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!

Demands for more services are increasing and high performance and reliability are expected, yet budgets, labor and floor space are all being constrained. I guess nobody said running a data center was easy.

The need for increased efficiency and reliability points to capacity management processes. And like anything else, you have to crawl before you walk, but the value of capacity management practices is there. So what’s it take to adopt more mature processes?

TeamQuest has released our Capacity Management Maturity Model that identifies different levels of IT management competency.

 

Following the lead of Gartner’s IT Management Process Maturity Model, we’ve drilled down even further to highlight the levels of Capacity Management maturity specifically.

After all, moving to mature Capacity Management tools and processes lowers costs, improves service quality and increases IT productivity since staff can focus on the most important duties rather than fight fires.

Take a look at our latest white paper entitled, Introducing a Capacity Management Maturity Model. Let us know what you think! Post your comments below.

Ten years ago it was all about data collection and working to get good performance from infrastructure components. Toward the end of the last decade the emphasis changed for the better, with IT management tools providing more of a service point of view rather than looking at things from a strictly technical infrastructure point of view.

So what’s next? Jeane-Pierre Garbani at Forrester Research recently wrote about “The Next Decade,” summarizing the progress we are making in the IT management software industry.

Business management looks at IT from a value perspective. They want to know, what business benefits am I getting for my IT dollar? Is my IT organization providing me with the ideal value-to-cost ratio? IT organizations are going to have to focus more on that value-to-cost ratio, says Garbani. I think he is right.

IT management and IT management tools vendors need to focus on optimizing that value-to-cost ratio, helping to ensure that business benefits are realized at the lowest overall cost. As Garbani says, IT management vendors need to position their tools “in the global context of the ‘IT Enterprise’ and show how they will contribute to internal IT optimization.”

What are your thoughts? Click the comments link below.

What were people asking about at CMG this year? Questions varied from workloads, automated reporting and TeamQuest Model, to collecting metrics in AIX and implementing a public cloud.

Read this post from TeamQuest Technology Summit 2009 on TeamQuest software and AIX.

While I can’t go into great detail, I can say that several visitors got what they wanted – a complete answer.

While not known for marketing its services, TeamQuest fielded a few questions about IT Service Optimization (ITSO). Customers saw an ITSO demo or two from Enterprise Performance Specialist Rey Rios along with capacity management tools that complement the ITSO process.

CMG was a great opportunity to continue supporting the individuals and teams responsible for ensuring efficient and scalable IT service delivery to the business.

BTW, stay tuned for more information on TeamQuest Performance Software in the Cloud.

This morning at CMG in Grapevine, Texas, TeamQuest’s Rey Rios gave an excellent talk about TeamQuest IT Service Optimization (ITSO) and how it relates to the broader, more encompassing ITIL framework.

ITSO is really a focused subset of ITIL, making it easier to get quick wins than if you dive headlong into a full ITIL implementation. It is analogous to the way that TeamQuest is able to excel at providing performance tools. We take careful aim on issues that affect the efficiency of IT services, and try not to be distracted by other aspects of systems management. Integration points in TeamQuest software allow customers to use TeamQuest’s specialized tools with whatever service desk or CMDB solution they choose, for example.

ITSO provides a formula for implementing effective ITIL Capacity Management, and TeamQuest tools can aid in that process. This will enable you to balance cost with performance, using business priorities to provide the proper perspective.

For more information about ITSO and ITIL, check out the links in the blog entry about Rey’s earlier CMG presentation. There is a video version of Rey’s presentation available on the TeamQuest website. You can find it on the TeamQuest VideoSeries web page.

TeamQuest Enterprise Performance Specialist Rey Rios gave an energized and insightful presentation called “Complement Your ITSO & ITIL Processes with TeamQuest Solutions.”

He used a nice analogy to explain SLAs – ordering food in a restaurant. What are your expectations when you go into a restaurant? You expect to be seated, you expect to look at and order from a menu, and you expect your food in a timely manner. If it’s going to take longer than expected – Paella in this gastronomical example – the customer should know.

Rios left the dinner table to walk the audience through ITIL versions 2 and 3 and compared them to the five-step process created by TeamQuest several years ago called IT Service Optimization.

