Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

New England VMware Users Group

By Lisa Crewe

Akorri was a sponsor of the New England VMware Users Group “Winter Warmer” last week.  It was extremely well attended with more than 800 people there. 

One of the major themes was around how to virtualize mission-critical apps.  Two of the vendors gave presentations on this topic – one sharing the results of a test environments running a large Exchange environment and the other talking about the strategy behind getting there. 

Dave Vellante with Wikibon blogged about the other major themes – consolidation ratios, storage, back up and security.  I’d be interested to learn whether these are the top topics on your mind. 

Overall a great event. Looking forward to attending the next one.

January 31, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Server Tiering? What the heck is that!

By Rob Strechay

With it being the new year I figured I would try to impart something new.  Or maybe instead share something from the “everything that is old is new again” file.  I have found a renewed interest in storage tiering among our customers.  This is not too surprising with the folks at EMC rolling out FAST and the continued success of these in the array tiering of companies such as Compellent, HDS, and NetApp. 

This is not “repacked Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)” but instead organizations are trying to figure out how many IOPS applications are really doing, what needs Solid-State-Disk (SSD), what will be just fine on Serial ATA (SATA), and then go with Fibre Channel for the rest.  Within those tiers they are also mixing RAID types; such as RAID-5, RAID-DP and RAID-6 for bulk, RAID-10 for higher throughput read, and exploring thin-pooling / thin-provisioning to conserve more expensive disks.  But what the heck does this have to do with servers?

I am seeing more customers looking to do the same on the server side and wondering where to start.  For the most part, 90% of the organizations I talk to allow uncapped access of servers to resources.  And still far too many organizations are doing in-place virtual server provisioning.  What is in-place virtual server provisioning you might ask?  It is the craziness of taking a physical server that you are going to virtualize and provisioning in the virtual world the same number of cores and memory the server had in the physical world.  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. 

Weren’t you the guy who pushed back when they ordered that server without you knowing for the project?  I can hear you now saying “just because the vendor said it needs that much doesn’t mean it can really use it”.  Guess what?  You were probably right.  Why not take this opportunity to fix that problem?

This takes qualitative numbers … aka facts!  Being able to say “Mr. app owner, you have not used more than 25% of the four cores you currently own,” and “when we virtualize we will give you double your current usage,” meaning two vcpu’s worth.  Take a deep breathe … now doesn’t that feel good?

Already down the virtual-first path you say?  Well here is a perfect opportunity to go back and prove that you can get better than 10 VMs per one host.  Here is a perfect time to go and beat the industry average.  Again this is average and not all applications are the same.  So, gather the quantitative data first then make your adjustments.  And get management buy in first and I discussed in my last blog.

Once you know what the apps really use then you can tier them.  I would suggest using resources pools within VMware.  Maybe you have been using them as folders for certain types of applications.  Most people are not using them for anything more than organization.  Here are the rules of thumb I would suggest:

  1. Gather quantifiable data on CPU, Memory, and IO
  2. Keep your tiers simple – no more than three types / tiers
  3. Create specific resource pools for high-end mission critical, “I-lose-my-job-if-there-is-an-issue” applications that have minimum service levels
  4. Create a resource pool for everyone-else (the middle-class) and maybe set no upper or lower reserves or caps
  5. Now create ones for those servers that are allowed to be “slow” and put caps on them
  6. Measure your success (see #1 and compare) – you should be able to provide service levels to keep even the most vocal critic happy

As always, please share ways you have been able to bring service levels into you virtual environment.  Also, let me know how you define server tiers in your organization.

January 11, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Why aren’t you successful consolidating?

By Rob Strechay

It being the first week of January, I thought it was time for some reflection on the past year.  I have been hearing many IT folks say, “We need to reduce storage and/or server costs”.  Interestingly, I was at a VMUG  meeting discussing this with some of the attendees when I asked, “Why are you not virtualizing more then”?  I got two answers.

1. FLAT budgets are making it difficult to purchase tools that provide the needed visibility into the infrastructure and reduce the risk of virtualizing production applications. 
2. FLAT head count is making everyone work longer hours and take on less new projects.

Server consolidation, especially in environmentally and space strapped locations, is back in vogue after a little reprieve.  Then why are most companies still getting what I feel, based on the ratios our customers are able to drive, are extremely conservative consolidation ratios (10 to 1)?  It’s not because they don’t want to consolidate more.  Many factors seem to be getting in the way in addition to the money and people constraints.

1. POLITICS:  This is not a swipe at the President or Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).  It’s actually company politics that seem to be the #1 inhibitor.  When I was in IT, I didn’t want to get involved in a project without knowing that it clearly mapped to the executive committee goals  and objectives.  In other words, if the project didn’t have CXO support it would limp along. 

2. TIME:  This comes down to how much planning it takes to change the engine on a plane while you are flying .  We used to create three to five year plans in IT.  It was easier to dictate where funds would be spent based on the IT roadmap.  The last year has turned most three year plans into three month plans if you are lucky.  Most of the people I talk to are seeing server to admin ratios grow from 100-1 to 300-1.  It used to take three weeks to get a server installed, up, and ready for deployment. Now, with virtualization, it is taking 30 mins.

3. Process – or the lack of it:   I remember that “ analysis paralysis ” could be the case when I was in the last big IT shop.  But I think that process is really taking a major back seat.  This is hurting IT organizations when it comes to justifying purchases, especially those meant to help with some of the soft costs.  You know,  those costs that equal you vpn’ing in on your weekend or worse from your vacation.  I think the lack of process is leading to an easy way to have little or no accountability by IT management.

4. Tools maturity: Tools have been slow in catching up to the change in how to manage old processes for the physical world.  Two things need to happen. First,  we as an industry need to mature and realize there is still not one vendor or tool that can solve all our issues.  Second, we need to use the hierarchies such as FACS or ITIL frameworks to lead us in enabling our management.  One example is understanding that you WILL have multiple event/fault management systems (VMware vCenter , MS SCOM, NetIQ,  EMC Ionix) which will need to be augmented with tools from independent third-party vendors.

Obtaining higher consolidation ratios is going to take some effort, so my recommendation is to establish a management hierarchy first. Then figure out how to minimize the number of tools you need to enable your processes; like ITIL.  Establish a gap analysis of your current tool sets and determine what type(s) of tools you are looking for.  This will be critical to get CIO / VP / Director buy in as budgets return.  Also, tools that do not take a full time employee will help as well. Let me know if you’re seeing the same inhibitors in your organization and whether you think this approach would work.  I’d love to get your feedback.

January 5, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | 1 Comment