Cloud computing has rapidly and dramatically changed the model for distributing and managing services. With this new model, many benefits and savings are achieved, but it also comes with challenges when it comes to developing the right strategy that fits your organizational needs.

Many IT organizations do not fully understand the potential conflicts of a cloud environment or lack the visibility into the performance of the application or service, according to the a 2011 Forrester Consulting study.

When it comes to managing capacity and performance in the cloud, many IT organizations are not taking full advantage of the benefits that can be provided by establishing a good capacity management process and using their capacity management tools to gain the full benefits.

HOW CAPACITY PLANNING CAN HELP IN MY CLOUD COMPUTING?

 1.    Planning your cloud environment

Planning is essential in any process.  Provisioning in the cloud too quickly can lead to many pitfalls, like losing total control of your IT process, overestimating your cloud capabilities and exponentially increasing the cost of your cloud initiative.  Planning will also speed up the release of new IT services into the cloud.

“Because the cost of cloud computing is directly linked to resource usage, planning the capacity needed to process a workload in the cloud is directly linked to an estimate of cost and consequently to an informed decision about the choices that are now available to IT.”
The Key to Cloud and Virtual Computing – Managing and Planning Capacity in 2011 and beyond – Forrester Consulting

Keep in mind the following when planning:

1)    What services will you offer in the cloud?  What is the initial sizing needed? Do not be tempted to add everything.  You need to understand your applications and your computing resources in the cloud.  Collecting performance data will enable you to understand the resource consumption and provide an estimate to the initial sizing of your cloud environment.

2)    How will it be managed?  Visibility to performance metrics is vital, especially if you are on a public or hybrid cloud.  At the end of the day, these are physical resources that need to me monitored and managed.  If you have a hosting solution, how will you have visibility of these performance metrics?

3)     How will I measure Service Levels?  Whether you are in a private cloud or using a hosting provider, you need to monitor and report on your agreed service levels.  This means, you must have some visibility of the IT service or application, or at least, have information about response time from a user’s perspective.  Otherwise, if you don’t measure these, you are not providing business value.

4)    How will my business change over time?  Planning for spikes, growth, and seasonal changes before you add services and application to the cloud.  According to Forrester, “Workloads evolve with time and business events. Performance monitoring, linked to resource allocation, lets IT operations take advantage of the flexibility offered by virtualization and cloud computing by providing a ‘‘throttle’’ that will constantly adapt resources to the workload as a function of expected performances.”

TeamQuest can assist in your planning by providing decision support for determining which services should be relegated to the cloud and how much of those services should run on the cloud. A careful cost and performance analysis of various options will be required.  TeamQuest Model can assist with your “what-if” scenarios that can prepare you be ready when you encounter spikes, sudden growth and seasonal changes.

2.    Measuring Business Value

Measuring business value means you will have SLAs (service-level agreements) with your cloud provider, setting expectations and responsibilities for both parties and negotiating any penalties for failing to meet those expectations.  But you cannot rely on the hosting partner to provide these metrics for you.

TeamQuest can help you measure the business value by tracking and reporting service performance against SLAs on an ongoing basis on things like response time and throughput service levels.  It will also improve things like mean time between failures (availability), improve IT efficiency and reduce potential impact to the business due to unplanned outages.  All adding to your goal of increasing business value.

3.    Monitoring the Performance

Going beyond measuring business value, you should also measure IT specific metrics in your private cloud and public clouds.  On a private cloud you can monitor your resources and create alerts that can speed restoration by easily drilling down to pinpoint the causes of incidents.

“A strong capacity management process is considered by a majority of respondents as the best approach to avoid performance issues in a virtualized environment”
The key to Cloud and Virtual Computing – Managing and Planning Capacity in 2011 and beyond – Forrester Consulting

You can become proactive by creating a Linear Trending Analysis that takes selected parameter values, calculates a trend line for the selected parameter, and then projects that trend line into the future, thus potentially avoiding a future disaster. All of this is automated and it gets evaluated on a specific schedule (usually every 24 hours).

In a public cloud, you can measure response times and the experience from a customer’s perspective.  You can automate this process to run on a schedule, let’s say every 10 minutes, and alert you on any thresholds you have applied.

4.    Continuous Service Improvement

Change is a constant in IT, and the cloud is no exception.  In fact, because of the complexity nature of the cloud, with a mix of virtual, physical, applications, services, public, private and scalability agility, the change is rapid and competitive.

In order to compete, your cloud initiative should continually improve and re-invent your service offerings.   By doing so, your demand will be affected and the right capacity, at the right time, at the right cost mix will be essential for meeting your desired business goals.
Continuous Service Improvement should start immediately after your cloud implementation is done, not in 9 months.  SLAs are measured, gap analysis conducted, identification of potential risks and efficiency of the services and process must be an ongoing process.  This continuous process is how we gain IT maturity.

The TeamQuest CMIS provides the server infrastructure performance and usage information needed for the IT staff to perform these assessments and assuring a measurable improvement of your services.

As you can see, TeamQuest’s suite of performance and capacity analysis tools can add excellent value to getting the right cloud computing environment in your business.  These set of tools are easy to use, flexible and satisfy the needs of capacity planners, service level managers, performance analysts or predictive modelers in assisting with the cloud configuration, reducing performance issues and reducing all budgets across in your IT organization.

We are pleased to announce that Verizon Wireless has been awarded the 2011 IT Service Optimization (ITSO) Award. Verizon Wireless recently launched Apple’s iPhone 4 on the nation’s fastest and most advanced 4G network. By using TeamQuest software to optimize their IT services, the launch was a complete success.

“The launch of iPhone 4 for Verizon Wireless showcased how we utilize TeamQuest tools to enhance and optimize systems. Through continuous testing and strategic planning, we accomplished a record number of device sales without incurring any critical performance issues or outages,” said Rich Rodgers, Verizon Wireless Executive Director of IT Systems Engineering, Integration and Finance.

Can you hear me now?

Previous ITSO Award winner Law School Administration Council (LSAC) established an IT Service Optimization framework in tandem with TeamQuest software and has been able to streamline its infrastructure to completely fulfill its service demands. LSAC successfully negotiated its peak activity period with no service shortfalls, while adding new services at the same time.

ITSO Award nominees are judged on a variety of criteria:

1. Adoption: Implementation and use of TeamQuest software and best practices
2. Impact: The benefits obtained from implementing TeamQuest software and best practices
3. Innovation: The way the company uses TeamQuest software and best practices
4. Results: Concrete improvement and measurable change

Verizon Wireless implementation of TeamQuest software is a shining example of how to use sound capacity management people, process and tools to bring value to the organization.

Join us in congratulating Verizon Wireless on their achievement!

The rush to virtualize everything NOW has been in vogue for a couple of years. But warning flags were raised at TTS by keynote speaker Leonid Grinshpan, a technical consultant with Oracle. He laid out graphically how much of a performance penalty there can be due to virtualization.

“There are a lot of problems being experienced in the field with virtualization with enterprise applications,” said Grinshpan.

Big companies like Thompson Reuters, for example, even have policy against virtualization their applications due to performance issues.  On that company’s major application, Virtual Machines (VMs) impose an additional overhead which can reduce performance by 15 to 20 percent, and disk I/O sequential read performance can degrade by 15% - 70% depending on the architecture.

He modeled an example of three servers running two applications. When not virtualized, response time was always below the corporate standard of less than eight seconds and typically less than four seconds. Modeling with TeamQuest also highlighted that one server could be dropped and that performance would remain acceptable for both applications. When virtualized, however, the transaction rate soared for one app to more than 30 seconds. This, said Grinshpan, was due to VMs resulting in longer queuing times. He went into detail on queuing theory and showed specific numbers to back it up. All of this will be covered in a white paper that will be posted on the TeamQuest site within a few weeks. His message: VMs cause more CPU utilization and this has to be taken into account.

“Use TeamQuest to model performance and provide the right estimates in a VM environment,” he said.  “For enterprise applications, capacity planning will never be dead.”

