Virtualization Log

Modeling capacity in virtual environments

This blog post was written by Megan Santosus, features writer for SearchServerVirtualization.com.

By now, server virtualization has pretty much proved its mettle as a way to consolidate data centers and reduce costs. As virtualization has gone mainstream, some of the management challenges have become top of mind. Consider the situation for a senior IT manager at a financial services company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Virtualization is great stuff,” he said. “But it does change the way you manage things.”

Two years ago, the financial services company began implementing virtualization — specifically VMware and ESX Server, although the company has since deployed virtualization with Sun Solaris clusters. At that time, the company realized that it had a gap in virtual server management capabilities. “We are making a large push with ESX servers, and we want to manage them holistically with some of the other servers in our environment,” the IT manager said.

To that end, four months ago the company began beta testing CA Advanced Systems Management r11.2; the company already uses the previous version of the software, and one of the enhancements with 11.2 is integration with VMware VirtualCenter. By installing an agent on VirtualCenter and another on the CA management server, the company now collects and aggregates the performance data for virtual machines into a centralized Web-based system. “We take the performance data on the physical ESX server and provide that to our capacity team so they can plan and manage our virtual environment,” the IT manager said.

For the capacity team, virtualization means being able to figure things out in advance such as how many hosts can run on an ESX server, what’s the footprint of the application, and whether it’s best to put components on the same physical box or spread them out. “We can now give the capacity team performance data they need to make the decisions about moving things around,” the IT manager said. Rather than planning, the IT manager likens the process now to capacity modeling. “If we want to move virtual servers running Oracle, Apache and Weblogix, we look at the performance data to make our decisions.”

Performance management’s next frontier

Megan Santosus is a features writer for SearchServerVirtualization.com.

VMware Inc.’s recent acquisition of B-hive Networks is indicative of just how much of a wrench virtualization has thrown into the performance management arena. (To recap: B-hive’s Conductor software monitors application performance across virtual environments.) “First and foremost, the acquisition shows the importance of being able to manage performance in a virtualized environment,” said Trevor Matz, the president and CEO of Aternity Inc., a provider of end-user performance management software. “The system metrics normally associated with performance tools are pretty meaningless in virtual environments.”

Traditional performance metrics — CPU, memory usage — that are used to monitor the performance of the hardware that provides service to end users don’t have much relevance in virtual environments, Matz said. “Those metrics are associated with a host machine or virtual box itself and don’t indicate what the end user is experiencing,” he added.

Matz said that Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft and Parallels are all at work on creating tools that collect meaningful metrics in a virtualized environment. “Having comprehensive tools is not enough,” Matz said, adding that there are already more than enough metrics to parse through. “The next big frontier is the ability to transform huge amounts of data into actionable business intelligence that correlates across platforms.”

‘Twas the week before Christmas: Virtualization Log

Despite the impending holiday and our stubbornly long shopping list, SearchServerVirtualization.com and SearchVMware.com keep pumping out the virtualization content. Highlights of the week include the following:

• An extremely well read-article on how VMware pricing may be alienating large enterprise customers. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve had similar experiences, or if, on the contrary, you’re A-OK with how VMware prices its products and negotiates its enterprise license agreements.
• More about storage — specifically, some thoughts on sizing logical unit numbers (LUNs) for virtual machines; and an Ask the Expert question on who supports iSCSI best: VMware, Citrix/XenSource or Microsoft?
• A beta tester’s guide to deploying Microsoft’s new Hyper-V; as expert Anil Desai finds, “the system requirements for Hyper-V are far from ordinary,” requiring the latest 64-bit, virtualization-enabled chips. That may prohibit all but the most advanced test labs from taking this baby out for a spin.
• The benefits of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), by Barb Goldworm, who describes one IT shop that virtualized 800 desktops to 14 IBM BladeCenter machines accessed by thin clients, cutting their annual power consumption from 80,000 to 17,000 watts, for a savings of almost 80%!
  
• Scott Lowe answering what inquiring minds really want to know: What exactly is a connection broker, and what does it do? You read it here first.
• Last but certainly not least, expert Craig Newell discusses how to configure Ethernet network interface cards on your ESX host, whether its a tower, rack or blade server. Word to the wise: A VMware host needs more Ethernet ports than your average server.

