Computers are the most awful way to do things, except for all the other ways we’ve tried.  It’s easy to blame computers; they don’t fight back.  What’s much more difficult, yet distressingly important, is figuring out why computers have done something unappreciated and remedying the situation.  One important tool in a systems administrator’s arsenal is Solarwinds’ Virtualization Manager. Humans have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.  Many of us give our cars names, ascribe to them personalities, talk to them and sometimes treat them like members of the family.  We similarly ascribe personalities and motivations to individual computers or even entire networks of them, often despite being perfectly aware of the irrationality of this.  We can’t help it: anthropomorphizing is part of being human. Computers, however, aren’t human.  They don’t have motives and they don’t act without input.  They do exactly they are told, and that’s usually the problem.  The people telling the computers what to do – be they end users or systems administrators – are fallible.  The weakest link is always that which exists between keyboard and chair. Our likelihood of making an error increases the more stress we’re put under.  Whether due to unreasonable demand, impossible deadlines, or networks which have simply grown too large to keep all the moving parts in our memory at given time, we fallible humans need the right tools to do the job well. You wouldn’t ask a builder to build you a home using slivers of metal and a rock to hammer them. So why is it that we so frequently expect systems administrators to maintain increasingly complex networks with the digital equivalent of two rocks to bash together?  It’s a terrible prejudice that leads many organizations to digital ruin.  A tragedy that, in...