Virtualization Capacity Management

With its roots in mainframes dating back to the 1960s, server virtualization today is a strategic answer to consolidating under-utilized servers, reducing energy consumption, and trimming data center space requirements. Recently a new approach has appeared on the horizon. Organizations that experience swings in server utilization are looking to virtualization to prioritize and share resources across their enterprise as a cost-effective approach to satisfying changing business needs.

Regardless of the approach you are taking, mitigating risk of failure and maximizing ROI requires up-front capacity planning and subsequent proactive performance management.

In this competitive business environment, you need to know that virtualized systems will meet service levels. Your business cannot afford unexpected outages and slow-downs. Capacity planning can ensure that physical and virtual servers are optimally configured for meeting the needs of your users. And a heterogeneous IT Service Optimization solution can help you keep multi-vendor virtualization solutions running smoothly across multiple data centers.

ITSO for Heterogeneous Virtual Servers

IT managers find it critical to use TeamQuest software to plan predict and manage capacity and performance for virtualized environments such as:

• vSphere (VMware ESX and ESXi),
• IBM PowerVM (LPARs and WPARs), or
• Solaris (Zones, Containers, and LDOMS).

TeamQuest provides IT Service Optimization solutions for monitoring, trending, and analytic modeling heterogeneous environments with a mixture of hypervisors and operating systems including Unix, Linux, and Windows. The ability to use the same tools and processes across an entire enterprise for multiple platforms is a strategic advantage for TeamQuest customers.

Click for larger view

One Fortune 500 customer cited the ability to understand the following four aspects of a virtualized environment as being critical:

• The physical server - TeamQuest software allows you to analyze the utilization of different resources, such as overall CPU and memory usage, and identify which resources are nearing full capacity and which are being underutilized.
• The hypervisor - Monitoring the hypervisor is critical. You can lose the whole box if swap space is too low, for example. TeamQuest software can alert you to such problems early, allowing you to resolve it before it becomes critical.
• Individual guests - It is important to monitor the activities within each individual guest, or virtual server, to understand how well it is performing. TeamQuest software provides this information, allowing you to determine whether sufficient resources have been allocated to each virtual server so that performance requirements are met.
• Guest interaction - Understanding how the virtual servers are behaving relative to each other and to the hypervisor is also important. Clearly, the applications running on each guest must be compatible and interact nicely without competing for resources. TeamQuest software provides this information.

Click for larger view

This report shows an example of how you can view the status of your virtualized environments. Using TeamQuest reports such as this one, you can quickly focus your attention where it is needed most, mitigating performance problems and in many cases, preventing them before they impact your customers.

Capacity Planning for Virtual Servers

Vendors would like you to believe that virtualized environments are a panacea, that virtual servers can be managed automatically in a reactive fashion. But experts know that to ensure a successful virtualization effort requires capacity planning. In fact, at a recent infrastructure, operations and management conference, the vast majority of respondents indicated that capacity planning is still important to delivering expected levels of service in virtualized environments. Capacity planning is a "best practice" for ensuring that virtualized environments will perform optimally.

TeamQuest Model is a software tool that uses analytic modeling to predict the performance of an IT environment. With TeamQuest Model you can anticipate how systems will respond when workloads ramp up or are moved as part of a server consolidation effort. You can determine how workloads will interact when consolidated and evaluate the performance effect of configuration changes. And using TeamQuest Model, you can quickly perform what-if scenarios to find the best balanced and most cost-effective physical and virtual configurations that satisfy your planned and, in some cases, unplanned workloads.

With capacity planning using TeamQuest Model, you can avoid embarrassment from overworked virtual servers, and know in advance how many virtual servers you can realistically place on a particular configuration of a physical server. You can predict how long current configurations will perform adequately, and know when upgrades or additional systems will be needed.

Want to know more about virtualization performance? Contact TeamQuest