Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Successfully Selecting a Real-time Solution for Optimizing Performance and Efficiency in a Virtualized Data Center
A VMTurbo eBook

VMTurbo Inc. | 400 Columbus Ave. | Valhalla NY 10595 | Phone: (914) 495-3500 | www.vmturbo.com VMTurbo Inc. | www.vmturbo.com

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHALLENGES OF VIRTUALIZATION 2.0 ..................................................................................3 KEY REQUIREMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 Performance............................................................................................................................4 Efficiency .................................................................................................................................4 Planning for the Future ............................................................................................................4 SELECTION CRITERIA ..............................................................................................................5 Real-Time Operation ...............................................................................................................5 Closed Loop Control: Tie the Viewing with the Doing ............................................................5 Holistic View of the Entire IT Stack ..........................................................................................6 Planning Tools to Support Growth and Change .......................................................................8 Real-time Monitoring ...............................................................................................................9 Historical Reporting ...............................................................................................................10 Integrated Suite for a Consistent, Systemic Workflow ...........................................................11 Deployment Considerations ..................................................................................................13 Scaling to the Enterprise and Cloud ......................................................................................13 ABOUT VMTURBO ...............................................................................................................14

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

CHALLENGES OF VIRTUALIZATION 2.0

Virtualized Infrastructure Management Checklist
Real-time identification and execution of rich set of actions to resolve and prevent problems, and maintain the environment in a healthy state Proactive analysis to avoid degradations and anomalies (vs. reacting to / detecting threshold violations) Planning tools (predictive analysis for a wide range of scenarios related to planning growth and change of virtual workloads and infrastructure) Closed loop control (Tie the Viewing with the Doing) Integrated suite for a consistent, systemic workflow Single-pane of glass view that includes holistic analysis of entire IT stack Real-time monitoring on infrastructure health, performance and utilization Historical reporting on key performance and efficiency metrics Rapid deployment Scaling to the Enterprise and Cloud Virtualized data center and cloud workloads fluctuate -- by season, by quarter, by the day of the month, day of the week, time of the day, by the second. At the same time, workload priorities fluctuate --by application, by business, by time, by user. Infrastructure managers need AGILITY. Cloud IT environments are increasingly shared, dynamic, constrained, and growing in complexity. Cloud IT environments need AGILITY. Todays IT management is struggling to meet these challenges. Yesterdays tools fall short: Silod by technology and function, stuck in the weeds of collecting too much detailed data, swamped by a myriad of point tools with little intelligence to automate decision making, IT management is unable to adapt to the demand of the new environments. Yesterdays tools are unable to orchestrate across multiple layers of services and infrastructure, leaving the heavy lifting to system administrators. Invariably, ad-hoc approaches are used to address exceedingly complex problems. Large, complex, dynamic environments are manually managed, yielding performance degradation, inefficiencies, waste and unscalable operations failing to deliver the agility promised by virtualization and cloud computing. The good news is that a new generation of management tools is emerging to address these new challenges, falling broadly into two categories: 1. Focused tools that provide a deep dive into a particular aspect of the IT stack (e.g., troubleshooting storage performance issues), or a portion of the closed-loop control (e.g., monitoring tools, or workload placement mechanisms); 2. Integrated platforms (or suites) that provide a broader view of the entire IT stack, and attempt to close the control loop through monitoring, analysis, and control. Deep-dive point tools are indispensable for troubleshooting the increasingly complex IT stack. At the same time, cloud environments call for a new paradigm of closed loop management that ties the viewing with the doing through holistic proactive end-to-end management, with built-in intelligence to automate management decisions. Which management solution is right for you? The answer depends on many factors: size and complexity of your environment, diversity and relative importance of the virtualized applications, fluctuation of workloads, business goals, etc. In this selection guide, we propose criteria to consider when exploring the alternatives. Page 3

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

KEY REQUIREMENTS
There are three central challenges in keeping a virtualized environment running optimally: (1) meeting application performance requirements while (2) optimizing the environments efficiency with respect to utilization and operating expenses; and, (3) planning for the future.

Assuring Application Performance Do I have problems impacting applications?

How do I resolve & prevent problems? How do I share key metrics with stakeholders?

Performance
Job one of any corporate IT environment is to deliver application performance meeting the required quality-of-service goals for all application classes. To meet this goal, its critical to know as close to real time as possible whether there are performance problems, infrastructure bottlenecks, what actions need to be taken to resolve problems, and better yet prevent them in the first place.

