I’m attending the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week, and I’m hearing a lot about virtualization and cloud. In fact, I’ve heard analysts joke (I think) that they are required to mention “cloud” at least once in every presentation. Here are some of things I’m hearing analyst say in regards to virtualization:

“Nearly 50% of all installed x86 server workloads are now running in virtual machines.”

“In 2012, more virtual machines will be deployed than in 2001 through 2009 put together.”

“Virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers.”

“The more you virtualize, the more physical layer problems you introduce.”

These are the types of comments that have me so excited about TeamQuest’s acquisition of Performance Surveyor. If you can’t manage capacity successfully in virtual and cloud environments, you run the risk of creating unwanted downtime or just plain waste resources and money that virtualization and cloud computing promise to deliver.

Performance Surveyor is trusted in environments with more than 40,000 servers, tens of thousands of virtual servers, and hundreds of thousands of network elements. All of this scalability, with the focus solely on providing service-centric virtual and cloud computing management and optimization.

Listen to a podcast that discusses the impact of Performance Surveyor.

Read more about Performance Surveyor here and here.

Follow me at @jwia on Twitter, TeamQuest at @TeamQuest_Corp, and keep up with all of the real time information that is flowing from the Gartner Data Center Conference by following the hashtag #GartnerDC.

Joe

It’s official! TeamQuest purchased Performance Surveyor. You can read about the acquisition in the news release. If you want to hear what this means for TeamQuest and the company’s plans to help IT optimize dynamic environments, listen here.

We’re putting the control in your hands. You can own a completely vendor agnostic, capacity management solution.

We’re changing the rules. You can immediately increase your capacity management maturity without a massive implementation.

We’re keeping it simple. You can completely replace your underlying infrastructure management toolsets and continue to do automated capacity management with our solution.

Of course, we’re excited about this news, but we’d like to hear your thoughts on the role capacity management plays in your dynamic environments. How do you realize the benefits of capacity management in your IT environment?

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. 

How’s your Tetris game? Looks like that maddening game is a good analogy for dealing with demanding workloads - much like what you should expect when managing today’s virtualized environments.

Estimation, analytical modeling and synthetic load testing are the three best ways to predict workload capacity requirements. Up front planning can help you efficiently manage those workloads.

Of the three options mentioned above, you should have a good understanding of what will work best in your environment (virtual and physical, homogeneous and heterogeneous, simple and complex). Remember, managing your environment is part of your journey to simplifying your work.

Read an excerpt from the white paper below and check it out for yourself.

Tetris-like blocks symbolize the irregularities among different workloads. A simple workload with a moderate need for resources would be represented by a basic two-piece block. Higher needs for resources and higher complexity would cause the block to expand in various directions.

The larger and less symmetric the blocks get, the harder it is to combine them. An inability to combine the blocks translates into workloads that are starved for resources and can’t be migrated to another host. All of a sudden, two of the key mechanisms that enable flexibility in virtualized environments become unusable. And even if you were able to combine them, large asymmetric blocks will most likely lead to white space fragmentation and lower resources utilization than you calculated and planned for.

White paper

Is this something you’ve dealt with? Let me know which option worked best in your environment and why?

Enjoy the journey.

Vernon

Well, I finally heard the word that I’ve known to be true in pretty much every emerging data center technology that has come about in the past 20 years of TeamQuest’s existence. “Sprawl.” But now it’s turned from “virtual sprawl” to “cloud sprawl.” In sitting in one of the key notes yesterday, I heard Gartner’s Ray Paquet enunciate the words that make my skin crawl. Sprawl!

The only cure for technology sprawl are the fundamentals of our IT Service Optimization (or ITSO, hence the name of this blog) process. A combination of capacity management people, process, and tools is the cure. With the advent of recent technology like virtualization and cloud computing, people thought capacity would not be a problem. But, the fact remains that data center space along with power and cooling is still one of the top priorities of CIOs across the globe. Yet people thought capacity management was dead, right? Wrong.

If you’d like to keep up with the rest of the Gartner Data Center Conference, you can follow the #GartnerDC hashtag, follow me at @jwia on Twitter, or keep checking this blog for updates. Oh, and you can always join our LinkedIn Group.

All for now,

Joe

Speaking recently at a Gartner conference, Gartner analyst Milind Govekar said through 2015, less than 25% of enterprises will derive full benefits of virtualization and cloud computing.

Why? Because of the lack of understanding and investment in capacity planning.

