Akorri Blog Authors
Innovation Insights
By Rich CorleyCIO Perspectives
By John GavinMarket & Industry Watch
By Lisa CreweIT Perspectives
By Rob Strechay
Managing virtual environments: Common myths
By Lisa Crewe
I read a nice article this weekend from Rupert Collier on virtualization management myths. These are the three he identifies and dispells.
- Myth #1: Virtualisation guarantees performance
- Myth #2: Virtualised IT silos can be managed in isolation
- Myth #3: Virtualised IT can be managed separately from the physical infrastructure
You can read the article here. What other myths would you add to this list?
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.
- You bought more memory for your ESX server and it didn’t fix the performance problem.
- VMware DRS causes you performance problems every time it moves a virtual machine.
- VM performance problems come and go and you can’t figure out why.
- You haven’t turned on VMware DRS because you’re afraid of what it will do to your performance.
- The SSDs you purchased are not delivering the performance you expected.
- You ran into poor performance due to running a VM on a LUN with the wrong RAID level.
- The new array you purchased doesn’t perform as expected in your virtual environment
- You spent days debugging a VMware related issue using data from several different tools.
- Your application owners complain that their application performance on VMware is worse than when it was run on a dedicated physical server.
- 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.
What’s a Marketer to Do?
By Lisa Crewe
BalancePoint is a unique product. I’ve had many discussions over the last few years about how to describe it and what category it belongs in. Application Resource Optimization. Virtual Infrastructure Management. Infrastructure Performance Management. IT Operations Intelligence. All accurate in one way or another, but not categories that IT buyers understand.
Why not just use something that people understand? Well, because it’s different. BalancePoint often gets confused with traditional storage resource management products or virtual machine management tools.
What’s a marketer to do? Well, what we decided to do is create this video that uses an analogy to tell the “how BalancePoint is different” story.
Our story begins…If you’re the Admin managing a virtualized data center, every morning can be like driving into a new city…
Watch the video and let me know how we did.
Can You Get Performance and Capacity Assurance in a Virtual World?
By Lisa Crewe
Capacity management is a hot topic these days. There’s no doubt that it’s more difficult in a virtualization environment and you can get easily get into trouble – especially on the storage side – if you don’t have some guidance. I recently talked with an end user who suffered a failure in a VMware cluster environment because a thin provisioned volume on an array ran out of space to expand. It took down a bunch of VMs and he spent the next 48 hours rectifying the problem. Not fun.
According to Forrester, capacity management is the top operational concern among IT professionals using virtualization. IT Business Edge recently published an article I wrote on this topic that I thought I’d share titled, Assuring Performance and Capacity Management in a Virtual World.
You can get a handle on it and there are some tools out there to help. Read this article to learn how.
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.
Akorri News Releases- Akorri BalancePoint Achieves VMware Ready™ Status September 10, 2010
- Akorri Introduces Industry’s First Cross-Domain Performance Predictor to Prevent Dynamic Data Center Outages Before They Impact the Business September 10, 2010
- Akorri Customer SandRidge Shares the Secret to Increasing IT Virtualization Efficiency at VMworld 2010 September 10, 2010
- Lost in the Clouds? Akorri Helps you Think Service Infrastructure, not Element Infrastructure September 10, 2010
- COMPUTERLINKS helps resellers develop virtualisation opportunities with addition of Akorri performance management software September 10, 2010
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