Today we are “turning it up to 11″ with TeamQuest Performance Software Release 11, a new suite comprised of four products:

• TeamQuest Analyzer — IT performance analysis
• TeamQuest Surveyor — Enterprise capacity management
• TeamQuest Predictor — Capacity planning
• TeamQuest CMIS — Distributed Capacity Management Information System

The new release brings newly acquired Performance Surveyor fully into our product suite as TeamQuest Surveyor. Other new capabilities include:

1. TeamQuest Administration Console — a new component of TeamQuest CMIS providing policy-based management of TeamQuest software in larger installations
2. Remote agentless collection of performance data from Microsoft Hyper-V
3. Support for new versions various hypervisors and operating systems
4. And much more!

Check out our press release for more details.

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.

Many of us who have been involved with Capacity Management for some time have experienced the situation of not being able to recreate past work. We built a plan and then six months later, have a need to measure progress against predictions. The only problem is that we can’t recreate the original results. I have spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong with my calculations, only to find out that I had changed my process to create the report, missed a parameter or two and used a different reporting tool against someone else’s data. After being embarrassed a time or two, I took steps to avoid those mistakes.

Well now you don’t have to worry about those reporting and data disconnects. There is an ITIL Version 3 concept, called a Capacity Management Information System or CMIS, which can make life easier for all of us by helping to prevent problems such as these. An upgrade to the previous ITIL Capacity Management Database (CDB), the CMIS not only stores a wide variety of infrastructure usage and performance data, it includes a set of reporting tools. The CMIS is the book of record for all Capacity Management usage and performance data so no questioning who collected what data and how. A common reporting tool means you don’t have to worry about different reporting algorithms or distribution methodologies which can skew results. Operating with a consistent set of reporting tools and synchronized data, you will get the same answer every time, even if it’s six months from now.

Want to know more? Read our new CMIS white paper or contact your friendly TeamQuest representative to find out how TeamQuest’s implementation of a CMIS can help you maintain consistency and uniformity in your reporting.

Until the next post,

Ron

One of the more common complaints I hear is the issue of conflicting reports. Two different people using different tools to report against data from the same time period arrive at different answers. The situation drives senior management crazy and makes them question the credibility of both parties.

The problem? The people probably use different reporting tools against independently collected data, probably with different collection parameters. Some data may be averaged over the entire collection period where others may be an accumulation of 30-second data points within that same collection period. One may be using a statistical analysis program, the other a spreadsheet.

The solution? Perhaps a Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) is the answer. It is a database or databases containing all capacity management information, including service level and business statistics. All data in the CMIS is synchronized so collection parameters and periods are consistent across the enterprise. The CMIS also has a reporting element to ensure that two different people reporting on the same data with the same parameters will arrive at the same results every time.

Want more information? Watch this blog for the announcement of my upcoming white paper on the subject.

Until the next post

Ron