One way to address the sprawl of virtualization, said Rey Rios of TeamQuest, was to become far more agile by moving up the stages of the Capacity Management Maturity Model. He recommended the audience assess themselves against the model by visiting the TeamQuest site and completing a self assessment.  That shows which level your organization is currently at and what needs to be done to move up to the next level.

According to Gartner, 60 percent of U.S. companies are at the reactive stage. To move upwards, said Rios, they need the combination of the right tools as well as the right processes and a lot of hard work.

“It is not easy to jump from one level to another as it takes time and effort,” said Rios. “Do it sensibly in small steps. As you see the quick wins, everyone gets on board.”

Ron Potter and Jon Hill from TeamQuest discussed another aspect of agility in a virtual world – the implementation of the Capacity Management Information System (CMIS). It forms a single book of record for all capacity and performance related information for IT infrastructure components

“If you build a CMIS, people and tools know where to go to get information,” said Potter. 

In listening to eBay’s Mazen Rawashdeh and Gartner’s Dave Cappuccio in their Gartner Data Center Conference session discussing how eBay solved their infrastructure and data center challenges, a few things stood out to me:

• A linear relationship between capacity and cost is not a sustainable IT Operations model. If you cannot look at historical data, understand your current capacity status, and be able to plan for future capacity investments, you will have a tough time keeping your costs at a reasonable rate while providing adequate capacity to support all of the services you provide to the business.
• Metrics drive behavior. Think about it…accountability cannot happen without measurement.
• If you are unable to innovate and keep up with the changes around you, you will fail. This is not only good business but also a valuable life lesson.
• Start with the why, not the what. Help your teams understand WHY they are doing what they are doing.
• People, process, and tools are the foundation for driving change, efficiency, and ultimately generating revenue.

So, what’s your plan to break the linear correlation between capacity and cost?

Joe

I’m sure many of you are gearing up for your travels to Louisville for itSMF USA Fusion 10. Get ready to plug in and rock the house! We all know everything changes, and with the flood disaster that changed the venue from Nashville, it seems that Fusion 10 will be the perfect setting to dig into all of the new and exciting changes in the wonderful world of ITSM.

As you are heading to the great state of Kentucky, I thought we could give you a little reading material for the trip. TeamQuest is inviting you to see how you can Join the Journey to capacity management maturity. Lower costs, improve service quality and increase IT productivity by moving to more mature Capacity Management tools and processes.

What level is your organization? Chaotic, Reactive, Proactive, Service, or Value? Let us know:

Most businesses today are in Reactive or Proactive stages. To take the next step and reach the Service stage, homogeneous monitoring across heterogeneous platforms and technologies in combination with predictive modeling becomes crucial. This also prepares you for the ultimate level, the Value stage.

For more information, we invite you to visit teamquest.com or you will have the opportunity at itSMF Fusion 10 to talk one-on-one with a TeamQuest capacity management professional by stopping by booth 1921.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, we’ll be tweeting updates throughout the event.

We look forward to talking with you!

When I read the eWeek article entitled, “How to Manage Capacity in Virtualized Environments” I finished wanting more. Actually, I finished realizing TeamQuest already has more to offer.

Explaining the ITIL definition of Capacity Management is great, but how about expanding a bit further and drilling down into the details - from a Capacity Management perspective. Since the author, Rob Smoot, is a Group Product Marketing Manager at VMware, let’s focus on VMware.

TeamQuest offers scalable, agentless performance data collection for both VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors and:

• vSphere 4
• AIX PowerVM, including LPARs and WPARs
• Solaris Containers, Zones, and LDOMs.

TeamQuest Model, one tool in our suite, can predict performance in advance, help to optimize services and avoid costly bottlenecks altogether. We can find the least-expensive, best-performing configurations for P2V consolidation, ensuring that service levels will be met. IT managers can quickly determine the best way to allocate resources to VMware guests. And unlike other tools, TeamQuest Model understands response times inside virtual machines.

Take a look at a previous blog post entitled, “It’s CRAZY to Run Just One App Per Virtual Server.” Ron Potter, TeamQuest’s Manager of Best Practices outlines the benefits of running multiple applications on a virtual machine and the planning needed to ensure you have the right configuration for the right situation. In fact, Potter takes this a step further in his white paper, “Grab More Post-virtualization Savings.”

