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Akorri Blog Authors
Innovation Insights
By Rich CorleyCIO Perspectives
By John GavinMarket & Industry Watch
By Lisa CreweIT Perspectives
By Rob Strechay
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By All Akorri BloggersClouds or Fog: it is your choice!
By Rob Strechay
I recently gave a presentation on this Thornton May’s IT Value Studio. My feeling is that the concept of private vs public clouds, one virtualization flavor vs another, really will hamper the idea of cloud providers. Today’s cloud service providers are giving out virtual machines that are configured with particular application infrastructures. Not ideal for legacy application workloads. Current clouds are for “new applications” that are written to one or another clouds provider specs.
I also agree with John Gavin, CEO of Akorri when he said “Virtualization used to be all about the low-hanging fruit, where server consolidation and cost management were the drivers. Now it’s really all about simplifying management and managing performance issues when in mission-critical applications.” I agree with him, full disclouser, not becuase he signs my pay checks … but he is dead right.
But for cloud/grid/dynamic IT to become real, been saying this since my stint with GGF/OGF, not only do we need to stop recreating standards, but we need the right standards. One in particular that would nice to see adopted and would jump-start would be Open Virtualization Format (OVF) really being used. We need standards; maybe not even new ones but right ones.
Another issue that will have to be addressed is performance and service level management in this environment. Right now the number one reason people do not virtualize is the strength of business units. What I mean here is if a business unit within a company had a bad experience with virtual so they went back to Physical in some cases; not a death nail but the role out slows dramatically.
Virtualization is the new whipping boy for IT. This is why understanding (baselining) pre-virtualization like our customers do, then comparing and managing to “all systems are green” from an infrastructure perspective is so important. Mature virtualized organizations, some at 90%+ virtualized have realized this. When I am talking to them they rank stability, availability and performance as the top concerns they battle from the FUD of business units.
This is not rocket science. Baseline what you have (physical), convert and test (test baseline), make the decision to virtualize, measure impact to the production virtual environment, and compare ongoing operations versus the baseline. Like the directions on a shampoo bottle … shampoo, rinse, and repeat as desired.
Tuning, Tweaking and Troubleshooting Your Virtual Infrastructure
By Lisa Crewe
Interop has typically been a networking focused show, but this year the organizers have a heavy emphasis on virtualization. Virtualization track chairs, Barb Goldworm and Anne Skamarock with Focus Consulting, have a great line up of topics that address virtualization issues from new implementations to advanced complex environments.
One of the sessions we hope folks will attend is Tuning, Tweaking and Troubleshooting Your Virtual Infrastructure. Here’s the abstract from the Interop web site.
Virtualization is great, but the business application is king! Getting your virtual infrastructure to perform optimally is essential to meeting application service levels. This requires performance monitoring and management; capacity management and chargeback; and troubleshooting tools that successfully navigate the complexities of the entire virtual infrastructure including servers, storage and networking. This session introduces some of the ways IT can address application performance and capacity management across the virtual infrastructure.
It’s a topic that Akorri has a lot to say about and Akorri CTO Rich Corley will get a chance to provide his “take” on the subject.
If you’re interested in attending, here’s a link for a 40% discount on conference passes and free expo passes: http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/?priorityCode=CMXSNL13
Top Server Pain Points
By Lisa Crewe
Bob Gill, Managing Director for Server Research with the InfoPro presented the key findings from their brand new Wave7 research on a webinar this week. All the research I’ve seen lately continues to point to the need for virtual infrastructure management solutions. The InfoPro’s research shows the top 5 server pain points are server sprawl, environmental (heat and power), manageability, and virtualization complexity.
To hear all the findings, watch an on demand replay of this webinar, Reducing Virtualization Complexity: Management strategies to help you cope.
Is your cluster N+2, N+1, or N+0 from a capacity perspective?
By Rob Strechay
Most of you know how vMotion and DRS work and ensure you do not “shoot yourself in the foot” by exceeding thresholds for too long. You also know this is not load balancing.
If one physical host goes down and sheds its VMs successfully to the rest of the cluster, is everybody going to play nicely? Take this very simple example.
You have 100 VMs on five hosts. One host goes down and 20 servers vMotion to the remaining servers. Each physical is handling about the same workload, only if the five servers it receives were loaded the same. Otherwise, it could be an exponential workload increase.
If all the VMs’ workloads were not created equal, expect more VM transfers and some amount of pin-wheeling and rotation of the VMs around the remaining member hosts.
Some vendors offer a “capacity planning” option for their software that makes getting all the data about your data-stores and storage in general an exercise in excel. How does this type of planning make you or your guys more efficient? The most important planning key is to get the right data in the right hands at the right time. Is the right thing graphing 74 servers in one graph or telling that a spike in memory, cpu or IO is an issue?
Another thing I’ve learned through working with a lot of virtualization administrators is that reports, such as BalancePoint’s Performance Index report, get IT folks out of counting “c drives” and into fixing problems, avoiding application slow downs, and lowering their costs by getting the most out of the physical and human assets.
Total System Workload/Capacity Modeling
How can you get a handle on how much cluster capacity you have if you can’t get the right data at the right time in the right hands? You would think simple questions like “is our cluster N+1″ should really just pop out of a tool. They don’t. All VMs are not created equal. Workloads vary per VM and sometimes within VMs based on times of day. This is tough math and not a straight line equation. It is not simply drawing pretty graphs. Remember - garbage in…garbage out.
The whole idea around Performance Indicators is to turn data into information. For example, if I have a Performance Index of 90 across my cluster of 200 guests:10 ESX servers, I am not N+1. Ultimately, there will be an impact on response time of my applications if I have a hardware failure or even if you use vMotion to do maintenance.
Easily Manage Your Virtual Resources
By Lisa Crewe
Those of you struggling with infrastructure performance issues and fingerpointing may be interested to read this case study published in Processor Magazine. Kevin Brown, Infrastructure Manager as Service Corporation International talks about his experiences managing a virtual infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt.
There’s always a problem with others taking responsibility for an application’s and/or system’s performance. The two quick responses when individuals are asked about poor performance of the resources are: “It’s the network” or, “My stuff is working fine.”
Read the full article in Processor Magazine.
Akorri News Releases- Akorri and Datalink Announce Partnership June 22, 2009
- Akorri Appoints Three Seasoned Technology Executives to Lead Worldwide Sales, Channel and Partner Alliance Growth June 21, 2009
- Consolidated Communications Taps Akorri BalancePoint to Ensure Optimal IT Performance for Physical to Virtual Infrastructure Migration June 16, 2009
- Akorri Adds Dewpoint, Inc. as BalancePoint Authorized Reseller for Midwest May 17, 2009
- Akorri BalancePoint Resolves Virtual Infrastructure Performance Problems for VistaPrint May 10, 2009
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