrial estates with a disaster-recovery position that actually exists.
Where we have deployed it
VMware is the default hypervisor across most of our virtualisation programmes.
| Programme | What the platform had to do |
|---|
Enterprise Virtualisation & Offsite DR
Industrial group · Egypt | A centrally managed hypervisor cluster with real capacity headroom, and a network design updated to carry replication without starving production traffic. |
Geoscience HPC Cluster
Oil & gas · Tier-III DC · Egypt | Hypervisor operations, monitoring and 24/7 support on a seismic and geoscience processing cluster. |
HPC & GPU Clusters
Research & energy · Saudi Arabia | Hypervisor stack hardened to SACS-002 cyber security requirements, delivered on site by Stark engineers. |
Secure Compute Cluster
Licensed e-payment provider | Cluster nodes and virtualisation platform under payment-grade operational discipline. |
These are real Stark programmes. Client identifiers are withheld under confidentiality.
What we actually configure on a vSphere cluster
Most virtualisation problems are not hypervisor faults. They are design decisions taken quietly at build time, no capacity headroom, one datastore for everything, management traffic sharing a NIC with vMotion. That only become visible on the day a host dies. This is what we set, and why.
Cluster design and availability
Real N+1 headroomThe cluster sized so it can lose a host and still run everything, with vSphere HA admission control enforcing that rather than trusting anyone to remember. A cluster running at 90% of capacity has high availability on paper only.
HA behaviour, decided deliberatelyHost isolation response, datastore heartbeating and VM restart priority set so the right workloads come back first and a network blip does not trigger a mass restart of machines that were running perfectly well.
DRS and affinity rulesAutomatic load balancing, with anti-affinity rules keeping the two domain controllers, the two database nodes or the two application servers on different hosts. Clustered guests on the same physical host is a very common and very expensive oversight.
EVC baselineEnhanced vMotion Compatibility set at build time so next year’s host generation can join the cluster without a shutdown. Retrofitting EVC to a running cluster means powering off every virtual machine.
Right-sized virtual machinesOversized vCPU counts hurt performance rather than help it. We size to observed demand and revisit it, instead of accepting whatever the application vendor’s datasheet asked for.
Storage
Datastore layoutSized against workload and failure domain rather than convenience, with enough datastores that one filling up does not stop the estate, and free space genuinely reserved for swap and snapshots.
Multipathing and path policyRedundant HBAs or NICs, correct path selection policy for the array, and both paths proven by pulling one during commissioning.
vSAN where it fitsDisk groups, fault domains and a storage policy per workload class, and an honest conversation about rebuild capacity, which is the part most vSAN designs under-provision.
Snapshots are not backupsSnapshot age limits and alerting. A snapshot left running for months grows until it fills the datastore and stops every machine on it. We have been called in to clean up exactly that more than once.
Networking
Distributed switchingA vSphere Distributed Switch so port groups, VLANs and policy are defined once for the cluster rather than drifting host by host.
Traffic separated properlyManagement, vMotion, storage and virtual machine traffic on separate VLANs and separate uplinks. vMotion sharing a link with production is the reason a migration slows the business down.
Teaming and failoverUplinks split across physical adapters and physical switches, with load-balancing policy that matches what the switches are actually configured for, a mismatch here causes intermittent faults that are very hard to find later.
Jumbo frames end to end, or not at allIf MTU is raised for storage or vMotion it is raised on every hop and verified. Half-configured jumbo frames are worse than none.
Hardening and operations
Access control on vCenterNamed accounts with role-based permissions, MFA on administrative access, and no shared root password circulating in a WhatsApp group. Whoever holds vCenter holds every server you own.
ESXi lockdownLockdown mode, SSH disabled unless in use, management interfaces off the general network, and syslog forwarded somewhere that survives the host.
Patching with Lifecycle ManagerAn image-based cluster baseline and a maintenance rhythm, so hosts are patched in rotation without downtime instead of being left on the build they shipped with.
Backups of the platform itselfvCenter backed up and its restore tested. A perfectly good cluster with an unrecoverable vCenter is a very bad afternoon.
Monitoring that predictsCapacity, latency and datastore growth trended, so the conversation about the next host happens a quarter early rather than a week late.
Disaster recovery, the position, not the product
RPO and RTO agreed in writingPer workload, not per estate. The finance database and the print server do not deserve the same answer, and paying for them as if they did is where DR budgets are wasted.
Replication sized against the linkChange rate measured before the circuit is specified, and replication shaped so it cannot starve production traffic.
A runbook, and a rehearsalWritten failover steps with named owners, and an actual test. A DR design that has never been executed is a document, not a capability.
Where we draw the line. We build on Proxmox as well as VMware, so we have no commercial reason to defend a licence you do not need. Where the subscription arithmetic no longer works for your host count, we will say so and price the alternative honestly. Including the migration effort, which is the cost most comparisons leave out.
On the licensing question everyone is asking
VMware licensing has changed, and for some estates the arithmetic no longer works. We will tell you honestly whether yours is one of them. We also build on Proxmox, so we have no reason to defend a licence you do not need.
Where VMware is still the right answer, it usually is for a reason worth stating out loud rather than assumed.
Free virtualisation review, no obligation
Tell us your host count, workload profile and renewal date. We will tell you what staying costs, what moving costs, and which one we would choose.
Book the free assessment02 35375791
