Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Virtualization Version 2 and Key Performance Indicators That Put the Science Back Into IT

As IT professionals continue to take on more and more responsibilities, consistently we hear the pleas, “I need you to tell me what’s good and what’s bad” in my environment.  People are really looking for the answer to the question, “so what?”  They have a lot of stats coming at them from different directions, but they still ultimately rely on guesswork to make decisions. 

As we move into this virtualization version 2, or what I am coining VV2 … something like WWII … Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) are going to be a must.  These are things that we may not fully understand the math behind, we just know that when it’s low people don’t complain and when it’s high they do.  Akorri’s Performance Index (PI) is just one of them.  It tells you what combo of cpu, memory, and IOPS is healthy or not given the infrastructure allocated to the workload.  What this reminds me of is the “miles till empty” message most cars have today.  The ultimate KPI is the “miles till empty” that is somehow doing math based on the speed and distance you are traveling to indicate if you are totally screwed or if you are going to make it to the next gas station.

I think of our PI as being that “miles to empty” for IT folks in a virtualized environment.  It provides the answers to the “so what question” … so will I be okay if a host fails or not … so what subscription ratio can I really get to … so is there too much workload on a virtual infrastructure?  Not an exhaustive list, but a nice set of questions to have answered, right?

Companies relying simply on  intuition, a hand full of data points, and qualitative “I think so” are in for a long year.  Answering the above questions with quantitative information will be part of the answer for companies to utilize IT as a way to weather the storm that is the current economy.  KPIs will really be a necessary part of putting the science back into IT, because right now it is far too many times an art and no science.

March 6, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

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