VIRTUALIZATION CHANGES THE GAME for performance monitoring and management. Read on for a primer on optimizimizing virtual environments, without compromising performance. Automation and adaptability is key….
Ah, virtualization…the promise of infinite flexibility and an example of software and hardware working together in perfect harmony to solve real problems within the data center. Without question, virtualization is a technology that is transforming the IT landscape and the practice holds significant promise to those who are looking to improve availability and IT processes — and ultimately make IT more responsive to business needs.
Virtualization provides too many benefits to just stand by and watch. According to the Yankee Group, 9 out of every 10 enterprises will have implemented virtualization into their IT infrastructure by the end of 2007. While the business case for adopting virtual infrastructure technology is clear and compelling, it is important for companies to understand the performance characteristics of virtualization so they can first put the right management tools and business drivers in place. One area in need of attention is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Most companies recognize the value that application and performance monitoring brings to the table. Keeping a close watch on all systems and applications to ensure they are available, and then having the technology in place to resolve the issues and report back to the business with a clean bill of service health provides a level of assurance that can't be quantified in dollars and cents. ("Priceless") But just when everyone gets comfortable, virtualization comes along and changes the IT infrastructure into a dynamic and fluid (and chaotic!) entity.
Given that virtualization implies continual change, managing performance in a virtual environment will require the ability to adapt constantly to changing behavior patterns. While it has always been a challenge to manage the performance of all the moving (and changing) parts that comprise a company's IT systems, virtualization technologies promise to make it all that much more complex.
Certainly, existing systems management tools have been good at understanding infrastructure availability, but they lack visibility into the behavior of virtual resources and application performance. With Gartner reporting that 27 percent of IT executives have no confidence in their current performance monitoring tools, how can companies have confidence in virtualized environments if there is no confidence in the physical world?
DON'T HATE - AUTOMATE!
The industry is going to continue to see an up tick in the request for virtualization technologies, so we'd better get used to dealing with added complexity and constantly changing environments. The bottom line is that enterprises will never be able to scale their virtual and physical data center environments without automation.
Why? Because we have reached a point where it is humanly impossible to keep track of all of the constantly changing components and events within IT that affect the quality of service and the user experience. However through automation - and the availability of self-learning and continuously adaptive technology — we are able to achieve a level of business intelligence that allows us to understand system behavior and anticipate user interactions, heading off any anticipated problems before they even occur.
This approach makes performance management more intuitive and efficient. Using intelligence in this capacity - to automate the decision-making processes --represents a shift in thinking about managing IT, and the industry is following suit as more and more system administrators turn to automated, behavior-based tools in order to scale along with the increase in user demand.
What do you think accurate, realtime knowledge is worth to a system administrator who is in the IT trenches struggling to return a critical server to operation? Or a team in a data center where there is literally no physical room to house servers? Or maybe the question is better positioned as "what is the cost of downtime and will I have to pay Dr. Evil 'One Billion Dollars' to get up and running again?"
BEST PRACTICES: GET PREDICTABLE!
IT is supporting a mind-boggling number of increasingly complex and unpredictable user and technology interactions. Without the restrictions imposed by siloed, proprietary infrastructure platforms, performance has become difficult to predict. To restore predictability and bring performance consistency to virtual environments, IT management needs to adapt in the following ways:
SELF-LEARNING CAPABILITY: Heuristics and behavior analysis have been used in the IT security realm for years. Real-time behavior analysis provides the same benefit of self-learning anomaly detection in the data center. Rather than trying to model constantly changing performance variables, performance management should analyze behavior in real time and correlate infrastructure performance quickly to application performance and vice versa.
AUTOMATED THRESHOLD MANAGEMENT: As part of the self- learning capability, thresholds should be adaptive. Performance management tools for virtual environments should be able to learn and build behavior profiles for servers, virtual machines (VMs) and applications and also adapt thresholds for changing behavior.
VISIBILITY INTO INDIVIDUAL VM AND SYSTEM BEHAVIOR: With so many moving parts in a virtual infrastructure, it can be nearly impossible to isolate the cause of an application performance issue. It is critical to have visibility into the health of each VM and the health of the overall system.
PROACTIVE CAPACITY PLANNING: Performance management tools need to offer resource allocation and capacity planning before deployment as well as in production. The value of virtualization is flexibility and resource optimization. Tools that can deliver that optimization from the onset are the most valuable.
CONCLUSION
The benefits of virtualization are compelling, but successful adoption depends on having the right skills, management tools and business drivers in place. One critical area of importance is application and performance monitoring and how that process will be able to function effectively in a virtualized environment.
Companies will need to get a better grip on managing performance in a virtual environment by implementing management systems capable of learning and adapting to constant change. Self-learning performance management technology provides visibility into the behavior and the interdependencies of the virtual and physical resources and--most importantly--the applications and business functions they support.
By Jean-François Huard
No comments:
Post a Comment