The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘sprawl’

Server Tetris and Monitoring a Dynamic Datacenter

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

As a child of the 80′s, I have fond memories of playing Tetris on the brick-like Gameboy.  The challenge of perfectly aligning the blocks and leaving a gap for the long one to clear four rows was very addictive.  For those not familiar, though I doubt anyone falls into this category, Tetris is essentially a video game where random blocks fall from the sky and you line them up so there is no gap in between.  It sounds boring comparing to modern games but nonetheless, I had spent countless hours playing it.  So when I came across this article reporting the CTO of VMware wants to play “Server Tetris”, it caught my eye.

VMware has Load Balancing technologies that would shuffle VM’s around so the servers would be better utilized.  But what they want to do is something greater than just load balancing on computing resources.  They envision to be able to automatically shift VM’s to servers where power is cheapest.  With energy cost steadily climbing, I’m sure their customers will jump for joy.  However, what would it mean for someone managing a VMware infrastructure?  The complexity of the environment will increase when things move around so much.  How can you stay on top of such a dynamic environment?

up.time’s in-depth VMware monitoring provides insight into inventory, performance, capacity information all in a single pane of glass.  It stays constantly in-sync with VMware so it knows when things change in your virtual environment, such as VM’s moving around or adding/removing ESX servers.  Additionally, reports such as VM Sprawl and VM Workload pierce right into the heart of burning questions such as “how much resources are wasted?” and “how much resources are available?”.  up.time not only monitors your VMware environment, it also monitors the applications, business services and SLA’s that are running on VMware.  The unified dashboard gives you visibility into all components in your enterprise.

Just because VM’s are dynamic and might make your head spin, it doesn’t mean you have to be left in the dark.  With up.time, you can stay on top of the ever-changing environment so that you can proactively manage it.  Download up.time and see the difference!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Virtualization, virtualization vmware, VMware, VMware Monitoring | No Comments »

Reduce Energy Waste and Sprawl in your IT Infrastructure with Capacity Planning

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Recently, there was an article talking about data centers wasting vast amounts of energy. Although it spoke primarily about the super-data-centers from some of the big players and service providers (i.e Facebook, Google, Amazon), the same can be said about almost any data center.

Running any number of servers efficiently not only requires a lot of thought and preparation beforehand, but it also requires continual attention to how they’re being used. This is especially true if virtualization is in the mix since it gives IT more power and control over the resources they have available. What used to take days or even months to order a new server now only takes a few seconds with virtualization. This double-edge sword of power also makes it that much easier to shoot ourselves in the foot by allowing us to waste resources on servers that are no longer used and over-provisioning the resources we do have. These types of problems can be simplified into two main problems: Capacity Management and Sprawl.

If we’re just waiting for email alerts telling us that our disks are getting full, we can get into trouble. This is great if we want to stay at the proactive stage of monitoring our environment, but if we want to get more proactive, we’ll need to start analyzing data and reports to determine which systems will need more space in the future. Capacity Management helps us detect potential issues before they become a problem. It can also help us track down odd resource behaviors on systems that should be fairly stable or differentiate between regular spikes of utilization and an actual outage. If your monitoring solution doesn’t have the reporting tools necessary for this, is it really doing enough for you?

Sprawl happens when we have servers (physical or virtual) that are no longer being used but are still taking up space and resources; essentially costing your business money. This can be very difficult to track since a virtualized environment can be constantly changing every second, and you don’t have time to wait for your monitoring solution to catch up. Having an all-encompassing monitoring solution that provides visibility across your entire application stack, including the virtualization layer, and includes important reporting features out of the box is what every enterprise who’s interested in saving money should have already. Yes, up.time has all of these things, and more, so if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet have a look at our free trial here.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Virtualization | No Comments »

up.time VMware vSphere 5 Support

Friday, April 27th, 2012

You asked for it, our upcoming release of up.time 7.0 will fully support VMware vSphere 5! uptime software inc. has been a long time VMware partner, launching our first VMware monitoring solution in the early days of ESX in 2006. Since then we have released several major evolutions of our virtualization monitoring platform and are continuing to build on our relationship by fully supporting the latest vSphere edition in up.time 7.0. up.time 6.0 already fully supports vSphere 4.x, with all of the powerful features you are used to continuing to be available:

Smart VMware Monitoring

  • vSync Dynamic Discovery: Keep your monitoring inventory in lock step with any changes to your vSphere environment. The second a new VM is spun up or hosts are moved around the datacenter, up.time’s inventory will update itself instantly so that you know you don’t have any monitoring blind spots in your environment. Monitor your whole vSphere environment agentlessly through your vCenter installation.
  • Power Awareness Intelligence: Power state awareness dashboards bring real time power status information into your global view. Take control of power state changes by alerting your administrators when critical systems are powered down. 
  • VM Sprawl Control: Automatic notifications of new VMs ensure they are compliant with your IT policy. Review weekly sprawl reports to target zombie or over allocated VMs  so you can free up precious disk & memory space to the VMs that really need it.