Efficiency

Optimizing the Environment How do I maximize resource capacity?

How do I reduce operating expenses? How can I support more classes of workloads?

Of course, if application performance was the only requirement, we could simply over-provision, which would return us to the low utilization metrics associated with a non-virtualized environment. Today many organizations that have deployed virtual infrastructure are challenged with what specific action plans they should take to optimize the efficiency of their environment without compromising the service levels of virtual machines and the applications they support.

Planning for the Future

Planning for the Future How do I virtualize more applications?

What is the impact of changes in demand? What is the impact of hardware changes?

Virtualization is a on-going project for most organizations. Some of these projects are in their early stages. Others are well along toward achieving the levels of virtualization that the organization desires. Tools are required to assist in growth planning and change management within a virtualization capability. Questions about necessary capital equipment investments need to be explored in terms of the behavior of VMs from the existing environment. The load profiles and capacity profiles of virtualization components, taking all resource needs and resource contentions into account, should be used to produce accurate models to guide the processes of infrastructure build-out and optimization. Page 4

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

SELECTION CRITERIA
VMTurbo is the only real-time solution that: Recommends (and automates execution of) a broad set of specific actions based on a wide range of performance metrics; Enables the IT agility required to address the continuously fluctuating demands of today data centers.

No two virtualized environments are the same, and no one-size-fits-all management solution exists. The optimal choice must be driven by your unique application requirements, virtual infrastructure, business requirements, etc. To help you sort through some of these factors and determine the best virtualization management solution for your unique needs, we have compiled a set of criteria to consider when choosing a virtualizations management solution.

Real-Time Operation
Virtualized environments are dynamic subject to rapid changes in the workloads and infrastructure configuration. So the faster the ability to react to a change in the environment, the more of an opportunity there is to achieve more efficiency and better performance.

Whereas other solutions rely on a database to perform the analysis, VMTurbo uses an in-memory analytics model a key requirement in order to respond in realtime. A database-driven approach lacks the performance required to manage thousands of entities (or more) on a real-time basis.

Virtualized environments can have wildly fluctuating dynamics, at levels previously unseen in the world of silod IT environments. Usage spikes whether from rapidly changing market or news events, or more regular daily/weekly/seasonal spikes, etc. can severely tax the data center environment. And if not properly managed, can cause performance bottlenecks, SLA violations and even uptime failures. And in this increasingly dynamic world, what does it take to implement changes with your VM performance optimization tool? How frequently are the recommendations or corrective actions updated? What does it take to make the changes? Do you need to review and manually implement them? What is the time between analysis and action seconds, minutes, hours, or days? After all, some solutions are far from real-time polling data as infrequently as 30 minutes from off-line databases, due to the scalability challenges of collecting large number of parameters across many entities.

The VMTurbo suite uses patented analytics to automate key virtualization management operational procedures including complex workload balancing, real time & continuous rightsizing, and virtual infrastructure performance & capacity management. Through powerful data correlation capabilities VMTurbo provides line of site to problems, in real time, which would otherwise be difficult to identify. Only VMTurbo: Pinpoints the problems; Identifies its impact; Recommends the corrective actions; And can execute them to ensure your virtualized environment is running optimally.

Closed Loop Control: Tie the Viewing with the Doing

Collecting and reporting on performance metrics is fairly straightforward, which is one reason the marketplace is saturated with vendors providing monitoring and reporting tools. Arguably, the real value is in the next step of keeping the data center in a healthy state -- providing you with the specific workload management and infrastructure optimization actions that must be taken in order to prevent performance bottlenecks, maximize utilization, and minimize operating and capital costs.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Holistic View of the Entire IT Stack

VMTurbo is the only solution taking a holistic approach across the IT stack -- analyzing a broad range of performance metrics, with a rich set of actions to keep your environment healthy and efficient.

Bottlenecks and other challenges can pop up throughout the entire IT stack, so your virtualization management approach needs to be as broad: Looking at the virtual machines, physical machines, network and storage infrastructure; Monitoring a sufficiently broad number of parameters, including CPU and Memory congestion, co-scheduling congestion, IO and network bottlenecks, over- and underutilization, etc;

VMTurbo monitors the entire IT stack, including virtual machines, physical machines, storage infrastructure, etc.; and detects problems and bottlenecks such as CPU and Memory congestions, co-scheduling congestion, IO and network bottlenecks, over- and underutilization, and others.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Rich Set of Corrective/Preventive Actions

To keep the environment in the best possible shape, VMTurbo considers both real-time data, historical trends and transient spikes. This provides the basis for a rich set of corrective and preventive actions across the entire infrastructure in real time.

Problems can arise in every layer of your infrastructure, and resolving and preventing them requires a rich set of actions the management solution is able to execute. A management solution must be able to take action across physical, virtual, storage and network components.

VMTurbo recommends and can execute a broad set of actions throughout the physical, virtual, storage and network infrastructure.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Planning Tools to Support Growth and Change

Virtualization redefines IT fundamentals. Decisions can no longer be partitioned across silo boundaries, and actions can result in waste and/or performance problems. Manual ad-hoc management processes are too limited:
Integrated in VMTurbo's virtualization management suite, the Planner is a wizard-based tool that will help you plan workload changes and hardware transformation, provisioning and/or decommissioning.

Changes may require (re-)assignment of workloads; Complexity and waste can grow dramatically when the number of VMs increases, when physical machines vary, when there are constraints (e.g., storage access, security policies), and when the rate of change is high; Ad hoc processes can lead to costly inefficiencies.

Holistic capacity planning involves the 7 use cases illustrated on the left below, along with the 5 key questions to answer regarding workload placement and resource allocation.

Key Questions to Answer: 1. Can I accommodate the load or do I need to add more Server capacity? Can I accommodate the load or do I need to add more Storage capacity? How will my workloads perform on different servers and/or storage Can I consolidate workloads on fewer Servers & Datastores and how will it perform? Where do I place workloads on servers & datastores to achieve optimal performance & utilization of available capacity?

2.

3.

4.

5.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Real-time Monitoring
A proper monitoring solution must offer system administrators complete visibility into their virtual infrastructure by providing:
VMTurbos problem log highlights performance bottlenecks and environment inefficiencies.

Key metrics for managing virtual infrastructure health and assuring application performance; Views that allow administrators to share the relevant subset of monitoring data with IT managers and application owners; A problem log highlighting performance bottlenecks and their related elements at a glance; Powerful grouping capability enables you to organize views of resources by criteria which are aligned to technical or business need of each user.

The VMTurbo Monitor provides a real-time, holistic view of all key physical AND virtual resources - not just CPU and memory, but also IO, Network, Swapping, Ballooning, and CPU Ready queues. The Monitor provides insights into resource problems and bottlenecks, including CPU and Memory congestion, co-scheduling congestion, IO and network bottlenecks, over- and underutilization.

Heat charts quickly identify over- or under-utilized resources. You can see heat charts for VMs, physical hosts, and data stores. While lots of green is a good sign, red (overutilized) and blue(under-utilized) indicators show you opportunities for improvement.

Drill down, zoom in to see trends, inspect problem details. The VMTurbo Monitor provides real-time answers to the following key questions: How am I doing NOW? Is my environment in a healthy state now? Do I have any problems, and what is their impact?

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Historical Reporting
Managing your virtual infrastructure can be complex and time consuming. It's often a challenge to assess which resources will run out of capacity as the workloads continue to grow; when and where mission-critical applications and virtual machines are disrupted by high storage latencies; which storage can be reclaimed from sprawling dormant VMs; and which data stores will run out of space and when. A reporting tool must enable you to:
VMTurbo provides System Administrators with customizable reports to track, analyze and trend their virtual infrastructure, in order to gain a complete understanding into relevant performance, demand and utilization trends, and detect emerging bottlenecks, identify resource waste and estimate capacity expansion needs.

Determine when workload demands will saturate resources and require capacity expansion; Rapidly identify and eliminate resource congestion and virtual infrastructure bottlenecks; Explore key resources (CPU, Memory, IO, Network, Swapping, Ballooning, CPU Ready queues, Datastore IOPS, Latency & Space); Analyze storage usage, including key categories such as VMDK files, snapshots, logs, configurations, etc. Identify wasted resources from dormant VM sprawl, wasted storage and VMs that are Rightsizing candidates; Create management reports to justify plans for virtual infrastructure growth and change.