He went on to say there is a perception that buying more compute resource capacity will solve performance and availability problems for every capacity-related incident. It doesn’t. And many think it’s cheaper to overprovision than to mess with planning. It isn’t.

Govekar said through 2015, 75% of organizations will plan compute resource elasticity by overprovisioning compute resources but will continue to face major outages.

Don’t let that be you. It is a journey to go from simply overprovisioning to proactive planning. And yes, there are likely to be some speedbumps along the way. But it’s worth it from so many angles. And you have a trusted companion to guide you.

Join the Journey!

Jennifer

We recently had the opportunity to listen to Charles Babcock, editor-at-large of InformationWeek, speak about the much discussed topic of cloud computing at the TeamQuest Technology Summit. Babcock reinforced a couple of themes that we have been saying all along during the advent of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is not a revolution, but as Mr. Babcock terms it, a “convergence” of several technologies used together in a unique way. When it comes right down to it, a cloud environment still consists of traditional compute fabric we all have grown accustom to in the past several years with virtualization in the forefront. The main twist to the technology of cloud computing is the method of delivery to the end user.

Listen to the Clip: Cloud Computing Evolution vs. Revolution

We need to avoid “compulsive over-provisioning,”  which is something that we have seen in a majority of IT organizations in early stages of Capacity Management Maturity. Joining the journey to becoming a mature IT organization takes time and effort and a key component is understanding the current state of capacity coupled with forecasted capacity requirements. Having strong capacity management processes in place allow you to focus on bringing value to the business versus reacting to performance problems and incidents that arise due to capacity issues.

Listen to the Clip: Compulsive Over-prosivisioning

I like the idea of using the cloud to dodge problems with over-provisioning. I should point out though, that contrary to popular belief, tapping cloud computing still requires careful performance and capacity management. To achieve IT Service Optimization using the cloud, you need to analyze the financial aspects as well as performance, capacity, and risk when determining how, how much, and when to use cloud services. Keep in mind, the cloud is more complicated than any one of the technologies that converge to comprise it. As you prepare for it, you’ll want to tap the right performance and capacity tools to ensure that cloud projects successfully deliver business value.

If you are interested in learning more from Mr. Babcock regarding cloud computing, check out his book, Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution. You might also be interested in this white paper from TeamQuest: Capacity Management Ensures Success for Enterprise Cloud Consumers.

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!

Today Mike DenHartog of TeamQuest clued attendees in at CMG 2009 on the nuances of managing the performance of AIX LPARs in a PowerVM virtualized environment. Mike told the audience it’s important to know the meaning of key parameters. You need to understand what exactly the data are telling you about performance when using advanced virtualization features available for allocating resources to IBM LPARs. Based on comments from the audience, some tools out there do not report information in a sensible manner, adding to the potential confusion for people striving to understand LPAR performance.

Mike also provided some capacity planning examples using TeamQuest Model to prepare for workload consolidation and migration in an AIX environment. He showed how TeamQuest Model can be used to answer what-if questions regarding LPAR configuration parameters such as:

1. Entitled capacity
2. Capped/uncapped
3. Variable capacity weight
4. Number of processors
5. SMT on or off

The presentation included some graphs showing just how these parameters can change system performance.

This presentation included a lot of practical information and examples for folks using LPARs. As I understand it, we will have a white paper and/or video edition of this presentation available in the near future. I’ll update this blog entry as soon as I have a URL to share with you.

Guess what? TeamQuest covered virtualization at its user group yesterday. That isn’t a big surprise since the company’s latest release is pretty focused on maximizing VMware performance.

TeamQuest Engineer Scott Johnson delivered his “Business Benefits of our VMware Modeling Solution” presentation in a brief 30 minutes. He focused on a process such as IT Service Optimization, increasing IT maturity, and beginning with the end in mind.

“To be blunt,” said Johnson, “the primary benefit of capacity modeling for the VMware environment is that it will save you money.”

VMware referenced an IDC report that cited 20-30 percent lower cost-per-application savings, for example.

Other benefits of VM ware modeling cited by Johnson included:

• Better service to our customers
• Efficient use of existing resources
• Good stewardship of capital investments for the future

Johnson compared achieving the benefits of modeling VMware to hiking Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park.

Success is fraught with obstacles and risk. Companies and individuals must focus, persevere and keep the end-goal in mind.

I believe Johnson will go into more technical detail in his vendor presentation which will be covered later this week.