One last thing: A story on SearchDataCenter.com finds that, despite growing industry concern about saving power, no one actually shuts down servers over the holidays. Or do they? If you’re planning on using VMware’s new Distributed Power Management (DPM) next week and shutting down some systems, let us know.

Down and dirty with storage and networking: Virtualization Log

Designing the storage to go along with your virtual environment? In this tip, Anil Desai explains a variety of ways to avoid storage (I/O) bottlenecks. In his analysis, Desai covers all the bases: analyzing a virtual environment’s I/O characteristics, designing RAID configurations and fault tolerance and, finally, planning for host and guest-level backup.

Meanwhile, over at SearchVMware.com, Scott Lowe regales us with a great tip on the ins and outs of VST, EST and VGT VLAN tags in VMware ESX. He explains why VST tags are usually your best choice but also describes cases where EST and VGT might be more appropriate. The Internet is awash in virtualization content, but IMHO, this tip really exemplifies why TechTarget launched SearchVMware.com: to provide VMware administrators with the nitty-gritty technical information they need to properly configure their systems. I hope it’s helpful to you.

Editors’ note: Virtualization Log is a regular feature of the Server Virtualization Blog, where we recap the news, tips and columns that were recently published on SearchServerVirtualization.com and sister TechTarget publications.

VMware, Oracle redux: Virtualization Log

How “three times less overhead” became “three times better performance” is beyond me; but whatever the case, the issue of database performance in a VM is hot again, with VMware bloggers firing back at Oracle’s superiority claims. But with Oracle’s clout in the enterprise, analysts seem to think that IT shops will take a good, hard look at the latest Xen variant.

If you’re testing Xen, we have a new tip for you on hardware drivers in a paravirtualized Xen environment, and the vagaries of dom0, domU, QEMU and the like. And the takeaway is this: Hardware-driver issues become quite complicated on a platform that supports both paravirtualized and fully virtualized drivers.

Meanwhile, over at SearchVMware.com, we learn that VMware’s brand of paravirtualization — paravirt-ops and the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) — is wowing early adopters. By running paravirtualized Ubuntu on VMware Workstation, blogger Mark Mayo witnessed impressive performance gains compared with running it with VMI disabled.

Also, for those of you following the Microsoft Viridian — ahem, Hyper-V — developments, SearchWinIT news director Margie Semilof uncovers some inconsistencies in Microsoft’s claim that Hyper-V will be a “standalone” and “bare metal” hypervisor. “The reason for all the guessing,” she wrote, “is that Microsoft has offered an architectural picture of Hyper-V that runs on Windows certified hardware and drivers. Since that’s the case, ’something like Server Core or PE must be inside.’” she quotes Nelson Ruest, a Microsoft MVP and principal at Resolutions Enterprise, a consulting firm in Victoria, B.C., as saying.

VMware Server lives on: Virtualization Log

It may be free, but it’s not forgotten — or is it? VMware Server 2 is officially in beta, and while Yankee Group’s Gary Chen took the release as a sign of continued development on the part of VMware, virtualization.info’s Alessandro Perilli isn’t so sure:

It’s evident the company is spending most of its R&D and marketing efforts around ESX Server and Workstation. In 11 months no company (in a big ecosystem of over 200 technology partners) developed products for VMware Server, despite its price and wide feature-set could push adoption like no others.

In other virtualization news, Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz will take the stage at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference today and is expected to officially announce the company’s xVM virtualization strategy: an x86 hypervisor based on Xen and Sun xVM Ops Center for unified management. Sun has also rounded up support for xVM from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel, Microsoft, MySQL, Quest Software and Symantec and is launching OpenxVM.org, which Sun describes as “an open source community for developers building next-generation datacenter virtualization and management technologies.”

Speaking of Oracle, VMware isn’t taking this whole Oracle VM thing lying down. Going live today on VMware’s Web site is a page devoted to running Oracle on VMware ESX, with links to white papers, case studies and other resources.

Meanwhile, on our newest site, SearchVMware.com, check out a tip by blogger extraordinaire Scott Lowe on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and connection brokers, where he breaks down for us exactly what a connection broker does. Pool management, anyone?

Editors’ note: Virtualization Log is a daily roundup of virtualization news and tips published on SearchServerVirtualization, as well as on sister TechTarget publications.