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.

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.

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.

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.

Day one at CMG and I visited the TeamQuest User Group to hear several presentations. The first one was titled “A Pragmatic Look at Cloud Computing, Capacity Management, and TeamQuest Solutions” by the TeamQuest Director of Product Management Scott Adams.

After going through a brief description of cloud computing and its benefits, Adams spent time discussing TeamQuest’s Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) and the company’s data analysis and automation plans.

TeamQuest provides a CMIS which provides the historical data needed to make informed decisions on new services and major service enhancements. In addition, high level modeling of different scenarios helps leaders understand the potential impacts of new and changed services on the IT infrastructure. For more information, read “Release 10 and ITIL Version 3” on the TeamQuest website.

Adams’ presentation focused more on the relevancy of capacity management and the fact that the cloud is more about delivering services than it is a technology.

As product manager, Adams explained that TeamQuest will focus on:
• Adapting to new technology
• Scaling to the large enterprise
• Automation, real-time analysis

Questions dealt with the ability to service cloud service providers and/or cloud users. How does TeamQuest software interface with the CMDB? Here’s an article on the CMDB.

I’m headed to an event later tonight, but plan to make two more posts before tomorrow morning.

BTW, TeamQuest announced a software release in October 2009. Adams covered many of its benefits and future enhancements in today’s discussion. What do you need in capacity planning software for your IT and business needs?

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.

Yes, I admit it. At one time in my career I was an adrenaline junkie. As a mainframe systems programmer, I lived for those 2 a.m. calls to rush back into work to fix a production problem. In those days if it wasn’t nightly batch issues, it was getting the online system back up quickly after it crashed in the middle of the day. The operating environment was complex and the mental stimulus was highly satisfying. Being the hero got us a lot of recognition. And we all enjoy being heroes of the moment, especially in IT where being a hero boosted your compensation. Life was good.

Then I tried management on for size. I had direct contact with the business unit leaders. What an eye-opener!  Although they appreciated and generously compensated us for all our heroic efforts to keep things running, they were also asking questions about why all these service interruptions and late report deliveries couldn’t be prevented. The business people analyzed and fixed problems proactively on the business side so why couldn’t IT do the same. Some even suggested that we should be wearing colorful wigs, make-up, shiny red noses, polka-dotted suits and floppy shoes. It was then I realized that although we were getting gratification by attacking and solving complex problems, the value of our reactive culture to the business was low.

The company I worked for at the time embarked on an ITIL journey. I was privileged to be part of the planning and implementation phases (feeling “privileged” now, not at that time). Capacity Management was the first process to be implemented. Boy, what a difference!  Within a year or so, many of our production problems had been mitigated. We had time on our hands. We were invited to participate with Enterprise Architecture teams. We found a whole new world out there. We were looking at new technologies and figuring out if and how they could benefit the business, taking it to new heights. It was more interesting work than scurrying around trying to fix problems. Now when I look back, I wonder how I got so caught up in the reactive thing when there are so many more meaningful things I could do to support my business.

Perhaps it’s time for you to turn in your “adrenaline junkie” hat for a “technology planner” hat.

Until the next time…

Ron

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

This survey was taken at the 2009 TeamQuest Technology Summit, April 28-29. We asked attendees to choose their highest priority for 2009. And the winner… Overwhelmingly, it’s virtualization. Is that a surprise? Well, no, but I have two questions. Why is cloud computing so low with a paltry 7 percent and when will processes such as ITIL finally get their comeuppance?

Virtualization - 68%
Virtualization has been the teacher’s pet for the last couple of years. The news articles, analysts and businesses continue to sing its praises. We’ve branched out though. Instead of focusing on server virtualization, we’ve moved to desktop and application virtualization. What’s next? How else are you exploiting virtualization capabilities? Will virtualization continue to be the class favorite?

ITIL - 14% 
Ahhh yes. The processes that work well for IT, but have yet to translate to or get buy-in from the business side. ITIL is a tricky one for me. I see its value. ITIL isn’t easy. ITIL can demand a cultural shift and buy-in from IT staff. ITIL has several processes with just as many starting points. What are you to do?

With the mantra “do more with less” being trumpeted about companies and IT staff, one would think more businesses would welcome some sort of process to improve the delivery of services. Those of you who have had success incorporating an ITIL process or two should share your secrets with other readers. How do you get buy in from the business side?

Green IT - 11%
It’s good to see Green computing working its way up as a priority, but there’s more we in IT can do. I’m talking more than server consolidation. Ron Potter has a few ideas for data center and systems management professionals.

Cloud Computing - 7%
Cloud computing has captured the interest of the IT world in much the same way as virtual servers. It’s a great conversation piece, but its priority seems to be pretty low. Why is that? Is it due to security reasons? Are organizations concerned with someone else being in control?

Craig