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.

Engineer Mark Manness’ breakout session focused on understanding that performance instrumentation at all levels (e.g., application, guest OS, virtual machine, host) is necessary for successful capacity management on VMware. The three main takeaways from his presentation:

• Monitoring inside the Guest OS is an important piece of the performance puzzle
• What some of the Host and Virtual Machine metrics mean and how they can be used.
• Appreciate the numerous modeling options available on the VMware platform.
  • Physical to Virtual planning
  • Proper configuration of virtual machines
  • Using data from smaller benchmarks to size larger workloads.

Thanks for the post Mark.

TeamQuest engineer Scott Johnson wanted the audience to walk away with the following main points from his presentation:

• While measuring application response time can be a challenge, there are some reasonable options for passive data collection.
• A fortuitous side effect of some response time monitoring agents is additional data that can be used for application trouble shooting and business intelligence.
• Application measurements can be used to enhance capacity models.

Johnson also noted that transaction rate and response time information are very valuable for monitoring service level agreements. In the world of Unix, Linux, and Windows, there is no standard transaction monitor for applications. For those that grew up in the mainframe world with proprietary transaction monitors, this situation is a bit unsettling. However, several approaches have been developed to address certain classes of applications.One approach for web-based applications is to use synthetic transactions and response time “robots” to initiate and measure these transactions. This approach is called active measurement since it initiates a small artificial load on the application in order to obtain measurement data. This approach provides reasonable indicators of application availability and network latency.Another approach is to instrument the application and then make the response time information available, perhaps through an application log file. Also, the technology used in web applications provides the possibility for web server log file analysis and TCP packet sniffing. These last approaches are usually called passive monitoring since they add no transaction load to the application. The advantage of passive monitoring is the potential to understand the actual rate of application activity and the actual user experience.Thanks to Scott for this post.

The guy pictured above was a part of the entertainment at the North American TTS 2010, where this year’s theme was “Optimize Your IT Zoo.” The San Diego Zoo is famous throughout the world, so in addition to the technical content, there were a number of visitors present who work at the zoo, including the beautiful bird shown here.

In some cases the technical content of the show was blended together with the zoo-based theme. In fact, one of my favorite presentations at this year’s event was a talk by the zoo’s Chief Technical Officer, Robert Erhardt. Here are a few tidbits from my notes:

• Google Street View works inside the San Diego Zoo. Check it out!
• The zoo attaches tiny fraction-of-a-gram RFID devices with little whisker-like antennas to rare mice in order to track them.
• Condors have radios that send data via satellites. The trick needed to make the radios practical was to design antennae that did not interfere with the birds’ ability to fold their wings.
• In California, organizations can qualify for big rebates by implementing power-saving virtualization solutions. They measure your power consumption before and after virtualization and your rebate is calculated based on the reduction in power usage.

I thought Erhardt’s talk was both entertaining and informative. It was good fun that I think exemplifies this year’s summit. If you didn’t make it this year, don’t miss next year’s event which is sure to be even better. At next year’s summit we will celebrate TeamQuest’s 20th year of existence!

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!

Many organizations operate IT in firefighting mode, reacting to performance incidents when they occur. It is surprisingly less often that organizations perform capacity planning up front, though that would ensure that systems will provide necessary service levels without interruption. Being reactive is more expensive, but nonetheless, more common than being proactive. Maybe it’s human nature. It seems that few organizations possess the maturity to see the value of formally addressing capacity issues in an organized manner.

Maybe that’s changing.

A recent Network World article, “10 best IT jobs right now,” predicts that “Capacity Manager” will be an up and coming job title in 2010. In the article Denise Dubie suggests that tough economic conditions combined with added complexity from virtualization should help influence companies to pay more attention to capacity planning. Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester and Cameron Haight of Gartner are both quoted as emphasizing the strategic importance of capacity management for organizations seeking to maximize the value provided to a business by its IT organization.

At TeamQuest we’ve got tools for both proactive and reactive performance management, but we always try to influence customers to take a more proactive, service point of view. We suggest that the organizations with the highest level of capacity management maturity analyze IT capacity in terms of the business value that it can bring to an organization. (See the recent post here on the TeamQuest Capacity Management Maturity Model).

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.

This entry is one in a series of Top 10 lessons learned by Ron Potter in his previous job as the Director of Capacity Planning at a Fortune 100 health insurance provider.

Short term memory goes first

For the most part, executives have a short attention span. You have to keep reminding them of your past accomplishments, especially when the benefits span IT and non-IT departments. For example, IT adds an application that automates a process. As a result, a business unit needs 200 fewer people. Management makes a conscious decision to add costs to IT in order to enjoy the benefits of the overall reduction. During the next budget cycle, the CIO is attacked because his costs are up while others are substantially down. What went wrong?

When we were developing IT Service Optimization (ITSO) processes, we noticed that several successful IT organizations kept a historical log of their accomplishments and the overall benefits the organization enjoyed as a result of the work. Every year the previous year’s log would be included in the budget submission. A log reminds management of the decisions made over the past year where tradeoffs between technology expense and business cost reductions were made. Doing so usually results in much more constructive budget discussions. As a result, historical logging has been, and will continue to be, an important part of ITSO.  It is included in Step 5 - Manage service performance.

For more information on ITSO, please visit our website or you can always contact us.

Until the next post…

Ron

Enterprise Performance Specialist John Seifert recently spoke to performance analysts and capacity planners at CMG about the chart types and functions available in TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter.

The three main benefits from the software include the ability to:
Align performance analysis and reporting with business and IT services
Group and manage IT resources across the enterprise
Show and report on relationships within the enterprise

The best illustration he provided was of a VMware report (slide 60), which showed an array of ways to convey information, analyze data, and present performance/capacity data in an effective way. This is the kind of information that presents itself well to management.

Yes, the audience saw the numerous chart types such as table, line, pie, area, heat map, and others. Seifert explained the pros and cons of each and shared his favorites. He did the same with the chart functions.

An interesting part of the presentation was when John showed the gauges and heat maps. John highlighted the ability to view data and highlight by color which is good for performance analysis and hotspot detection (slide 35) something that will help IT better communicate with business.

His gauge display (slide 33) showed how well your IT assets are being used. John also suggested that gauges can be used for max, mean and min measurements.

Find more information on the latest TeamQuest software release.