Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

The New System Management

System management is literally evolving as the concept of what a “system” means grows with newly available technologies. In distributed systems, system management initially addressed only physical servers. Then servers with centralized storage. With virtualization, the system became virtualized machines, physical server hosts, virtualized storage, and SANs. IT today requires implementing solutions and processes that enable effective and efficient systems management at the cluster and resource pool of virtual servers.

As I mentioned in my previous post, cross-domain analytics allow IT to see across silos as well as drill down into elements to analyze and model the interactions between what were previously isolated technology domains in order to:

  • Visualize End to End Infrastructure and Troubleshoot Performance Problems
  • Optimize Performance and Utilization
  • Plan Virtual Infrastructure Capacity
  • Manage Service Levels – Meet Business Requirements

 IT investment decisions and project evaluations can be made with certainty (no more guesswork), and technical initiatives and efficiency objectives can be measured for success. Organizations can now manage IT more as a business with intelligent, automatic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can justify, measure and validate IT initiatives like consolidating servers, centralizing storage, or technology upgrades. They can also measure, manage, and report on key virtual service metrics that matter to their application customers, enabling proactive assurance and avoiding unproductive finger-pointing.

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you spent hours correlating data from multiple tools to pinpoint where a performance problem originated from you’ll appreciate learning about this first system analysis, called Application Contention Analysis. What it allows you to do is identify potential contention spots across virtual servers, host servers, SAN and storage. How?

Akorri BalancePoint software automatically and agentlessly collects and analyzes performance data from an application’s IT infrastructure including virtual and physical servers, SAN’s, and storage. A logical data path topology is constructed automatically that includes all the infrastructure resources that each application uses and shares with other applications. Then dynamic performance analysis determines if there are any hotspots or bottlenecks and if so which applications and to what extent each might be contending for critical resources.

BalancePoint provides a fully navigable visual topology that is color-coded red/yellow/green to quickly find and resolve any cross-domain resource hotspot and contention issues. Because BalancePoint analyzes across IT domains, it can find and analyze deeply buried contention that domain-centric tools simply cannot see.

BalancePoint Application Contention Analysis

In addition, BalancePoint generates alerts with informative analysis text and supporting tables that provide an operator with detailed information on resource performance issues, enabling quick and often proactive troubleshooting and remediation.

BalancePoint produces two other key troubleshooting analyses, I’ll introduce next.

November 30, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

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