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Virtualization has caught the imagination of the IT world. Most enterprises have adopted a technology which comes in many forms. According to Forrester, the number of virtual servers will equal or exceed the number of physical servers by 2011.

Let's take a look at three types of server virtualization - VMware, Sun Solaris Zones and IBM Micro-Partitioning – and how to analyze them using IT Service Analyzer in the context of ITIL processes.

ITIL Processes and TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer
TeamQuest software brings value to many different areas of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. When discussing TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer, however, the focus in on Capacity Management, as well as related disciplines:

Incident Management - Capacity Management supports the Incident Management process by resolving and documenting capacity related incidents.

Problem Management - Capacity Management provides a specialist support role to identify, diagnose and resolve capacity related problems.

Resource Capacity Management - This is responsible for ensuring that all components within the IT Infrastructure have finite resources are monitored and measured, and that the collected data is recorded, analyzed and reported.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer is of immense benefit to these ITIL disciplines. Even when faced with a virtual server environment, this new addition to the TeamQuest suite makes it possible to slice and dice virtualized environments.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer provides a common approach that supports Incident and Problem Management for different types of virtualization. It can report overall performance or capacity utilizations for a physical system, break down the physical system by the virtualization’s component parts and drill-down to specific details within the component parts. Thus TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer opens the door to viewing problems within a virtualized and heterogeneous environment in a unified way.

State-of-the-Art Technology
As it is a Rich Web application, TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer brings the look and feel of the desktop via a web-based GUI that allows administrators and analysts to drag and drop, cut and paste, and access TeamQuest from any desktop or laptop within the enterprise. The Federated Database architecture widens the reach of TeamQuest software across the entire enterprise. Instead of being tied within a specific physical system, TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer extends across multiple databases and systems to provide consolidated end-to-end performance data.

Thus TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer can be used for a wide range of functions. It analyzes and reports on IT service performance. It makes it possible to drill down from IT services to the infrastructure components that support them to investigate and diagnose service performance issues. It identifies the root cause of performance issues, regardless of where in the infrastructure they may reside. And it accomplishes this with ease, within any kind of virtualized environment.

The key to the broad functionality of TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer is TeamQuest's "IT Resource" concept that facilitates the combined performance analysis and reporting of multiple related IT components. IT Resources encompass physical (CPU, server, switch, etc.) or logical components, as well as applications, business units and services.

IT Resources provide for an enterprise-wide drill down capability, crossing technology silos. They can be used to represent physical or logical components, can be linked to other IT Resources to map dependencies, and can group together other IT Resources. TeamQuest automatically builds IT Resources for the physical and logical components it discovers. This is done as soon as TeamQuest is installed. In addition, users may create IT Resources for their specific reporting and analysis needs.. To simplify data presentation, everything can be accessed via an Explorer-like view. By clicking on the icons, users can drill down or up as their needs dictate.

XML Import has been incorporated into TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer. Thus, the user can create IT Resources for additional physical systems using the import facility. If a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) already exists, for example, it is a simple matter to use TeamQuest’s XML schema to rapidly batch load that data into TeamQuest. Thus users are not compelled to harness TeamQuest’s automatic compiling and grouping of resources. They have the option of creating their own resources and groupings in a CMDB (or other location) before having them imported to TeamQuest.

Let’s take a look at how TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer relates to three specific virtualization technologies: Solaris Zones, VMware ESX Server and IBM Micro-Partitioning. Each is represented differently by TeamQuest due to their inherent architectural differences.

Solaris Zones
Solaris Zones is a partitioning technology used to virtualize a single operating system image into multiple operating system (OS) services. This form of virtualization is considered software virtualization. In a Solaris Zone environment, TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer makes available resource usage data for the entire physical system and each individual zone. From a single view, you can see resource usage for the entire physical system along side the resource usage of each zone. Additionally, users can drill down into more detail and see individual workloads and processes running within each zone.

Predefined report templates are provided as part of TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer for the various forms of virtualization. These templates will display single view mentioned previously. All the user needs to do is select the appropriate predefined template, such as one that shows physical resource usage along with a virtualization component break-down and process details for Solaris Zones. Once selected, the user then drags the IT Resource that represents their desired Solaris Zone environment to the open template. The resulting report will show total resource usage for the entire physical system, resource usage by zone, and the breakdown of the individual processes running within each zone. This is displayed conveniently on one screen.

VMware ESX Server
ESX Server abstracts processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. Like Solaris Zones, it is also a form of software virtualization. However, it uses a single "host" OS image to host multiple "guest" OS images.

Like Solaris Zones, the predefined VMware ESX Server report template makes it easy to build a picture of physical and logical resource usage within a VMware environment. Thus the user can build one screen that displays resource usage for the entire physical system, resource usage by Virtual Machine and process detail by Virtual Machine.

IBM Micro-Partitioning
Micro-Partitioning makes it possible to run multiple operating systems on the same system without interference. This is firmware virtualization using the POWER hypervisor (a hypervisor is a virtualization platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time).

The predefined IBM Micro-Partition report template functions in a similar manner to those mentioned above for Solaris Zones and VMware. The user selects the predefined template and can then see physical resource usage along with a virtualization component break-down and process details for IBM Micro-Partitions.

Server Virtualization comes in many different forms. Although, the analysis of these diverse technologies can appear difficult, TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer eliminates the effort by facilitating high-level and drill-down views of every aspect of a virtualized infrastructure.