Tag Archives | Virtualization
Virtualized Resources

New technologies, same old management problems

By on November 17, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

There’s no doubt network professionals are adopting technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, but it is less certain how IT organizations are working to monitor the advanced environments and troubleshoot performance problems. Recent survey results show that while industry watchers often advise keeping management in mind when deploying new technologies, many IT shops tend to focus on monitoring and troubleshooting after experiencing problems in production.

Network Instruments this week released the results of its 2010 State of the Network Survey, which polled some 265 network professionals regarding emerging technologies and ongoing management challenges. The network and application management vendor focused its questions on cloud computing adoption, virtualization, video conferencing and performance management. A recurring theme cropped up among these survey results, according to Stephen Brown, product marketing manager at Network Instruments.

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Bruce Milne

Capacity management for dynamic data centers

By on November 15, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Adopting new technologies often requires IT operations to also adopt new approaches to various management disciplines. For instance, virtualization is forcing IT managers to think differently about planning for capacity. Bruce Milne, vice president of product management in the Virtualization and Automation Customer Solutions Unit at CA Technologies, says the technologies acquired with Hyperformix will enable IT managers to better predict the capacity needs of their virtual environments and prepare to best meet the business’ needs.

Bruce MilneComing from Hyperformix, why are you excited about CA Technologies acquiring the company?
One of the growth pillars for CA Technologies is virtualization and automation, which is very exciting. One of the real problems if you separate computing capacity from the workloads and virtualize the workloads, then it is much more difficult to track capacity and efficiency of resources. This capacity management problem is just a stop off point to the destination to the real vision, which is dynamic capacity.

How does Hyperformix technology enable dynamic capacity planning and management?
We offer the ability for systems management infrastructure to pull together information how the IT infrastructure is being utilized right now. We are able to monitor that and bring information to the surface about exceptions as well as project into the future. We can predict if there will be a shortage of capacity based on business demand, which creates a demand for capacity. We can feed that information to, say, Automation Manager, the run-book automation application that then says supply this capacity to that server or this host for a certain period of time to support a business load. That is the dynamic data center, that is true automation, when you can remove manual processes.

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CA Technologies closes Hyperformix acquisition

By on November 2, 2010 in Service Assurance

CA Technologies secured its bid for Hyperformix Tuesday in a move that industry watchers say will equip the IT management software maker with capabilities to take on complex virtual environments as well as cloud computing.

CA Technologies announced its plans to acquire Hyperformix in late September, and the software maker touted Hyperformix’s technology that could manage capacity in real time – a must-have function for virtual and ultimately cloud environments. In a September blog post, Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing for the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit at CA Technologies, explained the company’s motivation.

“First, it directly supports the many organizations that have been asking us for sophisticated capacity management to support their virtualization strategy (and, increasingly, their cloud strategy), beyond what we do already with performance and reporting,” Mann wrote. “The acquisition also directly solves some of the biggest problems our more mature customers are facing today in their virtualization deployments – things like the VM sprawl that is exhausting available capacity and dramatically reducing virtualization ROI; and the VM stall caused by low capacity awareness and risk-averse business owners that slows or stops rollouts and stalls the major benefits of virtualization.”

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Ask the Service Assurance Expert: How virtualization affects network performance

By on October 13, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT organizations deploying virtualization across servers realize that management technologies and practices must evolve to incorporate the virtual realm into their service-centric management approach. Jerome Simms, senior director of product management at CA Technologies, says IT managers responsible for network and application performance want to ensure virtualization doesn’t create blind spots in their environments.

Management technologies enable virtualization growth, survey says

The adoption of x86 server virtualization seems to be here to stay. Are network managers updating their approach to managing performance to account for growing virtual environments?
Virtualization is a huge area and it extends down to the network. Customers are well aware of virtualizing servers. And they are keenly aware of the new data center and the converged data center, which also impacts the network because vendors like VMware and Cisco are embedding virtual switches as part of the hypervisor. That ultimately changes the paradigm of how management applications deal with the network.

Do virtual switches eliminate any blind spots that previously represented challenges for management applications?
These virtual switches play the same role as physical switches, and a vendor like NetQoS, [acquired in 2009 by CA Technologies] which has the ability to look at traffic between the virtual machines (VM) on the hypervisor is able to eliminate that blind spot. NetQoS has the ability to look at that traffic. Management applications can discover, map, model, manage and alert on physical switches, and now some are able to do the same with a virtual switch. Ultimately the goal is to uncover the root cause of any problems.

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Management technologies enable virtualization growth, survey says

By on October 12, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Management tools can often become an afterthought for high-tech leaders deploying emerging technologies, but the majority of IT decision makers recently polled confirmed that management is not only important, but a key priority for expanding virtualization across an IT environment.

CA Technologies Tuesday released at VMworld 2010 Europe the results of a survey of 473 IT decision makers in large and mid-size enterprise in the U.S. and Germany. The survey, conducted by the international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman on behalf of CA Technologies, revealed that while budget restraints and limited headcount are often a primary cause of stalled virtualization deployments, IT decision makers also cited: the high operational risk of a failed migration; the inability of available tools to meet management needs; and the lack of resources skilled in virtual server management.

Stalled virtual deployments were evident in the number of servers virtualized and the type of servers that have become virtual machines. For instance, 34% of organizations have only deployed virtualization for five to 20 servers – or what CA Technologies dubs the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of test and development systems, Web servers and print servers. The majority of respondents (87%) have virtualized less than 40% of their servers, with just 12% reaching the final phase of virtualization with more than 40% of systems virtualized. Survey respondents on average have virtualized 39% of their servers.

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Virtual capacity planning drives IT management acquisition

By on October 5, 2010 in Service Assurance

On the heels of the Hyperformix acquisition by CA Technologies, BMC Software Tuesday announced it had acquired the software business of Neptuny, a European provider of capacity management and IT performance optimization technology.

The deal, according to a BMC press release, will enable the IT management software maker to extend its existing capacity management products and augment BMC’s “dynamic Business Service Management (BSM)” and cloud management products. This type of technology, also recently acquired with Hyperformix by CA Technologies, will be critical to any IT management software maker looking to lead its customers from traditional environments to virtual data centers and potentially private, public or hybrid cloud deployments.

Capacity management posed a challenge even in traditional environments, but typically required planners to prepare for business growth perhaps per quarter using rudimentary tools or spreadsheets. The dynamic nature of virtual machines (VM) essentially breaks previous capacity management practices and requires the process to move from a static state to real-time monitoring and planning. Because the promise of virtualization and ultimately cloud computing is that environments can be quickly ramped up or scaled back, capacity planning needs to operate in real time as well.

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CA Technologies acquires virtual capacity management with Hyperformix buy

By on September 28, 2010 in Service Assurance

CA Technologies announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to acquire for an undisclosed sum Hyperformix, an Austin-based company with expertise in real-time, virtual capacity management capabilities.

The deal would equip CA Technologies with capacity planning and management technology as well as dynamic IT resource optimization capabilities, according to the IT management software maker, which has in the past 18 months completed a string of acquisitions including those of 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS, Nimsoft, Oblicore, Arcot Systems and 4Base Technology. And like many of those buys, the acquisition of Hyperformix will enable CA Technologies to help its customers better manage virtual environments and potentially more smoothly evolve those deployments into private cloud implementations, says Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing for the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit (CSU) at CA Technologies.

“The key to the Hyperformix deal is that CA Technologies has virtualization management capabilities across such a wide range of disciplines, but our capability for capacity planning has been limited to deployments we can control,” Mann says. “Hyperformix’s technology will let us look at capacity across the whole enterprise and control what needs to be controlled where it is being controlled. It is imperative to connect business policy with how we implement IT resources, especially in virtual environments and this technology gets us there.”

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What network managers need to know about cloud computing

By on September 27, 2010 in Service Assurance

IT and business leaders can’t say enough about the potential benefits of cloud computing. But for network managers, the technology could represent a new source of bottlenecks and traffic congestion without proper planning and execution on the underlying network infrastructure.

Cloud computing takes a bite out of IT budgets in 2010

Network management technologies depend on some level of visibility – in most cases, very granular insight into network traffic and performance metrics. But network performance details could increase in volume or become obscured with the introduction of cloud computing. While IT leaders explore the potential of private cloud now and consider evolving to a hybrid or public cloud, industry watchers speculate on how the transition could affect the network.

“The single biggest thing to consider when you put things in the cloud is bandwidth. The state of things is much better today and there are many tools to address that, such as MPLS and WAN optimization technologies, but network engineers need to build a network to avoid any type of bottleneck that might occur when using the public cloud,” says George Hamilton, principal analyst at Yankee Group.

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From sprawl to stall: How to clear the hurdles of virtual deployments

By on September 20, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT managers deploying virtualization technology first worried about their implementations sprawling out of control, but now industry watchers say that many organizations could be facing virtual stall — or in other words, IT managers are now seeing their virtual deployments slow down before they achieve maximum benefits.

While IT managers a few years ago struggled to track and control the number of virtual machines popping up across their environments, today IT managers are working to get more out of the virtualization technology they’ve installed to achieve reduced costs and optimized environments. As part of CA Technologies “Quit Stalling” campaign launched at the VMworld 2010 U.S. conference in San Francisco, Vice President of Virtualization and Product Marketing Andi Mann presented at the event on clearing certain hurdles to achieving more complete benefits. (Watch a video interview with Mann here.)

Now CA Technologies published a white paper on the topic, which Mann further explores in a recent blog post. Both discuss how enterprise IT managers can get beyond partial virtualization to more fulfilling implementations, which deliver the real promise of the technology.

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Virtualization, cloud standard on the fast track?

By on September 15, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Talk of standards development can often inspire yawns, but for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), it’s relatively fast quick progress from a specification to a standard adopted by neutral industry organizations is “a big deal,” according to cloud experts.

Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced at the end of August that its work on OVF standard version 1.1 had been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standard (INCITS) standard. According to a DMTF press statement, “This achievement marks a major milestone in DMTF’s efforts to enable interoperable, platform-independent cloud and virtual management solutions.”

Just a year and a half after work began on OVF, the results are emerging. The progress reflects the great interest among vendors and IT end users for virtualization and cloud computing, but it also shows that the vendors involved understand they must work together to create a non-proprietary method to manage virtual environments that could become a large part of internal cloud efforts. Started in March 2009, the speed at which development and adoption of OVF shows both the want and need for such a standard.

“ANSI adoption of OVF provides additional validation of the importance of this standard for virtualization management,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president, in a statement. “Since its introduction, OVF has achieved wide scale adoption.”

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Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on September 3, 2010 in Uncategorized

A collection of blogs based on VMworld 2010 U.S. conference held this week in San Francisco prove that VMware got its message out – it is more than a virtualization company.

VMworld 2010: A “New IT Stack” and Management & Security are No Longer Aftermarkets
Yankee Group Principal Analyst George Hamilton explains how VMware wants to become the data center operating system and why recent acquisitions of companies such as Integrien and TriCipher will give the virtualization giant the IT management and security technology it will need to achieve its lofty goals.

Virtualization Deployments and the “Trough of Disillusionment”
Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA Technologies Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit, took away from VMworld 2010 the impression of a more mature market for virtualization, one in which customers realize they need IT automation, management and other technologies to move beyond initial deployments, over the hump of virtual stall and toward large-scale implementations that could extend into private clouds.

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How to manage VMware vSphere for free

By on September 1, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

VMworld 2010 in San Francisco is flush with sessions on technologies to manage, secure and optimize VMware environments. Yet one session educated conference attendees on tools that could help them do all this – at no cost.

David Davis, vExpert, VCP, CCIE and video training author at TrainSignal and Kendrick Coleman, vExpert and blogger, teamed up to present a list of several free IT tools for vSphere management. The joint presentation offered insight into more than 10 tools and each speaker offered their take on why the free application helped monitor performance, migrations or storage, for instance. The endorsements by Davis and Coleman should cause many IT managers to at least check out the no-cost technology.

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