Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Isn’t Virtualization Self-managing?

Server virtualization vendors have marketed their technologies as if they would automatically correct themselves and optimally “self load-balance” to assure great service levels to client applications. But infrastructure performance doesn’t depend on virtual servers alone. Domain-centric “dynamic resource” features fall short of providing the kind of service assurance that critical business applications require.

Total performance depends on end-to-end “cross-domain” resource capacities, configurations and competition (e.g. application, servers, storage, and network). If you’re unfamiliar with the term cross-domain, check out this recorded overview we’ve put together to explain it.

To truly achieve the promised ROI of virtualization requires the ability to actively manage the important performance and capacity opportunities provided. While hypervisor managers come with many “knobs and switches”, they don’t come with the enterprise knowledge or cross-domain visibility that would help optimally and dynamically set those knobs and switches. In fact, worse than not getting the full value out of virtualization is the risk that naive configurations and default policies might actually prove counter-productive.

Optimizing virtualized IT infrastructure requires a new type of analysis that accounts for not only cross-domain components and contention, but also models the impact of resource sharing “entitlement” settings, logical resource pool membership, dynamic re-assignment (migration policies) across clusters of physical resources, and non-linear system performance curves under shared workloads. These data center level metrics are also required to assure optimal performance of the virtual infrastructure before migrating to the private cloud.

Over the next several posts I’ll explain these data center level metrics in more detail and how you can use them to optimize while you virtualize.

November 18, 2009 | Filed Under Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

comments

Leave a Reply