Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Who’s What in Service & Capacity Management

By Lisa Crewe

Virtualization Practice Analyst, Bernd Herzog, recently included Akorri in his “Who’s Who in Virtualization Management,” blog post. His point is well taken that VMware is currently offering a set of disjointed point products as its set of management offerings and each one of these offerings should be evaluated individually against the relevant third party competition.

He listed Akorri in the “Service & Capacity Management” category along with a few other vendors. In this list, Akorri BalancePoint is the only analytics-based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments.

We’ve long held that solutions that can understand interdependencies across all layers of the infrastructure and bring sophisticated correlation engines to the table will pave the way to the future of the next generation data center. Such tools are simply a key component of the management layer required in an increasingly complex, dense, consolidated, virtualized, and ever-changing data center.

Today, BalancePoint, plugged into VMware’s vCenter management console, reaches well beyond any virtual or physical data center silo, and paints a picture of end to end infrastructure performance, predicting performance issues, avoiding outages, and optimizing utilization for total data center visibility.

For more information about BalancePoint visit: www.akorri.com/video

August 3, 2010 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Akorri News & Opinion, Industry News & Opinion, Performance | Leave a Comment 

Virtualization is Performance Management, But Don’t Forget the Physical

By Lisa Crewe

I read Greg Shields blog today on Windows IT Pro about the need for performance management tools when using virtualization.  I  agree with his conclusion that “performance management is job one in virtualization”.  However, I would add that true performance and capacity optimization requires insight and analysis into both performance and utilization for virtual and physical machines including storage.  And that admins can’t guarantee performance of virtualized applications to the business unless they have insight and intelligence into both.

If you’re managing performance of the virtual machines and the physical machines separately it can make you feel like you have two jobs.  Who has time for that? 

What’s needed is a solution that handles both and can provide the following:

  • A metric that proves your VMs always perform optimally using minimal server and storage resources.
  • Measure and record the round trip response time of your virtual infrastructure? (virtual/physical; storage/server)
  • Alarms that isolate specific applications that have poor performance due to disk contention
  • A topology map that automatically discovers and displays I/O paths through virtual and physical servers and storage

Learn how you can get that combination.  Watch this video.

May 19, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Hear from Your Peers at VMworld: Vote for Case Studies

By Lisa Crewe

This year you can have a say in what sessions you’d like to see at VMworld. VMworld has opened public voting.

Many conferences have a hard time finding customers willing to present their story even though they are typically the most well received sessions.  There are several case study sessions to vote for in the Virtualization 101 track including one from SandRidge Energy (Session ID: V18113). 

Sandridge Energy is a natural gas and oil company headquartered in Oklahoma City.  They were challenged by some mounting performance problems and needed visibility into their virtual and physical environment including storage and how everything worked together.  Vote for this session to learn how they were able to get immediate insight and improve efficiency end to end.  You can read more about them now here. 

There are 8 tracks and you can vote as many times as you like in each track, but only once per session.  If you like a session, just click on the ‘thumbs up’, but you have to be logged in.  So if you don’t already have a vmworld.com accout you have to create one at www.vmworld.com/login.jspa

Get out the vote and hear from your peers.

May 17, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Dublin VMware Forums: Ireland’s IT Challenges Similar to the States

By Rob Strechay

I had a very enjoyable time with our Irish partner Triangle and distributor Sanalyse yesterday in Dublin.  It was very fun to see what a positive reaction the more than 400 people that attended had to Akorri BalancePoint.  Here are some of the interesting things that came out of our discussions with the end users there:

  • Many are into “phase 2” of their VMware deployments
  • A majority were running around 60 guest on 5 – 10 ESX servers
  • They were looking to move to virtualize “tougher applications” like SQL, Oracle, SAP
  • They had a mix mash of different storage
  • Still fighting budget battles; looking to move projects along this summer
  • 99% using VMware with a small percent using Hyper-v and VMware, and even smaller percent that were Hyper-v only
  • Many were looking for partners to help them with capacity planning

What I found most striking was that the cost savings messages we had been hearing from end users in the States for the past year, were the same there.  Some of the things I kept hearing were:

  • “I need to do more with less.”
  • “I need to add servers without adding head count.”
  • “I have more storage but no visibility.”
  • “How do we account for all of this?”

Obviously we were happy to talk to these folks about how BalancePoint has been helping customers in the States for years solve these problems.

Cloudy with a Chance of Skepticism

Pretty much unanimously they were tired of hearing about cloud.  In fact, I heard a funny story while I was there.  Apparently, Ireland’s Department of Finance from the Chief State Solicitor’s Office spoke out saying that you shouldn’t use a cloud of any type.  I guess someone didn’t get the memo that clouds can be private or public nor read the article (below) about the local investment in public cloud infrastructure before making his statement.

Both IBM and Hewlett Packard have established cloud computing competency centres in Ireland which created 190 jobs and involve a combined investment of €36 million. Microsoft, which is identified in the e-mail as a cloud computing supplier, invested $500 million (€366 million) in building a data centre in Dublin which opened last year and will provide these services.

Attending this event just proved to me that IT is the same around the world, just at varying stages, and that all governments can say things with unintended circumstances.

March 24, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Moving Deck Chairs on the Titanic? Ionix Changes Hands … Partially

By Rob Strechay

In a very interesting move and one that makes perfect sense to me, EMC has sold assets (software, development and sales) to VMware.  I think this is an extremely shrewd move by both companies.  But what does this mean to the customers?  Chad’s Virtual Geek blog has a great break down of what went from EMC to VMware and why. 

My thoughts are this.  The Ionix deal went a long way to ensuring that EMC and VMware will not overlap or compete in the management arena as VMware transitions from a hypervisor company to a virtual server and application management company.

What I find very interesting is that this now disconnects the server and storage domains.  If you know Akorri , we’re all about servers and storage, or what we call cross-domain.  Now I am sure there will be overlap within the EMC and VMware portfolios in the future (probably on purpose).  Perhaps one will  leave off or even hand off to the other’s management software.  So does this mean you will need a multi-vendor solution for cloud and virtualization infrastructure management?  I argue yes.

What’s the likely overlap?  I’m thinking SMARTS ADM / APPSPEED and the rest of the SMARTS family.  Almost instantly APPSPEED becomes a formidable APM management platform.  No longer just being J2EE application mapping and performance.  Now it can start to competing with the likes of HP BAC, Dynatrace, AppDynamics,  Bluestripe, Solarwinds, and many more.

As Chad states in his blog on the subject, cross licensing and integration among the software vendors has happened for many years – especially the cross-licensing / OEM’ing of SMARTS by Cisco and others to improve their correlation and event management.

So what does this mean to the customers?  I really don’t think it changes too much in the way the products operate today.  In the future will they become more VMWare specific?  Doubtful.  In fact this could be very positive for the development of the software.  Moving from inside a hardware-come-software-company-lately to a pure software company may bring life and future development focus to the products. 

At the end of the day the winner seems to be VMware in this.  I think for EMC it is a push given the development money spent over the years, the rebranding, and the acquisition costs.  Customers may win too – but we will have to see.

I don’t think it’s necessarily “moving deck chairs on the titanic” but I do think that it draws a line in the sand for the companies and reveals where they are not going to compete.

March 4, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion | Leave a Comment 

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