The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

« Older Entries

What Everybody Ought to Know about Capacity Planning

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Capacity Planning has been a “hot” topic of discussion amongst the IT community for a while now. We’ve gone through this topic in length on this blog, whitepapers and webinars (see related resources below). In our most recent blog post about IT capacity demands during peak seasonal periods, we established that correct capacity management is a gold mine; mis-managed capacity is the Titanic.

 

Is Capacity Planning Important to my datacenter?

Capacity PlanningCapacity Planning is essential in any IT data center to ensure the performance and availability of IT services and applications. Companies cannot succeed without the IT infrastructure they depend on so it is critical to balance capacity needs, while keeping costs in line.

Successful Capacity Management requires a unified view of your IT Environment. Far too many companies out there spend too much on additional capacity; meanwhile, they have the internal capacity readily available. This is due to lack of visibility into the critical capacity information needed to make the right decisions. This is particularly a problem in mixed vendor environments, multiple platforms and multiple data centers.

 

How do you get complete capacity visibility and reporting to implement effective capacity planning?

Effective capacity management starts with these basics:

  • Capacity PlanningGet accurate and granular capacity insight across all platforms and infrastructure (right down to the bare metal), so you can make high-level decisions and become more proactive
  • Find under-utilized capacity and re-allocate it to where it’s needed
  • Slow down spending on new equipment until existing servers are operating at over 60% and VMs are at a minimum of 90%
  • Get visibility and reporting that can monitor, measure and report on global capacity
  • Collect deep historical data in easy-to-view reports and charts to trend data and proactively
    forecast future capacity needs

 

 

If you are looking for a capacity management and reporting solution, the right tool should answer these critical questions:

  1. How much total capacity do we have?
  2. How much capacity are we currently using?
  3. When and where are we going to run out of capacity next

 

Ultimately, the right ITSM tool will need to empower IT to optimize performance, reliability and efficiency of the IT services it delivers to the business, and its clients, at the best cost. For IT departments with both physical and virtual infrastructures, capacity management will mean the difference between becoming the organization’s gold mine or it’s Titanic. Which do you want to be?

_____

Additional Resources:

Related Blog Posts

Capacity Planning: Do you Know your Virtualized Environment?

Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge

The Do’s and Dont’s of Capacity Planning

Manage Capacity and Avoid Downtime During the Holiday Season

Related Whitepapers

The 6 Capacity Planning Essentials

Related Webinar

3 Simple Steps for Total Control of IT Capacity

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management | 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 »

Is your Capacity Planning Evolving to Meet Business Demand?

Friday, May 11th, 2012

 

As an IT systems management vendor, we get fired up about new technologies including the latest buzz around virtualized capacity, automation and cloud. We respond by building slick tools, dashboards and reports to help solve capacity problems. I believe that’s what (we) systems management providers are supposed to be doing, helping you solve problems. <shamelessplug> Reducing the complexity of capacity planning and management is something we do really well around here at uptime software! </shamelessplug>

capacity planning

Capacity Management is all about evolving IT Operations.

But what about the capacity planning function itself? Does it not need to evolve along with these new deployment technologies? Do current capacity planning functions contribute value to the business by helping them scale to meet demand?

Virtualization, automation and cloud technologies give IT execs more options than ever before in how services will be delivered to the business, but do their current capacity planning processes reflect this same evolution in technologies? For most the answer is still likely “no”.  Most IT organizations still seem to perform capacity planning at the individual component level (server, network, SANs) which does not represent the true capacity requirements of their global facilities and infrastructure resources. The good news here is that you CAN evolve and turn this situation around.

Planning and managing IT capacity at a macro level is critical to delivering cost-efficient and reliable business services in a time frame the business expects. The good news is that today’s virtualization and automation technologies allow flexibility and new cost alternatives so IT execs can choose from a myriad of platforms to run applications and services on. The bad news is that these new virtual and cloud based resources are certainly not free and without new capacity planning processes, the benefits of easy procurement and instant provisioning can quickly turn into over-allocation and cost overrun nightmares.

  • So the message is clear: IT executives need new and more effective capacity planning processes in order to really take advantage of new technologies by optimizing the placement of applications according to criteria such as service level and cost. In addition, capacity planning software and tools can help teams be more effective.

One tactic you might consider as a start is to elevate your capacity planning team. Get it out of the “back room” of IT operations and make it a strategic function. Yes, remove it completely from IT operations and centralize it as a corporate IT function that reports directly to the CIO. This will send an important message to your organization and capacity management will begin to evolve and operate decentralized from technology support groups, such as network, server and storage.

capacity planning software

But Rome wasn’t built in a day….

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in automation, Capacity Planning, cloud, IT Management, IT operations, management, sla, Systems Management, Virtualization | No Comments »

Capacity Planning: Do you Know your Virtualized Environment?

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Remember, the key to capacity planning is knowledge. You cannot manage something you don’t know.  And to stay on that point, since VMware is probably the most popular virtualization technology available, I want to elaborate on VMware capacity planning.

 

up.time communicates with VMware’s vCenter to get all sorts of data and metrics.  For capacity management, we tie all that information neatly into easily digestible reports.

One of these reports is the vSphere Workload Report.  It enables you to visually see the resource usage at the data center, cluster and ESX server level as well as resource pools, vApps and the virtual machines.  With this knowledge in hand, you can easily determine if you are maxing out your VMware environment or if there’s room to better utilize your resources.

 

Quite a lot has been said about our capabilities on VMware but that is not the only virtualization technology we work with.  Another one that we have coverage for is IBM’s LPARs.  The LPAR Workload Report shows the CPU, Memory, Network I/O & Disk I/O for all the LPARs on a pSeries server. The graphs are stacked so not only can you see how the LPARs compare to each other, you also gain insight into the overall workload on your pSeries server.  This empowers you to accurately adjust the CPU entitlements of the LPARs and keep track of the overall workload over time!

Capacity planning might sound like a difficult task to tackle but through my last few posts, I hope I have shed some light on how up.time can assist in fulfilling your capacity management needs.  If you haven’t already done so, download a free trial of up.time and see what it can do for you!

- Patrick

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, monitoring, Systems Management, Virtualization, virtualization vmware, VMware | 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 »

Cradle To The Grave – Virtualization Capacity Management

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

 

Virtualization is not a new technology.

Virtualize Better
Companies of all sizes have utilized virtualization in a number of ways for a long time, even back to UNIX (yes, AIX LPARs and Solaris Zones).  However, how does virtualization help in the context of capacity planning and management in today’s complex IT environment?

One of the key benefits of virtualization is its ability to provide flexibility.  If demand is surging, you can spin up new virtual machines almost instantaneously to meet it.  So, the real question then becomes what should you virtualize?  This isn’t always an easy question to answer because you need to know both how much resources/bandwidth you are currently using, you also need to predict how well the VMs will work on your target physical host.

As mentioned in an earlier post, knowledge is key to capacity planning.  In up.time, the “Server Virtualization Report” helps provide that essential knowledge by automatically identifying physical servers that are good candidates to be virtualized on your target machine.  Simply put, up.time can predict if your physical servers will play nicely in a virtualized environment.  It gives you insight into the future, so you don’t have to spend weeks going through a physical-to-virtual exercise or commit  to buying hardware before you know exactly what you need.

Server Virtualization Report

Server Virtualization Report in up.time

Companies that have taken full advantage of virtualization technologies often end up with another problem: VM sprawl.

Since it’s easy to spin up a new Virtual Machine, many users have a tendency to request VMs all the time.  The result can be a data center infested with VMs that either aren’t being fully utilized or worse yet, not used at all.  This is what we call VM sprawl and it’s a headache for companies that are virtualizing.  These VMs are costing businesses real money in resources that aren’t being used.  In other words, they are taking up capacity that could be used to achieve more important objectives in your organization.

VM Sprawl Report

The "VM Sprawl Report" in up.time

How can up.time help?  A built-in “VM Sprawl Report” identifies the extent of the sprawl across your virtual infrastructure. It shows VMs that are underused, always off, suspended and even VMs that have not been powered on recently.  It also shows trends that can tell you if sprawl is growing or being reduced (a great report if you have a project to reign in sprawl and need to track your progress).  up.time empowers you to identify and solve your VM sprawl problems.

As you can see, we have reports that help you plan and execute your virtualization initiatives from cradle to the grave.  Every company, no matter the size, can reap benefits from using up.time.  Download a free trial of up.time today and take it for a test drive!

- Patrick

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

up.time 6 – Get Your Sneak Peek at our New Baby!

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

The up.time 6 launch is just around the corner (end of the month)! So, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what to expect. This new release is all about one thing; helping you monitor and manage your VMware environment better. Our development team has worked hard make VMware monitoring and management as easy as possible for IT departments, because we know you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.

In addition to the new VMware monitoring and reporting capabilities, up.time 6 continues to deeply monitor across all datacenter infrastructure and applications to give you the most complete set of metrics on performance, availability, and capacity. You’ll have full control over your servers and services across Windows, UNIX (IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP), Linux, VMware, Novell, and more from a single dashboard.

Here’s a quick preview into two of the major additions that will be included in up.time 6:

SMART Monitoring

1. Smart VMware Monitoring. We’ve taken a “Set it and forget it” approach with these new functionalities, allowing IT guys to save some of their time on virtualization monitoring. This includes:

  • Real-time vSync: To ensure your monitoring is fluid with your VMware environment. This will allow you to immediately know when VMs are added or changed with monitoring and alerting that’s automatically applied.
  • Sprawl Control: Be alerted and take automated action on new VMs, including license validation, resource allocation, and security compliance.
  • VM Power Awareness: Monitor power usage in your VMware environment to track energy savings initiatives, isolate power gobbling applications and workloads, and to map power usage to capacity over time.

 

up.time 6 Capacity Planning2. Comprehensive VMware Capacity Planning. We know that the #1 driver of your VMware performance is Capacity, so we’ve been working hard to make VM capacity planning easier. A huge problem across the systems management space is that IT professionals need to know how much capacity they have in their VMware environment, how much they’re currently using, and where the capacity bottlenecks are – and most importantly, when they’re going to run out so that they can prepare for future requirements.  Up.time 6 has addressed these problems by adding:

  • Capacity Bottleneck Trouble-Shooting, which will alert the minute a capacity bottleneck appears so you can regain control by locating them, in minutes, with deep, easy to use (3-click) capacity metrics.
  • Global VMware Capacity Reports, which will allow you to easily see and compare historical capacity trends across VMware (clusters, resource pools, vApps, VMs, ESX hosts, vCenters, Datacenters, and more) to help establish baselines for upgrade or consolidation projects and ensure that you never overspend on, or run out of, capacity again.
  • Virtual Capacity Forecasting. Stop getting caught begging for additional capacity and storage. Our new forecasting will allow you to easily and accurately see when virtual capacity will run out long before it pops up and bites you. It will find the users and business units who are over allocating or inefficiently using storage so that you can address their work practices.

I’m really excited for this release and the functionality that it brings to the table, and I think our clients will be more than pleased with what’s to come!

If you’re looking for a closer look at what I’ve talked about and/or want to see some of this functionality in action, our Product Manager is hosting a “Sneak Peek” webinar today (Oct. 6th) at 4pm EST that I recommend you attend. To register, click here.

- Alex

Tags: , ,
Posted in up.time 6, virtualization vmware | No Comments »

The Cost of Cloud – Part 1: Cloud Cost Analysis

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Clost of Cloud, Cloud CostAs a follow-up to my cost of cloud computing post that had a large response, I decided to do a follow-up cloud cost analysis. This is part 1 of a 3 part series that will be posted over the next few weeks.

The ultimate goal of deploying application or dynamic infrastructure to the cloud is the truly agile and cost-competitive nature of running and managing applications and infrastructure. However, cost can increase exponentially without proper cloud monitoring and cloud cost modeling. It has become crucial for IT to tie cloud success to cost analysis, in addition to overall system performance. This article will provide some common pitfalls and pains around current gaps in cloud costing and deployment, as well as a key set of questions to help IT make smart cloud decisions.

Up to now, the success of applications in cloud, virtual and physical environments have been viewed in only two dimensions – availability and performance. However, perhaps the most important dimension is cost, and it’s cost that will dramatically influence what, when and where IT organizations deploy to the cloud. Presently a major gap is in tooling, where no cloud monitoring tools can help IT and LOBs monitor their cloud costs, predict workload/application cost, notify when costs are escalating, as well as provide standard cloud performance and availability monitoring. However, we do see this tooling issue changing in the near future.

To date, companies have been oblivious to the workload cost of an application running in the cloud, apart from unclear monthly billing. We are entering a new era where performance and availability will be baseline requirements, but workload cost efficiency will be the new key to success. This will be the age of ‘economic compute’ and will be defined by how and where companies can run workloads at the best cost (assuming performance and availability remain constant). It won’t matter if it’s internally run on physical or virtual servers, or in the cloud, as the economics will drive this decision. However, the lynch pin to this costing decision model is missing…

To responsibly manage IT budgets, companies need visibility to the cost and performance data of workloads, applications and dynamic infrastructure services. However, the industry is missing a complete toolset or product suite that can help IT easily see and predict the cost of cloud deployment. Applications and services can be deployed on cloud infrastructure (assuming it returns acceptable performance and availability), but it’s essential for IT to have clear visibility to what the workloads will cost comparatively, across different cloud vendors or even the cost of an internally run workload. How can IT make a cost-conscious decision without the basic cost data of an application, workload or service? Quite simply, it can’t. This is part one of a three part series where the idea of the economic cloud comes into play:

Example #1 – Dynamic Infrastructure Services:

  • Ensure IT Doesn’t Overpay: A company may have provisioned a $500 per month system, but if its CPU is only consumed 10 percent of the time, then one is largely over paying. Now scale that scenario out to a company that is running many services, applications and servers in the cloud.
  • Companies with Many Separate Cloud Accounts: For IT managers trying to understand the cumulative costs of many developers or departments (LOBs) with cloud accounts, it can be almost impossible, with no clear means of reconciling usage (until it’s too late).
  • Manage Cost Across Geographically Dynamic Workloads: For more advanced scenarios, there are now a number of services that allow the creation of cloud instances in specific geographic regions, which enables a new generation of smartphone or mobile applications to exist.  There are millions of smartphone users in the world in non-North American geographies, such as Latin America – imagine if you could dynamically and geographically provision cloud resources that are compute heavy, or can service the requests of these remote smartphone clients, in a cost effective manner.  This reduces bandwidth requirements, increases the response time and can be done on cheaper, temporarily available compute resources. This kind of dynamism is incredibly powerful, yet monitoring the changing costs and performance of these cloud resources is going to be a difficult problem to solve.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more examples of where the economic cloud comes into play and please, let me know your feedback/questions by posting a comment.

Until next week…

Alex

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring, Cloud Virtualization | No Comments »

See you at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

uptime is going to be at VMworld in San Francisco next week.  If you’re heading down and want to join us for a meet and greet at the Press Club on Tuesday from 6:30-9, then please send a note to Lindsay Wagter and she’ll get you on the list.

We have a nice crowd showing up already and we’ll have a handful of uptime (myself included) people around to ensure you’re well looked after.  So, if you’re tired after a day of sessions and are looking for a comfortable place to kick back and relax, enjoy some entertainment on our behalf.

Hope to see you next week.

Alex

Tags: ,
Posted in virtualization vmware | No Comments »

5 Tips for Evaluating IT Systems Management Software

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

First off, I apologize as it’s been a while since my last post. The allure of the summer patio and the beautiful weather has taken its toll. But I’m back and ready to roll…

As I chat with customers and prospects at uptime software, it became clear that most IT professionals would find a  “Systems Management and Server Monitoring Evaluation Guide” very useful. So with that in mind, this blog is themed around how to better evaluate systems management and server monitoring software. We’ve found that our mid-enterprise customers (companies that have between 50-2,500 servers) have some common best practices when it comes to  evaluating various packages to monitor and manage their environment. So, without further ado, here are my “5 Tips For Evaluating IT Systems Management Software:”

1. Applications are becoming dynamic and complicated. Can your monitoring and performance software handle it?

Historically, it’s generally been fairly easy to monitor applications.  They sat on individual pieces of hardware and were relatively siloed.  Nowadays, applications are increasingly componentized and are being abstracted from the underlying hardware platforms.  Witness the prevalence of virtualizationtechnologies such as VMware, AIX LPARs, and Solaris zones, all of which are making great strides in widespread adoption.  It is now incumbent on systems managementvendors to understand these virtualization technologies in great detail and how they impact application monitoring and performance. Remember, your systems management and application monitoring tool should make application monitoring easier for you, not more complicated.

2. Heterogeneous platforms (Virtual, Physical and even Cloud) are the new normal. Your systems management software needs to be able to scale across them all.

In a mid-enterpriseshop, it’s highly unlikely that you’re a single platform and OS.  You’ll need to deal with hardware platforms of many vintages and architectures (and add in the network too).  Mix in virtualization and cloud and if you don’t have a fully features management and monitoring tool, you’re in for a world of grief. (shameless plug -  up.time can oversee all the platforms and environments). So, it’s best to ensure that the tools you are considering can cover all your platforms, both today and tomorrow.

3. Are you future proofing?  What about new technologies?

As technologies change, is your systems management tool ready to grow with you?  Virtualization was, and continues to be, a big disruptor and yet many vendors took years to understand how to introspect and monitor virtual environments.  With the advent of cloud and its adoption, a very similar problem is occurring again.  Can you get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring and managing what we call P-V-C (the physical, virtual, and cloud worlds) together?

4. Can you quickly evaluate and deploy?  Do you need lots of professional services?  Is the tool administration costing you an FTE?

We appreciate that extra time is something you probably don’t have the luxury of. So, at uptime software, we designed up.time to get up and running in under 15 minutes  We want to help you solve problems right away, not send a flock of consultants on-site to bleed you to death.  If you’ve had any experience with consultants (or lawyers), you’ll know what I mean.  I’ve heard our customers and prospects say loud and clear, that they don’t want a full-time admin to babysit and administer their monitoring tool. Is the solution you’re evaluating going to save you time or cost you an FTE to manage it?

5. The Last Tip is the most important. Trial, trial and ….trial. Before you talk to salespeople.

Make sure you fully trial the software before you get too far in the buying process. Don’t get caught being sold to through fancy demos, vapor-ware, and PowerPoint’s. Trial the tool, see what it does and how it acts in your environment. Sure, the marketing says how easy the tool is to use and install, and how deep the metrics are. Believe that and I have some swampland in Florida you might be interested in. If the trial is complicated, frustrating, and doesn’t do what you want, don’t expect the purchased tool to be any better. In fact, in most cases, it’s worse. Remember, it’s up to you to ensure your systems management tool is the right fit for your environment and needs. This is exactly why we provide a free trial at up.time. You don’t need to talk to a salesperson to get it, just download it straight off our website. You’ll be able to get up.time monitoringand reporting in less than 15 minutes! We want to you trial up.time, test it, put it through the paces in your environment. So far, up.time has over 700 customers in 32 countries because our trial let’s people see how up.time works in real-life, not on some fancy and wishful thinking demo.

We know that selecting a Systems Monitoring and Management Vendor can be time consuming. It’s also difficult to determine how to prioritize your needs. Therefore, we created a Systems Monitoring and Management Evaluation Checklist. This checklist is designed to help IT Managers and Administrators as they search for the right solution. Rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper, you can adapt the checklist to fit your needs, as it’s intended to be a generic list that can be updated, expanded and customized depending on your requirements. Edit and modify each of the items as you see fit. Also – if you are evaluating up.time (hint, hint), we’ve pre-populated a checklist with everything up.time has to offer. Click here to download a pdf copy or word document.

Interested in finding out more?  Check out our NEW Evaluation Center!

Alex

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Systems Management | No Comments »

« Older Entries