Deep VMware Capacity Management

  • Easy Capacity Bottleneck Troubleshooting: Instantly find your bottlenecks and drill into the root cause.
  • Global Capacity Reports: How much capacity do I have? How much am I using? How much am I wasting? up.time helps you answer all of these questions so that you can reclaim valuable resources and proactively avoid embarrassing capacity outages.

In addition to all of the other great benefits of up.time, our “single pane of glass” dashboards brings together your virtual, physical and cloud environments into one monitoring toolset.

If you haven’t had a chance to try up.time yet, you can download a free trial from our website and be up and running in 15 minutes.

Dave.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in cloud, Virtualization, virtualization vmware, VMware, VMware Monitoring | No Comments »

Do more with less. Virtualize and save – but plan carefully!

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Here’s some more work for you. Here’s some more responsibility. Here’s a shorter deadline. Now do it all with less money, less time, less resources, less, less, less!

It seems as though the more efficient we become, the more constrained we are. The current economic climate doesn’t help either.   Yes, this is the new norm.  So what can you do?

If you’re reading this you’ve probably invested time and money into a virtual infrastructure, or are considering it.  Great!  Virtualized computing environments squeeze every last drop of performance from hardware and, when properly budgeted, can save you thousands in the long run. But don’t expect a free lunch.

Physical to Virtual Consolidation

Consolidation of physical servers to virtual hosts allows you to break the 1 application to 1 server mold.  However the increased density in your server room might create hot spots, especially if you’ve decided on using a blade chassis.

That increased density means you’ll also be pushing your hardware harder. This will likely increase your power requirements, slightly.  Newer hardware is indeed more efficient, and technologies like VMware’s DRS Distributed Power Management allow you to move workloads around to less stressed hosts and power off unused resources. The net effect is a possible overall reduction in power usage, but peak times could actually require more.

An Up Front Expense?

Virtualization is a net new expense. Unless you are starting from scratch, you will need to invest in hardware, and software licensing.  I was recently asked to vet the cost of a 24 host, enterprise level virtual environment.  Assuming a requirement of 10 Terabytes of storage, and going with mid tier hardware I came up with an up-front ballpark cost of USD $225,000.  No small change.  Amortize your projected savings carefully. Is it worth the up-front investment? Luckily you can grow your virtual environment easily as required with little to no negative impact on the existing services.

Implement Standards

Virtualization has made provisioning services a snap. You’ve heard all the marketing buzz — reduced time to market, provision servers in seconds!, etc.  Suddenly that 10T of storage is GONE.  But how?

Sprawl. (Yes, up.time can help you with this!)

Back in the days before virtualization, if you needed more resources you had to justify the expense nine ways from Sunday.  When it finally arrived you’d spend a week staging it.  Then testing and finally implementing it, only to have it completely consumed a few months later!  When you planned your virtual infrastructure you WAY over provisioned it, didn’t you?  You thought ahead 3 years like you  did when you bought a single server for that one application.  However now you’re planning for possibly hundreds of workloads.  Need another machine?  No problem, just clone it and wait a few minutes.   Ever have cash burn a hole in your pocket?  Budgets prevent us from blowing that spare cash.  It’s exactly the same in a virtual environment, except the spare cash is extra CPU cycles, storage and memory.  From simply devising a set of rules for managing the virtual machine life cycle, or implementing tools to manage it, the only way you will realize long-term savings is to ensure you’re only using what you need.  Don’t run your VM environment like that TV salesperson’s famous oven — “Set it, and forget it!”.

If you keep these things in mind when building and managing your VMware vSphere environment, or any other virtual infrastructure, you will absolutely be able to do more, with less. Of course <shamesless plug>, up.time can solve you VMware monitoring needs with it’s deep VMware monitor and reports.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »