Today, our newest release of TeamQuest Performance Software hit the market. We are proud to announce that we are giving IT professionals the ability to monitor and analyze the performance of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (KVM) and to capacity plan for migrations to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

KVM is a widely adopted and well respected virtualization platform. With this release, you can detect and quickly troubleshoot performance issues in your virtual environment – regardless of OS. We now support VMware, Hyper-V, Solaris Zones, Containers and LDOMs, and IBM LPARs and WPARs. The addition of KVM makes the TeamQuest solution the front runner in adapting to the complex, heterogeneous virtual and cloud environments that are being built today.

When people think of IaaS, they usually think of Amazon first. We’ve given you the power to create what-if scenarios to evaluate just how a workload will perform in an Amazon EC2 cloud with TeamQuest Predictor. No more hoping that things won’t break or guessing how much it will cost – we take the guesswork out of the equation. This is yet another valuable addition to the multi-vendor environment coverage that enterprises need to support their business.

We are all about giving you options, and another noteworthy item is our PostgreSQL alternative to Oracle or the TeamQuest proprietary database. Just another way we continue to listen to our customers and build a solution that makes them successful.

For more information, check out the press release.

If you’re at this level, you probably…

1. Compile workload information across tiers to analyze and report on services;
2. Have established a dialogue with the business, trying to anticipate changes; and
3. Use analytical modeling to predict the outcome of those scenarios.

However, you also probably…

1. Are not accustomed to reporting IT results in business productivity or financial terms.

The Service level is a continuation of the Proactive level, but with a stronger focus on
workloads representing services. The view is extended to cover the full spectrum of
workloads that make up a particular service, from the end user to the backend systems.
By automatically gathering the information needed from each of the components that
comprise the service, one can detect, prioritize and execute those actions that will
improve end user experience.

To achieve this, simple trending is not enough to predict future needs. When looking
at the complex environment needed to deliver a service, it is necessary to have more
advanced tools that predict the effects of future business changes.
Analytical modeling offers a simple yet powerful way to address different scenarios.
Based on the empirical data collected during the monitoring of systems, models of the
systems are created. These models can then be used to accurately predict the impact
of growth, changes to the infrastructure, migration of workloads, etc.

Reaching this level takes more than a focus on technology. You also
need to establish processes for exchanging information. To identify
and verify prediction scenarios, there must be a two-way
communication between the business and IT. If the business wants IT to provide a
certain level of service without excessive over-provisioning, it needs to supply IT with
growth projections and business plans. On the other hand, to demonstrate the value
of the information received, IT needs to share cost-benefit analyses of this planning
with the business. Building this mutual trust is integral to success.

At this level, since IT knows the characteristics and importance of different services,
they can start to optimize the usage of them by implementing chargeback mechanisms
where different parties pay for the actual use of resources. This will yield not only a
fair distribution of cost, but also a way for IT to influence the usage patterns. Offering
a discount during low activity hours might smooth out the peaks and troughs often
seen in a data center.

See where your organization falls in the TeamQuest Capacity Management Maturity Model.

At VMworld in San Francisco, I was sitting in a benchmarking session given by VMware and heard a lot about industry standards and peer rankings. It became very apparent that there is a need for a standard KPI to base any benchmarking activity. A perfect fit to address this need for standardization is TeamQuest Performance Indicator or TPI.

TeamQuest Performance Indicator (TPI) is the best KPI. TPI is a single number that represents the overall performance health of your systems and applications. TPI uses a scale of 0 to 100; 0 = can’t get any worse and 100 = can’t get any better. It is calculated automatically and available in real-time. TPI uses sophisticated algorithms behind-the-scenes that account for non-linear behavior of performance.

At our booth at VMworld, we fielded many questions about what TPI is and how it can help organizations standardize their performance health reporting. It made for quite enlightening conversations for those struggle to determine just how healthy their services are.

What are you seeing? Let us know.

First off, VMworld is a crazy experience. If you are in any IT-related field, it truly should be on your bucket list.  With over 25,000 attendees and sponsors, you have ample room to get lost in pretty much whatever you’d like. But there is one issue I see with the event…it doesn’t address capacity management very well.

I have heard references to planning your infrastructure but it doesn’t seem to be a priority at all. Agility is one of the main drivers of virtualization and cloud computing. And if you don’t plan properly, you can throw agility out the window. You’ll either be wasting time, money, space, energy, and resources or you’ll have a customer screaming in your ear because you just cannot provide the services your business requires.

So, here’s my plea. Focus on proper capacity planning people, process, and tools. What would you say if I told you we recently helped a large financial services organization reclaim >2,000  VMs in less than 5 minutes?  Well, it’s true. And it begs the question, how in the world did 2,000 unneeded VMs get created in the first place? I know…poor capacity planning.

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.

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