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Posts Tagged ‘VMware’

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Manage Capacity and Avoid Downtime During the Holiday Season

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

Online Shopping and Capacity PlanningComing down to the last month of the year, most people are thinking about spending time with their family and what kind of gifts they should get for their loved ones.  While there are still some people that are hesitant on purchasing goods online, the convenience of shopping in your PJ’s is definitely taking over.  According to statistics, the top 3 spending days are Cyber Monday, Green Monday (who knew this existed?) and Free Shipping Day (another day I’ve never heard of).  While shoppers love the ease and convenience, online retailers have to be absolutely sure they can handle the influx of shoppers.

The issue outlined is essentially what capacity planning is all about.  We have discussed capacity at length through a number of posts (See related posts below).  But what if even after doing your due diligence and you still didn’t have enough capacity?  How can you be agile so you can meet the demands of the screaming shoppers? For the users running VMware with vCenter Orchestrator, you can easily integrate it with up.time so if up.time detects an outage or degraded performance, Orchestrator can easily spin up more instances to lighten the load of your servers.  Even if you aren’t using VMware, you can still use Action Profiles to assist in automating the increase of capacity with up.time!

As the statistics show, those of you in retail will probably be smiling this time of the year.  However, if you are not properly managing your capacity, it could be a disaster.

Happy holidays everyone! :)

-Patrick

Related Capacity Planning posts:

Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge
Never Run Out of Disk Space Again with Capacity Management
Cradle To The Grave – Virtualization Capacity Management

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Posted in automation, Capacity Planning, Server Monitoring, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Monitoring | No Comments »

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!

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Posted in Virtualization, virtualization vmware, VMware, VMware Monitoring | 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

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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.

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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

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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

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

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 1 of 2

Monday, November 30th, 2009

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.

The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business.  Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.

In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff.  As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP.  Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage.  At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.

Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure).  This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery.  For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.

How is the experimentation starting?

[ more next week in Part 2 ]

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization | No 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 | No Comments »

Incident Priority Tracking with up.time 5.2

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

With all of the summer vacations happening it’s been a while since my last post but to get back in the swing of things I really wanted to talk about a feature from our newest release of up.time, version 5.2. The “Incident Priority Quadrant” report has gotten a lot of buzz from both existing customers, prospects and the press. Specifically I have one large financial customer who upgraded to up.time 5.2 and started running the “Incident Priority Quadrant” report on a weekly basis for their Tier 1 & 2 Applications. They are now easily able to see where they need to concentrate their very “limited” resources. As well they have been looking at the areas where they can setup some automation. This brings me to another topic – VMware’s new “vCenter Orchestrator™”. up.time 5.2 has direct integration with this drag and drop Automation and Orchestration tool… but I will save all that for my next post.

Incident Priority Quadrant Report

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Posted in IT Management, management, monitoring, uptime, v5, virtualization vmware | No Comments »

SpringSource and VMware

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

As most of you know already, VMware has acquired SpringSource for a quite remarkable $420MM. Along with this purchase comes Hyperic, a struggling open source system’s management vendor that was recently force-merged with SpringSource by communal VCs.
Ultimately, this acquisition sets the stage for development and deployment on cloud computing platforms (PaaS), however, our interest lies in the monitoring, measurement, and management of applications running in the cloud. This is an area in which Hyperic conceivably will be used, however, they will need lots of development effort to enhance their cloud offering (Amazon EC2 API calls to instantiate AMI’s isn’t really what I would call ‘cloud leadership’, or ‘cool’).
I am also curious as to how enterprise customers are going to deal with having open source software managing their environments (there still are a huge number of holdouts in this area, which is why Hyperic was struggling).
This acquisition, in the next 12-18 months, doesn’t help VMware compete against Microsoft’s SCOM in heterogeneous environments (physical, virtual, and multiplatform) – which, in my opinion, poses a greater risk to enterprise adoption.

Alex

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization | No Comments »

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