Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

CIO Perspectives
By John Gavin

The Second Wave of Data Center Virtualization ROI

By John Gavin

I’ve seen a ton on ROI information out there from a host of very good vendors about the benefits of server consolidation which is all true and valuable, but that was yesterday’s ROI story. I say that because most IT groups are either on their way or have done a substantial amount of server consolidation.  The compelling ROI is why virtualization took off so fast and continues to be a growth market.  As the old saying goes, “So what,now what?” The “So What” is that by adopting a “virtualize first” mentality you get the savings and return on investment benefits of making the server portion of the infrastructure well on its way to a predictable and dependable level of new found efficiency. Figuring out the savings is easy to do with the aid of very useful web-based calculators from a number of vendors including VMware.  Bernd Harzog with the Virtualization Practice did an ROI exercise with server consolidation and business critical applications using the VMware calculator.

returnoninvestment

Now for the “Now What” part. This is trickier to get your hands on. The challenges of getting to the next level of ongoing savings beyond just server consolidation include:

  • Achieving higher VM densities (more than 10 ESX’s and more than 100 Virtual Machines) and/or virtualizing Tier 1 applications
  • Understanding  how this impacts the rest of the data center resources.

Adding Storage to the Equation

While server savings are very visible, they could be getting offset by the lack of visibility and connection to the storage environment that is critical in supporting production applications for important business operations. If storage resources are over provisioned or are not tiered or configured correctly to the proper performance for the VM’s  they support, then the costs associated with that is going to offset the server savings we got with virtualizing to begin with.  This is going backwards and begins to erode saving capital and management dollars. How can we stop that and be sure that in managing these new virtualized pools of resources, we have the end to end visibility, capacity, performance information, reporting and insightful analytics to make the right decisions and avoid costly outage issues as well as insure we have the efficiencies promised by virtual technologies.

The second wave of ROI for virtual data center is about taking the assets you have deployed (server and storage) and the operations management  talent you have and making them super efficient. Key considerations are:

1)      Maintaining High Service Levels  & Reduced Troubleshooting Time

Time wasted trying to diagnose and troubleshoot an application outage that is being blamed on the data center. Here it’s guilty until proven innocent and each group (server, network and storage groups) must try and gather, compile and assimilate abstracted dynamic data and pinpoint a cause for remediation.  If this is taking longer than in the physical world to figure out, that is a cost of resources we never get back and subtracts for the initial savings.

2)      Reducing Infrastructure Costs  with Better Capacity Planning

Where in the infrastructure is there additional capacity that not only meets the simple capacity test, but also meets the application I/O work load needs of that application group. If I try and add more VM’s to an ESX that looks like it can handle more, then why is the app running slower than before? If we don’t integrate the storage capacity and performance characteristics, then we are making the VM density better at the ESX level, but the business is screaming that the performance got considerable worse. More time wasted trying to figure out why that happened and you probably will stop attempting to VM density stack anymore. What are the costs associated with your top performing apps when they aren’t running or running at very slow rate?

Validate before you buy. If you are about to make a significant cap ex purchase, be sure you don’t have available capacity in the infrastructure and that it is going to meet the needs of your performance problem or new app roll out. Do I need Solid State disks or does the history from the application I/O profile suggest you don’t need that performance?  Are you sure it’s an ESX memory issue versus a storage disk contention problem? The only way to understand that is to look at the integrated I/O supporting that application and measure and track that across the infrastructure supporting the transaction. What if you had the ability to drive cap ex savings by even a 5% to 10% utilization of the existing investment you have?  This alone drives significant savings and cost avoidance/delays freeing budget up for more pressing projects.

3)      Increased Productivity

How much time and effort can be saved by having data center wide dynamic reporting in place to meet operating and management requirements and the dashboards that give the information needed to respond to problems quickly so that they don’t linger?  Can you predict when performance is trending down and capacity is trending towards an outage? Taking the guesswork out of any operations task allows you to regain control and then proactively manage this new dynamic operations environment at the lowest cost of service possible.

Finally, having a solution that provides you  the same metrics and capabilities for the physical environment as the virtual environment saves you money in time and better utilization. 

 Calculate Your Potential Savings

Check out this easy to use ROI calculator, for getting the next wave of infrastructure savings off and running.

August 17, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

How to Convince Your Boss You Need a Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

By John Gavin

Gone are the days when simply telling your boss that you needed the coolest virtual infrastructure management product just like all the other cool companies doing production virtualization would get it for you . Let’s face it. That won’t work these days when layers of approval are common place, endless questions on capital purchases are the norm and budgets are tighter than ever with ROI and TCO part of every ones lexicon and reason for buying. Ok, so what do you do to get the boss into your camp? There are really three areas you should highlight to get your boss to say yes.

The first is an old standby – time to resolve problems. Your first line of defense is that the traditional element management tools you have for physically dedicated environments can be useful, but just don’t cut across all the devices and see the levels of virtual abstraction to give that integrated system view which is vital to understanding virtual environments. Those older tools aren’t designed to see through and track all the virtualized elements because they were designed to support one device type in a silo-like fashion. You know the endless hours that are wasted chasing data, going to meetings or sitting on conference calls trying to find the culprits involved in performance problems that are impacting critical application availability, could all be avoided. You suggest even a conservative assumption of reducing this wasted, always unplanned, activity by 50% would be worth the purchase alone. The average Akorri BalancePoint customer with 100 VMs can identify over $500,000 in staff productivity annually.
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October 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

The X and Y ROI of Data Center Virtualization

By John Gavin

For my first blog I decided to tackle the common ROI topic so prevalent these days. There are various forms of ROI and TCO one gets from virtualization. The easier and first ROI to identify and quantify is what I call the “X” ROI which typically happens in that Stage 1, or server consolidation phase, of virtualization adoption. That ROI you get literally out of the box so to speak. It comes in Stage 1 of moving into a virtual IT infrastructure where you do the initial P to V projects and the focus here is server consolidation where getting a many to one consolidation savings is huge.

The second aspect or wave of getting a better ROI, thus what I call the “Y” ROI, is a lot trickier to get a handle on and is typically experienced in the Stage 2 and 3 phases of virtualization adoption. While the Hypervisor technologies out there have done a tremendous job of getting the underlying physical resources more productive, unleashing lots of untapped capability, there has been a major gap created in solutions that make the IT virtualization operations management job easier, especially when considering staffing is flat or down, physical and virtual resources co-exist and must be co-managed and everyone wants to develop a plan to get a private cloud someday, sooner rather than later.
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August 14, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment