The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

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

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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

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Quick update: We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

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Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring, Cloud Virtualization | 3 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

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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

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Posted in Systems Management | 1 Comment »

Living in the Clouds, The Myth, The Reality

Monday, July 12th, 2010

So the question of the day –  is “the cloud” as an infrastructure alternative becoming more of a reality, or still just a Myth?

A Quick Status Check:

  • We are seeing vendors continue to consolidate their efforts to standardize cloud service offerings and provide new “cloud computing frameworks”. (Terremark, Savvis, Liquid Computing, VMforce  to name a very small handful)
  • We are seeing a cloud services and consultancy eco-system cropping up. (Ala ServiceMesh and Symplified to solve cloud identity management problems, CloudSwitch to solve cloud migrations and vendor management to name a tiny sampling)
  • It’s becoming clearer and clearer that virtualization is a major building block for “cloudifying” our operations, it’s just really not clear what level of virtualization we should be able to achieve in the data center. Nor is it clear how we should deal with all the processes required to reach these seemingly universally desired higher levels of virtualization to facilitate data with “private clouds”. (See Andi Mann’s interesting article on ‘VM Stall’)

So back to the original question – Myth or Reality?

My thought is – still a bit of both.

The idea that you ‘should’ achieve 80%-90% virtualization in the private data center, or that you can deliver anything close to 100% of your IT operations using cloud based services alone continues to be more of a myth than a reality.

Most clients I work with continue to  juggle their needs with respect to computing demand, data security, regulatory requirements and continuous systems manageability. All of this is being weighed across a diverse stack of private, MSP, and cloud service offerings.

Clients express the observation that every vendor is coming out of “the woodwork” to magically solve all of their “cloud” computing problems,  and they realize like you that they need to figure out how to combine several technologies and platforms together to create something unified that’s as unique as their business and technology needs are. Typically this leads to a giant systems management architecture diagram, that looks more like a patchwork quilt of disparate tools, than anything that is remotely manageable or sane. This is typically when I get involved to help our clients  start rationalizing their tool set with our product capabilities – either by  leveraging product capabilities to aggregate data from disparate data sources or to enable the complete removal of tools from their stack to simplify the overall architecture.

From this we quickly see the reality come into focus – there continues to be a need  a systems management tooling that encompasses your needs for presentation, correlation, consolidation, and detection across all physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure. And we need this to be easy to license, deploy, manage and use.

If you are interested in seeing how you might potentially create this reality for yourself, feel free to join me on my next webinar that covers some of these topics “Simplifying Virtual, Physical and Cloud Monitoring”.


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Posted in cloud, IT Management | 2 Comments »

Microsoft finally draws their line in the clouds

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

As many of you are likely aware, last week Ray Ozzie announced that Azure (Microsoft’s cloud service) would go into full production on January 1st, 2010. Azure is interesting because Microsoft wants to keep the paradigm of desktop OS’s as a key part of the architecture with “the cloud” as an adjunct in what they call the “three screens and a cloud” vision. This vision is important, because it makes the cloud real for consumers and makes it more understandable and accessible to the general populace. Project “Dallas” also re-affirms Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing as a whole, Microsoft unveiled just enough details to make the project interesting – i.e.  data-as-a-service.

For all the “evil empire” slag that Microsoft gets, people tend to forget, or ignore, what happens when Microsoft embraces a technology and tries to dominate that market – the technology just gets easier to adopt and becomes more real.

This is an important milestone in the development of the entire “cloud story”. Let’s be clear – Microsoft, due to their size and market position, does not have the need to innovate or invent new paradigms. All they have to do, and what they are good at, is step into nascent markets that are at the edge of becoming mature enough to explode. This is generally a moment of truth for any incumbents, as Microsoft can and does take advantage of their massive resources in an all out war for dominance. Once they ‘put their toes in the water’, they slowly wage a war of attrition on the incumbents, and buy all the best players and minds, until eventually their technology is pervasive.  We have seen this strategy in effect to great success over the years. Remember the browser wars, Database (SQL?), ERP, CRM, Content Management (Sharepoint), Audio Devices (Zune), Console Gaming (XBox) and the list goes on.

So what’s the moral of the story? When Microsoft wades into the game, it’s a very strong sign that it’s time to get with the program and adopt this emerging pardigm.

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Just how disruptive is Cloud technology?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Let’s understand for a moment just how disruptive Cloud and virtualization technologies are to OTHER technologies. Ignore for a moment, all the changes required to business processes, maintenance processes, infrastructure deployment models and all the other stuff people have been beating to death over the past 2 months.

Just how pervasive and challenging is Cloud technology to entrenched technology? Well for one, people are redesigning and re-thinking how we use TCP/IP in order to enable and Long Distance VMotion. That’s right, in order to be able to forklift virtual instances and massive data over the internet, companies like netex have figured out how to make the old building block of the interwebs TCP/IP even better – dubbing their new UDP over IP translation technology “HyperIP”.  HyperIP optimizes TCP/IP so that you can move a full vmware instance over the wire up to 10X faster than usual. (Let’s not even talk about how people will monitor this new disruptive technology, but you can bet it’s the agile players who are even aware of the new challenges in this space).

The potential for this technology is 100% clear, and probably is somewhere in a lab being coveted by the people at VMWare as “my precious” – especially in the context of their desire to get remote DRS as a solidified feature in the VSPHERE platform.   If VMware manages to get this integrated as part of remote DRS and they start forklifting instances to/from and across the Savvis and Terremark clouds this will be a giant leap towards making unified compute and private/public clouds – “as real as it gets”. This doesn’t even take into account the latest ‘turnkey’ private cloud solutions unveiled by VMWare known as VBlocks.

The clouds just zapped TCP/IP, what’s next?

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Posted in agile, Cloud Virtualization, management, virtualization vmware | 1 Comment »

Would you like some HYPE with your Management Tool Soup?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

As a Solutions Architect, part of my job is to work with new prospects who are quite often bombarded by messaging from a wide variety of sources. By the time they get to me, usually ultra-niche players, or platform focused players have tried to convince them that what they need is a tool to solve their needs in a narrow or short sighted manner.

An example of a platform focused player are the tools the have a specific focus, say Windows for instance. Although tools like this appear to be broad, with a solid framework, they fall flat on their face when your organization brings in other platforms. This need will eventually arise in your organization at one point or another because of expansion, a need for new technologies to drive the business or even more importantly when your company has success and buys another company.  The contrast, of course, is a tool that can give you a single point of visibility into all hardware/software stack combos commonly found in the data center – including virtualization stacks.

The question to ask yourself is, what is the cost of going with a niche player? What will the time investment loss be when you are forced to adopt new technologies?

An example of an Ultra-Niche player would be the virtualization-only focused players in the market. Any vendor that focuses specifically and only on VMWare capabilities and visibility would be a great example. One such vendor focuses narrowly on consolidation and migration products. These products have such a narrow scope of focus, and can only be used as such a limited part of the IT systems life cycle.  They end up being thrown out after the consolidation and migration process is complete. More broad tools (like <here is my plug> up.time) in contrast, has the capability to aid you over the entire life cycle of your virtualization project AND most importantly ensure you have visibility over this infrastructure and the application and services that run on them – in the context of the whole data center.

The above two points often act as a point of illumination into the true capability of our product. It is very hard to find a product that incorporates the real useful features of those niche tools, that maintains a broad spectrum of platform support for heterogenous views, and lastly does all of that in an easy to roll out manner. It’s easy to see, that of the 300 to 400 vendors you can find on google that say they do systems and server monitoring, there are only a handful that can say they have the mandate and mission that uptime has set forth to accomplish.

“Ease of use” is a point that cannot be overstressed. In my role, we have displaced many products from much larger competitors, simply because our product focuses squarely on quick roll out and measurable results. We focus on ensuring that a minimum amount of administrative overhead is required to start collecting data that is immediately useful to your organization and then ensuring that that data can be used for a wide variety of uses. All the while the focus is to ensure that the client is able to do “what they need to do”, “when they need it”. Our clients realize that you need a tool that will guide you from simply monitoring infrastructure in a way that encourages adoption and pro-active action from “day 1″, while also allowing your organization to grow into sustainable capacity planning, virtualization planning, and SLA monitoring, reporting, and management.

It’s also very important that clients remember, that it’s the little things that matter. Many products emphasize alot of hype around their latest GUI features. Don’t get me wrong, uptime is no ugly duckling, we have one of the cleanest and most professional UI’s out there. What I am saying is, that clients quickly get caught up in needless or useless visualizations to impress people, not realizing that they are focusing on the features that really matter to the big picture. If your chosen system has a fantastic 3D rotating flaming logo, that’s amazing! I am sure it will likely impress alot of people initially and likely easily get you budget when you present it internally. But if the chosen system doesn’t have the features to laser guide notifications, escalate problems effectively and ensure that your staff don’t get unintelligible or spurious alerts at 3AM – you can bet that flaming logo visualization will be ignored soon and the product will be considered a bad investment down the line, putting you and your team at risk.  

By focusing on the ideas behind the examples above, one can see how quickly you can cut through the hype, avoid tool soup, and ensure that your organization ends up with a toolset that’s going to “get you there today” and “take you there tomorrow”.

I encourage you to join one of our public webinars to see for yourself how different and refreshing it can be to see a product demonstration that focuses on real client challenges…and no you won’t  be left at the end of the presentation asking  yourself if you should get some of that hype with your management tool soup.


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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Systems Management, uptime | 1 Comment »

Adapting to the Integrated Technology Stack: Next Generation IT Systems Management

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

I read  The race for the integrated technology stack, from Enterprise Strategy Group this week. Some completely valid points are made about the transition that IT departments and tool vendors in the ITSM space are going to have to go through to add value to the ‘new’ integrated data center. Virtualization has already challenged many deeply entrenched paradigms that many IT staff, and software vendors, have struggled to adapt to.

Agility from a training and tooling point of view are going to be essential for companies to see success in their rapidly changing environments and ensure that they are able to maintain their IT SLA with their users through this transition. As the integrated stack and adaptive infrastructure continue to gain share in large environments I have to wonder how software vendors, who are already unable to adapt to the rate of change in the data center, will stay relevant.

I see more agile companies like uptime, who already have mature solutions in the virtual systems management & physical server monitoring space, being able to adapt faster and offer solutions that directly address challenges in the new data center well before the big 4 framework vendors are able to align their solutions with the modern day problem set.

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Posted in IT Management, monitoring, sla, uptime, virtualization vmware | No Comments »

Virtualized Virtualization. Is it art?

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I love elegant but useless hacks.  There’s something artful about hacks that provide no real value, other than to make a statement;

“Yes, this can be done”

It’s like scaling Everest, or BASE Jumping the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.  But why do it?  Take, for example, this hack:

Run VMware ESX 3 in a VMware Workstation 6 virtual machine.

Can someone please explain to me why this is useful?

I’m not trying to be being obtuse, or short sighted.  I see the benefit of running ESX within a desktop virtualization platform for, say, quick development purposes, or simply to familiarize one self with the product.  But surely you have a hunk of hardware lying around that would better host ESX and give you more of a real-world feel for it?  Besides, ESX isn’t free.  You have 60 days to evaluate it, and surely you’re not going to purchase a license to run it in a virtual machine.  ESXi is free and can apparently be coerced to run virtualized as well.

So, are hackers artists?  Running a virtualization platform inside a virtualization platform is interesting, but not particularly useful.  It’s a beer’s worth of discussion, but much more than that and you’re thinking too hard about it.  Move on to the next piece in the gallery.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »