Virtualization offers multiple benefits, but a virtual infrastructure also introduces many complexities. Knowledge Center contributor Scott Herold discusses the five techniques that IT can use to ensure that an enterprise's virtualization initiatives effectively support applications and user satisfaction objectives.
Effectively
managing applications that leverage a virtual infrastructure can be an
elusive goal. However, the aforementioned challenges can be addressed
by better understanding the virtual infrastructure, and by managing the
relationships and interaction between all the components in the virtual
environment.
Ultimately, being able to correlate the events occurring in the
virtual infrastructure with the entire application environment helps
you determine the root cause of incidents. It can also reduce mean time
to resolution for incidents and problems. Let's review the
five techniques that IT can use to better ensure that
their enterprise's virtualization initiatives effectively support
applications and user satisfaction objectives.
Technique #1: Better understand how the virtual environment impacts the entire application
Visualizing the entire virtual infrastructure in a single view
allows you to clearly see the multiple resources concurrently in use
across the many layers of the environmentincluding data centers, data
stores, clusters, resource pools, ESX Servers and virtual machines.
What's more, being able to correlate the events occurring in the
virtual infrastructure with the entire application environment helps
you determine the root cause of incidents in the virtual environment,
as well as reduce mean time to resolution for incidents and problems.
Technique #2: Determine the root cause of an incident or problem before users are affected
The key to determining the root cause of an incident or problem is
expertise. Thus, IT needs detailed alarms with recognized industry
expertise covering best practices, future predictions, deviations from
normal activity and specific operational problems. Tools that can help
you determine that there is a problem, convey why it is a problem and
recommend ways to resolve the problem are ideal for diagnosing and
resolving issues before they impact users.
Technique #3: Track movement of VMs to understand their potential impact on applications and the business
Organizations need to be able to track assets, both in terms of
changes to configuration and location, so they can assess the impact of
the changes on performance and availability of the dependent
applicationand on other VMs in the same physical environment. By
tracking the movement of VMs, you can better understand their impact on
applications and users, as well as determine what happened and why.
Technique #4: Contain alarm storms from VMs and physical servers for a prioritized IT response
By effectively containing alarm storms and turning data into
meaningful information, IT can better understand the correlation
between infrastructure, host and VM issues. This is an essential tactic
for prioritizing problem-resolution efforts and preventing application
performance issues that can lead to a poor user experience.
Technique #5: Identify contention for resources between VMs to prevent over-commitment of resources
Organizations need to be able to show the resource impact of moving
a VM image from one physical system to another. Using this information,
they can determine in advance whether planned moves will unfavorably
impact resources, applications and users. Additionally, gathering
performance and utilization data at several levelsinfrastructure, host
and VMwill help identify contention issues.
By having a clear understanding of the core resources and historical
trend information, organizations can prevent future problems and
proactively plan for the future. As we have established, virtualization
offers multiple benefits but also introduces many complexities. Through
the five techniques just discussed, IT can more effectively support
application and user satisfaction objectives.
Scott Herold is the Lead Architect of the Virtualization Business Unit for Quest Software,
a role to which he brings a decade of industry experience in operating
system, network, security and storage design. Scott has been a pioneer
in architecting advanced virtualization solutions for many Fortune 100
organizations in R&D and implementation roles. Scott has provided
architectural expertise to multiple local and federal government
agencies around the world, and continues to provide key information
about market and technology trends to Quest's growing virtualization
business.
Scott is one of the co-authors of the best-selling "VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide" and the new VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide (No. 3).
Scott also travels the globe to speak at conferences about how to
best overcome both the business and technical challenges of introducing
virtualization into organizations. He can be reached at scott.herold@quest.com.
Virtualization 
