Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

The New System Management

By Lisa Crewe

System management is literally evolving as the concept of what a “system” means grows with newly available technologies. In distributed systems, system management initially addressed only physical servers. Then servers with centralized storage. With virtualization, the system became virtualized machines, physical server hosts, virtualized storage, and SANs. IT today requires implementing solutions and processes that enable effective and efficient systems management at the cluster and resource pool of virtual servers.

As I mentioned in my previous post, cross-domain analytics allow IT to see across silos as well as drill down into elements to analyze and model the interactions between what were previously isolated technology domains in order to:

  • Visualize End to End Infrastructure and Troubleshoot Performance Problems
  • Optimize Performance and Utilization
  • Plan Virtual Infrastructure Capacity
  • Manage Service Levels – Meet Business Requirements

 IT investment decisions and project evaluations can be made with certainty (no more guesswork), and technical initiatives and efficiency objectives can be measured for success. Organizations can now manage IT more as a business with intelligent, automatic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can justify, measure and validate IT initiatives like consolidating servers, centralizing storage, or technology upgrades. They can also measure, manage, and report on key virtual service metrics that matter to their application customers, enabling proactive assurance and avoiding unproductive finger-pointing.

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you spent hours correlating data from multiple tools to pinpoint where a performance problem originated from you’ll appreciate learning about this first system analysis, called Application Contention Analysis. What it allows you to do is identify potential contention spots across virtual servers, host servers, SAN and storage. How?

Akorri BalancePoint software automatically and agentlessly collects and analyzes performance data from an application’s IT infrastructure including virtual and physical servers, SAN’s, and storage. A logical data path topology is constructed automatically that includes all the infrastructure resources that each application uses and shares with other applications. Then dynamic performance analysis determines if there are any hotspots or bottlenecks and if so which applications and to what extent each might be contending for critical resources.

BalancePoint provides a fully navigable visual topology that is color-coded red/yellow/green to quickly find and resolve any cross-domain resource hotspot and contention issues. Because BalancePoint analyzes across IT domains, it can find and analyze deeply buried contention that domain-centric tools simply cannot see.

BalancePoint Application Contention Analysis

In addition, BalancePoint generates alerts with informative analysis text and supporting tables that provide an operator with detailed information on resource performance issues, enabling quick and often proactive troubleshooting and remediation.

BalancePoint produces two other key troubleshooting analyses, I’ll introduce next.

November 30, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Isn’t Virtualization Self-managing?

By Lisa Crewe

Server virtualization vendors have marketed their technologies as if they would automatically correct themselves and optimally “self load-balance” to assure great service levels to client applications. But infrastructure performance doesn’t depend on virtual servers alone. Domain-centric “dynamic resource” features fall short of providing the kind of service assurance that critical business applications require.

Total performance depends on end-to-end “cross-domain” resource capacities, configurations and competition (e.g. application, servers, storage, and network). If you’re unfamiliar with the term cross-domain, check out this recorded overview we’ve put together to explain it.

To truly achieve the promised ROI of virtualization requires the ability to actively manage the important performance and capacity opportunities provided. While hypervisor managers come with many “knobs and switches”, they don’t come with the enterprise knowledge or cross-domain visibility that would help optimally and dynamically set those knobs and switches. In fact, worse than not getting the full value out of virtualization is the risk that naive configurations and default policies might actually prove counter-productive.

Optimizing virtualized IT infrastructure requires a new type of analysis that accounts for not only cross-domain components and contention, but also models the impact of resource sharing “entitlement” settings, logical resource pool membership, dynamic re-assignment (migration policies) across clusters of physical resources, and non-linear system performance curves under shared workloads. These data center level metrics are also required to assure optimal performance of the virtual infrastructure before migrating to the private cloud.

Over the next several posts I’ll explain these data center level metrics in more detail and how you can use them to optimize while you virtualize.

November 18, 2009 | Filed Under Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

A customer perspective on infrastructure optimization

By Lisa Crewe

One of Akorri’s customers, Kevin Brown, Infrastructure Manager with Service Corporation International, was nice enough to share his virtualization experiences with Daniel Kusnetzky of The 451 Group for his blog on ZDNet.

In the article, Dan asks what products were considered to help take virtualization to the next level and I thought Kevin’s response was great, so wanted to share it here.

No single product was compared which was a driver in selecting BalancePoint. We had several tools already, Microsoft MOM, VEEAM Report and other tools, Hardware Vendor tools and MS SQL tools.
IT was taking a full arsenal of tools and a team of people to try and get to a common conclusion on what was happening within the system. BalancePoint was picked because it was a common tool for diverse teams to use and get a collective answer.
The fingers could then point to the problem instead of each other.

In talking with our customers, a recurring theme is the need to tie together the virtual and physical worlds of their infrastructure and it’s great to hear that BalancePoint is being used as a tool to help teams better communicate, collaborate and manage service delivery.

You can read the entire post here. If you are a BalancePoint customer and would like to share your story, please contact me.

November 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment