Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Finding The Needle in the Haystacks

By Lisa Crewe

SandRidge Energy is a rapidly growing independent natural gas and oil company concentrating in exploration, development and production activities. 

SandRidge deployed server virtualization over two years ago and has virtualized 60% of its application environment (including test and production applications). Today, over 140 machines are running on nine physical hosts supported by NetApp storage. The complex environment made it challenging to troubleshoot performance problems using the existing element management tools. When performance problems occurred, SandRidge consulted four different tools to resolve issues, which took a few systems engineers and up to a day to review data and find the “needle in the haystack.”

Cameron Han is the Infrastructure Operations Supervisor at SandRidge Energy, Inc.  I’m thrilled to share that he’s presenting his story at VMworld on how SandRidge’s IT department was able to improve their infrastructure performance using Akorri BalancePoint.

Here’s what he had to say about the product.

“BalancePoint is the only tool we found that can decipher our virtual machines, storage, and operating systems together, and we like that it will proactively notify us of potential performance bottlenecks.”

Check out the Session @ VMworld

Who: Cameron Han, Senior Systems Engineer at SandRidge Energy, Inc.

What: SandRidge Energy Increases IT Virtualization Efficiency

When: August 31, 2010 at 3:30 p.m.

Where: VMworld 2010, Moscone Center, San Francisco

Session ID: V18113, Track: Virtualization 101

If you can’t make the session, you can read the case study here.

See Us at VMworld, Booth #1331

  • See a demo of BalancePoint v3.5 that Predicts Performance Issues.
  • Get a cool t-shirt and wear it for a chance to win a new Apple iPad or GPS.
  • Get a free drink (or two or three) during the VMworld “Hall Crawl”, Tuesday, August 31 from 4-6 p.m.

Stop by the Akorri booth and visit us!  Tell me you read my blog for an additional chance to win.

August 27, 2010 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Akorri News & Opinion, Customer Experiences, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

10 VMware Performance Problems to Avoid

By Lisa Crewe

If you’re a VMware user you will run into performance problems.  Guaranteed.  Virtualization provides tremendous benefits, but like every technology there are common problems.  These are some of the issues end users we’ve talked to have experienced.

  1. You bought more memory for your ESX server and it didn’t fix the performance problem.
  2. VMware DRS causes you performance problems every time it moves a virtual machine.
  3. VM performance problems come and go and you can’t figure out why.
  4. You haven’t turned on VMware DRS because you’re afraid of what it will do to your performance.
  5. The SSDs you purchased are not delivering the performance you expected.
  6. You ran into poor performance due to running a VM on a LUN with the wrong RAID level.
  7. The new array you purchased doesn’t perform as expected in your virtual environment
  8. You spent days debugging a VMware related issue using data from several different tools.
  9. Your application owners complain that their application performance on VMware is worse than when it was run on a dedicated physical server.
  10. Application performance problems are experienced by end-users and you found it’s not the network or the application.

Do you have one we didn’t mention?   I’d love to hear about it and add it to the list.

August 6, 2010 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

BalancePoint: A fresh new tool for your IT arsenal! This product is a lifesaver for those trying to actively manage their ever growing cloud infrastructure.

By Lisa Crewe

One of our partners, Trent Steele, a Varrow IT consultant, recently blogged about Akorri BalancePoint. Read his thoughts below and then see how our product can help you at: www.akorri.com/video.

Akorri BalancePoint: The Dynamic Data Center Optimization Tool

BalancePoint: A fresh new tool for your IT arsenal! This product is a lifesaver for those trying to actively manage their ever growing cloud infrastructure.

Over the past few days our Varrow engineers have been involved with training surrounding a product that the company is extremely excited about! Our engineers have been through introductions with the company and its product BalancePoint. BalancePoint “is a third generation software product that is the only analytics based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments. Think of Akorri as the GPS of your IT infrastructure. Akorri supplies critical information and guidance versus a monitoring tool which just reports on a single infrastructure element (physical or virtual servers or storage or network).” What I really found interesting with the product is its ease of use. You are really able to get this product installed and configured rather quickly and when used for troubleshooting issues between virtualization, physical servers and storage there may not be another player in the market as strong currently. The reporting features of the product are pretty amazing and are readily for IT administrators and their management teams to show performance within the virtual environment.

The amount of work being placed on administrators these days is tremendous and only gets heavier from there. Most companies have the philosophy to do more with less. These are just a few reasons why a solution must be found to keep up with network sprawl which grows at a weeds pace. Everything in the data center is evolving and if things aren’t setup immediately for monitoring sometimes things get lost in the shuffle. “BalancePoint agent-less software collects statistics from the entire infrastructure, creates a dynamic model and then intelligently analyzes the information to understand how an application workload’s server, SAN and storage resources are utilized and interact. BalancePoint uniquely enables IT administrators to visualize their infrastructure, proactively identify and troubleshoot performance problems within minutes, plan future capacity requirements and measure infrastructure service levels to demonstrate efficient resource utilization to management.” Below are some of the benefits gained by using Akorri BalancePoint in your workplace, especially those who have committed to the private or public cloud and the management challenges that it provides.

BalancePoint™ deploys quickly, providing immediate benefits including:

  • Same-day non-intrusive implementation
  • Rapid cross-domain troubleshooting
  • Optimal IT performance delivery
  • Effective Infrastructure capacity planning
  • Justification for IT Virtualization and Consolidation projects

With BalancePoint™ in your environment you will:

  • Identify Performance Bottlenecks — Find problems and contention points before they impact operations
  • Troubleshoot Problems Faster — Identify root cause quickly so people can get back to work
  • Improve Storage Utilization — Use storage and server resources more efficiently and eliminate or defer new storage purchases
  • Manage VMware in Production — Improve VMware server and storage performance and utilization through “single pane of glass” management·
  • Optimize and Plan — Identify opportunities for improvement and plan for future growth requirements
  • Maintain Service Performance — Avoid application brownouts with cross-domain correlation of applications, servers, and storage
  • Guarantee Future Service — Enable performance-based capacity planning across applications, servers, and storage
  • Reduce Risk — Mitigate potential issues with what-if modeling for data-tier disaster recovery plans and data center optimization projects

The BalancePoint product has won many awards and if you are interested in the product, Varrow is a certified partner and reseller and can assist you with your project. Please feel free to contact us with any questions concerning the product.

 

August 2, 2010 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Customer Experiences, Performance | Leave a Comment 

Akorri Saved the Day

By Lisa Crewe

This is a direct quote from one of our customers for whom BalancePoint identified a potential issue before it impacted performance. 

In a nutshell, BalancePoint’s Performance Index was showing a rating of 600-700,  which is way out of normal range, for every monitored host for four days.  Over a seven day period, Performance Index had been spiking at the same time every morning.  In the actual servers however, the customer had seen no performance degradation or any complaints about the issue they saw in the logs.

For those not familar with Performance Index, ideally, you want to manage your infrastructure to a Performance Index of 100. Performance Index is BalancePoint’s data center level metric produced for each application that can be used to quickly and easily optimize usage of a system by balancing capacity utilization with good performance.  BalancePoint is the only solution on the market that has a metric of this kind.  Watch this video to learn more about Performance Index.

As it turns out, there was a change to the SAN backend that the admin was not aware of and this created a volume contention issue.  The customer’s resolution was to undo the change to the SAN. 
 
“Akorri saved the day by highlighting the issue,” the admin told our customer service team. 

 You can read how other companies have also had excellent results with BalancePoint here.

May 24, 2010 | Filed Under Customer Experiences | 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 

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