The pro-ITIL EPS suggested companies interested in ITIL must ask the following questions before jumping into ITIL:
• What is the goal of the business?
• What services do we offer?
• What are our customers’ expectations?

Making the Move Toward Maturity
He referenced the Gartner Maturity Model discussing how companies can move from the chaotic to value stage with the help of TeamQuest software. He said that one in three companies is in the reactive or chaotic stage of maturation – fighting fires at best.

Rio suggests that IT can use TeamQuest software to help ITSO & ITIL endeavors by:
• Ensuring optimal use of IT
• Improving availability and reliability of critical systems
• Providing cost analysis decisions
• Supporting the delivery of business plans
• Decreasing time to incident resolution and quicker root cause analysis
• Providing accurate measurement for decision making

Read a customer’s account of how Rey helped a company realize business benefits through ITSO. The customer, Law School Admission Council, streamlined its infrastructure to completely fulfill its service demands and is applying capacity planning to support a massive roll-out of new applications to hundreds of law schools throughout North America.

Many organizations have saved both time and money by converting underutilized physical servers into virtual machines and consolidating those machines onto fewer physical servers. IT folks are understandably proud of what they’ve done at that point. But if you stop there, you might be leaving money on the table. There can be plenty of additional savings to be had by consolidating virtual machines, hosting multiple applications on some of your virtual machine instances.

How can that save me money?

I recently spoke with Ron Potter, TeamQuest’s Manager of Best Practices. Ron says there are two common avenues organizations can follow to exploit virtualization. The first is one primarily motivated by cost and environmental savings. The second is one of dynamic routing of transactions and images to provide massively scalable operating environments. If your motivator is primarily cost savings and you aren’t pursuing the massively scalable environments using tools such as VMware DRS, then Ron is a proponent for consolidating virtual machine instances, i.e. running more than one app per virtual machine.

Virtual machines need administrators too. Whatever your virtual machine-to-sys admin ratio is, eliminating some of those machines will save you some admin time. That’s time that would otherwise be spent monitoring, maintaining, securing, backing up, and tuning all of those virtual machines. The fewer machine instances you have to manage, whether they are virtual or physical, the less admin time and effort will be required.

Reducing the number of virtual machine instances usually reduces operating system overhead, which will in turn cut demand for physical hardware requirements. Reducing hardware infrastructure will help trim space, power and cooling requirements too.

Ron says not to forget about software license costs. Depending on the OS you are running, you’ll have to pay for each instance, not to mention the inevitable middleware and management software that is required for each virtual machine instance. Depending on the terms of your application software license agreements, there can be big savings there as well. Generally speaking, running software on fewer operating system images will simplify and reduce license costs.

What should I watch out for?

If you have the performance tools necessary to properly plan and monitor your virtualized environment, there’s no technical reason you can’t begin a wave of virtual consolidation after your initial P2V wave of consolidation. You might, however, run into some politics. Your virtualization vendor has likely sold folks on the idea that there should be just one app per virtual machine. You’ll need a plan that can convince everyone that running more than one will still perform while saving money.

You might also see resistance from business units unwilling to share a virtual machine instance with apps from other business units. That issue is probably best settled by working with management. You might need some new chargeback functionality to keep everyone happy.

How do I make it happen?

Create a plan with goals and metrics for success, such as the number of servers decommissioned, software license reductions, or overall cost savings. Make note of service level requirements coming from the customers, departments or business units you are serving.

• Survey your virtualized environment. Take inventory of your virtual machines and the apps running on them. Measure how they are performing now.
• Select candidates for consolidation. Ron has a long list of things to watch for, but suffice it to say you want to look for apps you feel will be complementary rather than competitive when asked to coexist on the same virtual machine instance.
• Run an analytic model to predict how the consolidated environment will actually perform. Will service levels be met? If not, try different configurations or different combinations of apps. The key to fast work here is a fast tool for making accurate predictions.
• Actually commission the consolidation work to take place.
• Monitor the results. Report your success to management!

Get Real

Basically our best practices manager is saying that a lot of the same techniques you used to consolidate physical-to-virtual will work virtual-to-virtual. And you’ll get similar results: savings in hardware, software, space, power, cooling, and system administration requirements.

Ron’s ideas sound like common sense to me, and yet they run contrary to the advice that you may have heard from other vendors. I think it’s because Ron is seeing it more from the point of view of a business manager rather than as a vendor of virtualization technology.

For more detail, be sure to check out Ron’s white paper on this subject, and by all means, add your comments and observations to this blog entry.

ITIL Version 3 is a quantum leap for the best practice framework. It looks at IT as a business process, requiring substantial business input. ITIL V3 is about the best practices needed to run the business of IT. Many find this concept daunting. The good news is that many of the ITIL Version 2 processes still exist in V3, just structured into a business process approach instead of a technology approach. Those familiar with TeamQuest ITSO processes and best practices will have an easier time with the difference as ITSO has been promoting this type of change since 2005 – more than 2 years before ITIL V3.

So what is the value in doing the work, especially if you have already implemented ITIL V2?  First, let me say that ITIL V3 is not for everyone. Many organizations’ culture is counter to ITIL V3 principles so failure would be fairly certain.

For example, cultures where business and IT are housed in separate ivory towers aren’t ideal candidates for success. You know what I’m talking about. The blame game begins at the castle bastions, where accusations are hurled like arrows. This is an extreme example, but I wanted to get my point across that without discussion and collaboration, moving to ITIL V3 will most likely fail.

For those with a viable culture, ITIL V3 will improve the lines of communication. IT will be operated like a business and report results like a business. This will result in IT being accepted as an equal. IT expenditures will be viewed as investments rather than expenses. Those who have already successfully implemented ITIL V3 report huge successes in using IT services to improve business performance and excellent working relationships with business units.

Since many have said that reading the new books is a prescription for insomnia, I have recently written a white paper that gives the reader a high level view. It also explains how TeamQuest solutions continue to facilitate some of the ITIL V3 best practices. Download it now. There is no charge to do so and you need not register to download.

Please let me know of any changes to improve the content. I look forward to your comments.

Until the next time…

Best Regards

Ron

I recently had an article published on SearchNetworking.com regarding the translation of network usage into costs. This article explains how one of the ITSO (IT Service Optimization) best practices can be extended beyond the server space.   

The process is the same whether addressing server, network, print or other IT infrastructure service. This ITSO best practice covers identifying the components of an application, IT service or business process; collecting the usage data from the individual components; aggregating the usage into workloads or ITRs (IT Resources); allocating fixed, variable and overhead costs equitably and then reporting the results to senior IT and Business management. 

IT infrastructure usage is communicated in business terms at the end of this process so the organization better understands the value of IT.  

Experience shows that ITSO best practices can be extended across the organization. All it takes is a good understanding of ITSO and a little creativity. What have you done with ITSO? I would like to hear about it.

Until the next time…

Ron

Just about everyone has access to a dictionary these days. Just because you bought one and put it on your shelf doesn’t mean you have to read every definition and use every word in the book. That’s time consuming and provides limited value. My apologies if you’re a lexicographer.

I’ve read the ITIL tomes – versions 1 through 3 – and while they provide value, I don’t believe that every person in the organization should read them from cover to cover. Just like a dictionary, you should use what’s best for your situation.

ITSO and ITIL are comprehensive sets of processes and best practices. Since every IT shop is different, they have different needs. Since IT professionals have their strengths and weaknesses, the best action is to winnow through the best practices and select the disciplines that fit your circumstances, and provide measureable and meaningful value.

If one of your organization’s shortcomings is in the Capacity Management or IT Service Management arena, I urge you to take a look at TeamQuest IT Service Optimization (ITSO). Just like a dictionary, there may be components of the framework that can provide immediate value.

In these tough business times, every little step you take to improve service quality and reduce costs is important to your organization’s survival. Find out more – ITSO. 

Remember, ITSO and ITIL are frameworks. They are collections of processes and best practices. It’s up to you to determine which components provide value to your organization and then implement them; fill in the blanks in the framework.

By the way, I found some words in my dictionary that best describe this process - “flexibility” and “customization.”

I’m putting my dictionary back on the shelf for now.

Until the next time…

Best Regards,

Ron