Also, check out the press release on TeamQuest’s VMware capabilities, or our website on managing a virtual environment, or for some real nitty gritty details, see our white paper entitled, “Managing a Virtual Computing Environment - How TeamQuest Supports VMware’s Virtual Machines.”

Remember virtualization is not a cure-all. Capacity Management improves your virtualization tools. It’s a discipline that, when used with the right tools, allows you to get the most from your virtualization efforts.

If you would like to further the discussion on how to truly manage capacity in virtualized environments, don’t hesitate to contact us directly or leave a comment below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Anybody with a dartboard can claim to have a server capacity planning tool. Unfortunately, companies selling dartboards for capacity planning aren’t likely to be very honest about the sophistication of their tools. It’s caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

So how do you avoid buying a dartboard when accurate predictions is what you really need? What makes a good capacity planning tool? What should you look for in a capacity planning tool?

First off, monitoring performance is not capacity planning. Getting an alarm event 15 minutes before users complain does not constitute capacity planning. Monitoring and alarming are essential components for capacity management, but that’s not capacity planning.

Real time performance data isn’t enough either. Capacity planning always requires a historical record of some sort. But just keeping some historical data available for graphing and charting is not enough. You need more than that for accurate capacity planning.

Beware of companies touting trending as capacity planning. Computer system performance is not linear, and a capacity planning tool needs to know more than just past system performance in order to make accurate predictions about the future. And trending is of no use at all for many projects that involve capacity planning. You can’t plan a server consolidation project with trending, for example.

You should also be wary of tools that do “capacity planning” for server consolidation by adding together the resource utilization of each of the workloads that are being considered for possible consolidation. After normalizing CPU utilization to account for differences in computing capability, the utilization for each workload is added together to determine how much of the target CPU will be utilized after consolidation. A similar calculation is performed for other resources such as memory, I/O, and the network.

This kind of simplistic procedure can be good enough to find potential consolidation candidates, but it leaves way too much out of the equation for making the final decision when consolidating important workloads. You need a tool that understands something of the details regarding your server architecture, more about your applications’ use of that architecture, and how workloads will interact when they are consolidated.

OK, so I’ve said a lot about what isn’t a good capacity planning tool. You’re probably wondering what I would actually recommend. Not to say that less sophisticated methods don’t have their uses, but where critical apps are involved, you want a tool that performs capacity planning using some sort of modeling.

Sometimes when people talk about a “model” they mean a description or diagram. That’s not the kind of model I am talking about in this case. For sure, you need a description of the systems involved, but that description is really just a step in a good capacity planning process. What you want is a tool that can look at that description along with information regarding the incoming workloads, and predict how the systems will perform.

There are at least two types of methods used by capacity planning tools that use modeling to predict performance: simulation modeling and analytic modeling. A good simulation modeling tool will create a queuing network based on the system being modeled and pretend to run the incoming workloads on that network. Simulations like these can be very accurate, but a lot of work is necessary to adequately describe the systems with enough detail for the results to be dependable.

Analytic modeling also takes queuing into account, without pretending to run the incoming workloads on the model. Instead, in a good analytic modeling tool, formulas based on queuing theory are used to mathematically calculate processing times and delays. This type of modeling is much faster and not nearly so tedious to set up. And the results can be just as accurate as with simulation modeling.

Analytic models are not as generalized as what’s possible with simulation modeling, so when a crucial situation arises where a suitable analytic model is not available, it makes sense to put together a simulation model instead. The rest of the time you will want to stick with a much easier and faster analytic modeling process.

So analytic modeling is usually what you want in a capacity planning tool. If you really want to cover your bases, get a tool that can do both analytic and simulation modeling. And check that your capacity planning tool vendor isn’t mis-using the term “analytic” when making claims for their tool. You want to be sure that the tool you pick uses sound methods based on queuing theory to make its calculations, not something more closely resembling the less accurate capacity planning techniques I described in this article.

For more infomation, see teamquest.com/capacityplanning.