VMTurbo identifies over- and under-utilized resources, performance bottlenecks, and trending patterns. The analysis leverages VMTurbo's patent-pending utilization index, which reflects both resource-specific and infrastructure-wide utilization patterns. An integrated suite built on a common architecture, with seamless integration of the tools, data, analytics, and user interface, VMTurbo eliminates the need to learn multiple products with multiple interfaces.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Integrated Suite for a Consistent, Systemic Workflow

The VMTurbo suite supports a systemic life-cycle management process by helping administrators and IT leadership to organize their workflow into a cycle of activities: Monitor system behaviors Resolve and eliminate problems Plan changes and growth Optimize utilization and performance

It is key that the management tools and functions assure consistent actions. For example, a recommendation to shift workloads to an available host by a performance optimizer should not compromise energy minimization provided by a capacity management tool. Similarly, actions recommended by a problem resolution tool should not compromise the performance improvements executed by the optimizer. As organizations scale out virtualization and supports mission-critical applications, it is imperative that consistent, repeatable and automated service delivery processes are adopted to ensure SLAs are consistently met while containing operational costs. When evaluating operations management solutions, organizations should consider their capabilities in the context of how broadly they can address a number of key steps in an integrated, scalable and repeatable process. These steps are illustrated in the diagram on the right, and described in more detail on the following page.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

Proactive vs. Reactive: True Optimization

VMTurbos Virtualization Management Suite not only resolves problems, but also works to proactively keep the data center in a healthy state. It is a proactive system that keeps the managed environment healthy by continuously adjusting and tuning the managed entities, keeping the performance of all the entities at a similar levels. Unlike a threshold-based system that reacts to abnormalities when performance violates thresholds, VMTurbo maintains your data center in a much more stable and predictable state.

Some VM management systems respond to problems, the implication being that that problem has already occurred analogous to firefighters breaking down your door and dousing your entire apartment fire extinguishers. There are two limitations with this approach. First, waiting for a problem to occur prior to initiating action may result in a state far from optimal. By the time the problem has occurred, some damage may have already been done. For example, waiting for a threshold setting to trigger a VM move may have resulted in the environment being substantially unbalanced prior to the move. And worse, the corrective action may be messy and cause other problems, resulting in a cascade effect. Moving a VM to another server may result in unexpected interaction among the VMs, triggering a set of other VM moves and other reactions, driving the environment into a worse state.

Deployment Considerations
An important topic sometimes overlooked is deployment. For example, does the application require setting up agents and authentication access across multiple stacks and regions? If it does, you may have to factor in a potentially complex deployment process involving multiple parties with different needs and priorities. Once it is done, this framework will have to be properly maintained over time which may increase the maintenance cost. Another important factor is how much burden the management solution imposes on your existing infrastructure? For example it may overload your already overloaded corporate or management databases, impose heavy load on your SAN etc. Another factor is how much tweaking you need to make to start getting value from the management app (for example, setting up thresholds, custom policies etc).

The VMTurbo suite is packaged in a single virtual appliance, making it easy to deploy, configure and operate. The suite uses a common infrastructure and is packaged as a single Virtual Appliance. The appliance is self-managing: it installs automatically and supports automated installation and in-place software upgrades. Installed in minutes, the appliance automatically discovers and then monitors and analyzes your virtual infrastructure.

Scaling to the Enterprise and Cloud

The VMTurbo suite is architected as an enterprise class application, supporting distributed deployment, consolidating multiple data centers, clusters, applications, Virtual Centers and supporting cloud-scale environments. Well be with you as you scale your operation to 10,000 VMs and beyond.

Virtualization increases the importance of scalability requirements by orders of magnitude, as it introduces thousands (or more!) of dynamically changing entities that need to be tracked in a holistic manner. When considering a management solution, explore the following metrics: maximum number of managed entities (hosts, virtual machines, datastores, networks etc) a solution can support in a single application instance; time required to discover and present the entities; amount of storage needed; average time required to perform daily tasks such as exploring bottlenecks and suggested resolutions; and the ability to manage the rapidly growing environment from a single pane of glass.

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Selecting a Real-time Solution for Virtualization Performance Management

ABOUT VMTURBO
VMTurbos vision is to provide a killer application for managing virtualized data centers, enabling customers to maximize the ROI of their virtualization investment. Our Virtualization Management Suite automates the decision of what workload to run where and when to maximize the ROI of virtualized and cloud environments, enabling customers to do more with less IT resources. The suite ties the viewing with the doing through abstraction, analytics and automation. With VMTurbo, you can find and fix problems today; automate to prevent problems in the future; and plan for the future and report on how you performed. VMTurbo enables proactive and automated management of workload and resources in virtualized data centers. Only VMTurbo provides a holistic view of your virtual infrastructure, and detailed action plans with respect to workload placement and resource allocation. Our customers accomplish ever more, with less IT resources, by using our suite to analyze, optimize and control their virtual infrastructure. VMTurbo is headquartered in New York, with offices in California, Massachusetts, United Kingdom and Israel.

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