VMware Virtualization & Cloud Management

At VMworld Europe last October we announced three new suites for operations management, application management and IT business management. Together, these three management suites deliver on our vision to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era. Check out this video of VMware CTO Steve Herrod introducing our new virtualization and cloud management portfolio on main stage at Copenhagen. Now that the vCenter Operations Management Suite is generally available, let’s take a closer look at some of the new capabilities.

Automated Operations Management

With vCenter Operations 5.0 we’ve greatly enhanced some of the concepts and analytics introduced in vCenter Operations earlier this year. The new suite improves on the existing functionality and delivers several new capabilities including:

• Operations Management dashboard with smart alerts in all editions
• Fully integrated performance, capacity and configuration management
• Application discovery and dependency mapping
• New editions targeted at SMB and enterprise customers.

If you’re used to managing vSphere performance with esxtop or the vSphere client, you might be asking, why you should look at vCenter Operations? The reality is that more and more monitoring data is collected in a virtual environment. For example, vSphere 5 introduces about 130 new performance metrics greatly expanding the breadth of the datacenter fabric (storage, network, etc.)  that vSphere is managing.  At the scale of several hundred VMs, you can quickly see that operations management is becoming a “big data” problem if you stay focused on individual metrics -- what metrics should you look at, are there some metrics more important than others, what is the range of values and what thresholds should you set to alert about a performance problem, etc.?

In reality, not one or a few select metrics are more important than others. We need to look at managing the environment holistically and take advantage of the rich data and intelligence that the vSphere platform provides. This is why we introduced new “supermetrics” to better describe workload, health, risk and efficiency of individual VMs, hosts, clusters or entire datacenters. The key point here is that all metrics must be analyzed as performance is determined in context of CPU, memory, network and storage demands.

More importantly, we also need to measure how these metrics change over time and build up a knowledge base of learned behavior so we can determine whether the numbers we’re seeing right now are within an expected range or if they deviate above or below normal. This is what we call dynamic thresholds that adjust automatically with the behavior of the environment. Our intent is to completely eliminate the need for setting and managing static thresholds that either lead to false alarms or don’t fire when they should. Dynamic thresholds are proven to lead to fewer, but more actionable alerts.

There is a lot more to be said about the analytics in vCenter Operations than what I can cover in this post, but here is a brief summary of some of the new super metrics introduced in VC Ops 5:

• Health describes the current behavior of the environment and any problems that need to be addressed immediately. Health is composed of workload, anomalies and faults.  Workload is a measure of how hard the VM is working relative to the resources it wants and what it is entitled to using. Anomalies is an expression of the number of metrics trending above or below normal which is a leading indicator of upcoming performance problems, and faults is the number of “hard” thresholds that have been crossed when there is an availability issue or a hardware failure has occurred.
• Risk describes the potential for future problems. Risk combines scores for time and capacity remaining before resources are exhausted. Risk also includes a new metric for stress which shows patterns of chronic strain. For example, during certain times of the week, there is more demand for resources in one cluster while other clusters are at or below capacity. You can use this information to optimize VM placement or to pre-allocated resources ahead of time.
• Efficiency is a new super metric to describe optimal utilization of resources. Efficiency includes scores of reclaimable waste, such as idle, over- and under-provisioned VMs, and VM density.  VM density shows current consolidation ratio vs maximum possible ratio without performance degradation.

These super metrics are readily available in the operations management dashboard of the suite. Drill-downs allow you to quickly zoom into individual clusters or hosts or zoom out to get a datacenter-level view that might span multiple instances of vCenter Server. Moreover, we’ve added smart alerts with automated root cause analysis in all editions so you can proactively manage (and avoid) performance problems building in the environment.

Speaking of root cause analysis, we often hear from VI admins that 9 out of 10 performance problems are change related. In vCenter Operations 1.0 we already introduced the ability to correlate vSphere change events with performance and health metrics. In VC Ops 5 we introduce the ability to also show change events that occur inside the VM, such as registry changes, patches and applications that users may have been installed. This data is supplied by vCenter Configuration Manager (VCM) which a lot of organizations are already using for configuration and compliance management. Integrating configuration data with performance metrics give you a more holistic view of the environment which will help reduce finger pointing and improve relationships with storage engineers, and DBA’s.

To give you an idea of how this works in a real world scenario, I’ve included a video of vCenter Operations managing the hands-on labs (HOL) at VMworld 2011. The proactive alerts generated from vCenter Operations allowed our HOL team to detect and resolve a building storage problem before it started to impact lab attendees resulting in a flawless performance of what happened to become our biggest and most successful VMworld lab to date.

Better visibility into application components and services running on virtual infrastructure will help improve your ability to manage the environment. This is where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) comes in which provides application-awareness for users of vCenter Operations. It discovers application components, automatically names them and provides version numbers and maps out visually where these components are running and how they’re communicating with one another. Use case for VIN include impact analysis, disaster recovery planning and datacenter and application migration projects. With VIN, you can easily find VMs and see visually how they communicate and relate to other VMs within the context of an application. Check out this video to see Infrastructure Navigator in action.

Overall, the vCenter Operations Management Suite has been very well received by our customers and the new 5.0 release is another big step forward in simplifying and automating operations management. Again, the new version is available now and you can download a 60-day free trial. Existing customers can upgrade to the new version free of charge. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished with this release but, of course, it’s what you think that’s important.  So please send us your feedback and your questions.

At VMworld Copenhagen just two weeks ago, VMware unveiled three new management suites to help customers transform how they manage infrastructure, applications and business services in virtual and cloud environments. We are pleased to announce the general availability of vCenter Configuration Manager 5.4.1 (VCM), a key component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. With this release we take a major step towards delivering integrated performance and configuration management by correlating configuration changes to the performance events.  In addition, the new release also works together with the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite to discover and manage VMs that run in vCloud Director based cloud deployments.

Here are the major highlights of this release:

• Integration with vCenter Operations Manager 5.0
  • The integration of VCM with vCenter Operations Manager enables IT operations to quickly identify health and performance issues that may be caused by configuration changes on the managed machines. It also provides launch in context to change log in VCM, where you could remediate changes.
• Integration with vCloud Director
  • Using VCM, you can discover and manage virtual machines that are running in vCloud Director based clouds. This release supports VMs that are either directly connected (no NAT) or behind 1:1 NAT configuration
• OS Provisioning Enhancements
  • Support for custom ISOs and Linux disk partition configuration
  • OS provisioning support for RHEL 5.6 and 6.0 (32 and 64-bit)
• New Platforms Support
  • Managed Platforms Additions: ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 1, ESXi 5.0, RHEL 5.6 and 6.0, Mac OS X 10.6
  • Collector Platform Support: Windows 2008 R2 SP1 & SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1
  • Installing VCM Server on a non-English operating system is also now supported. See release notes for more details on this.
• Addition of the New Content Architecture (NCA) for UNIX & Linux Patching
  • UNIX and Linux patching has been updated to support NCA changes for assessment, deployment, repository synchronization, and content downloading and importing.
• New and updated compliance content to support the following standards:
  • vSphere 4.x Hardening Guidelines
  • PCI 2.0
  • Basel III

Check out more details about this release:

• Release Notes
• Documentation

To close out, here's a quick screenshot from vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 showing correlation with vCenter Configuration Manager change events. You can click on these events to launch VCM in context to quickly understand and remediate performance issues arising from configuration changes.  

Ramin Sayar, VMware's VP of Products, Cloud and Virtualization Management just posted a great blog about Cloud Management, live from VMworld Copenhagen!

Read it here: http://www.vmwareemeablog.com/uk/strategic-overview-managing-the-cloud

Read about VMware’s Management announcement today at VMworld Copenhagen: We’re simplifying how customers manage infrastructure, applications and the business of IT in the cloud world! http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2011/10/its-time-to-rethink-it-management.html

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

Good morning!

This week, our Disaster Recovery expert, Michael White, will be sharing compelling topics and answering all of your questions! To start with, read about How vSphere Replication Works!

There has been some excellent conversation about VR generated by presentations at VMworld and the release of SRM on the 15th of September.

Check out today's article here: http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2011/10/how-does-vsphere-replication-work.html and tell Michael whether or not vSphere Replication is a good fit for your environment!

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Jump in the discussion with comments here at the uptime blog at any time, or on any of our social media channels -  blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or community forum: 

- on Twitter: @vmKen and @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
- at the Management Mastery site

And it is FRIDAY. Thank you for a great week of interaction focused on IT Management infrastructure and operations challenges customers face as they transition to the Cloud. In the coming weeks, I will follow up with detailed posts explaining the technical details you asked for.

Throughout the week we talked about the trends of this new IT model, pointed out why the traditional management tools cannot do cloud management, explored how VMware is rethinking its approach to IT management, as well as highlighted a few real world vCenter Operations successes from VMWorld 2011. We are committed to make futher strides in IT management for cloud - stay tuned for VMworld Europe 2011 :-)

Thanks again for engaging on all of these topics throughout the week! I am always here to help, so keep following me on Twitter @hemantgaidhani. You can also follow our other social media channels for IT management:
- on Twitter: @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
- at the Management Mastery site

And remember, next week Michael White will be talking about Disaster Recovery on our Twitter @vmwaremgmt channel – check it out Monday morning!

A quick post today - focusing on real world customer stories about vCenter Operations from VMworld 2011.

To start with, here's a great video Chad Sakac posted about how vCenter Operations helped diagnose a network latency issue that plagued the first day of the Hands on Labs at VMworld 2011. In his words "It was really cool to be able to use vCenter Operations to correlate issues across “infrastructure siloes" ... and ultimately resolve the issue".

In the previous post, I referred to VMworld 2011 super session "SUP1018: Managing Virtual and Cloud IT Environments - A Roadmap to Well-managed ITaaS" where Ramin Sayer, VP Products, Cloud and Virtualization Management discussed strategic roadmap and direction for VMware's management offerings. From 35:00 to 50:35, there is a great interview with Michael McGibbney, Vice President, Engineering at American Express discussing the IT management challenges in the cloud era.

Next check out another VMworld 2011 session CIM4280: VMware vCenter Operations in the Real World where three VMware customers - Stanford School of Medicine, Maximus and Kaiser Permanente talk about their experience with vCenter Operations.

Can you share your stories with vCenter Operations? If you haven't played with it yet, try the free 60-day evaluation.

As always, looking forward to hearing from you, so come join the discussion!
Jump in the discussion on any of our social media channels - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or community forum:
- on Twitter: @hemantgaidhani and @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
- at the Management Mastery site

As IT organizations embrace Cloud computing to deliver IT as a service, they must adopt a new management approach—one that is as agile, proactive, flexible and dynamic similar to their new IT infrastructure. In the previous posts, I reviewed the trends about this new IT model, as well as pointed out why the traditional management tools cannot do cloud management. Today let me provide you pointers to how VMware is rethinking its approach to IT management:

1. First, I recommend you check out VMware’s  Virtualization and Cloud Management solution page – it describes how VMware’s automated, intelligent, converged approach to IT management will help you run IT like a business. While on that page, don’t forget to check out at the Management Mastery link on the right side. 

2. Next, I recommend you check out VMworld 2011 super session "SUP1018: Managing Virtual and Cloud IT Environments - A Roadmap to Well-managed ITaaS" where Ramin Sayer, VP Products, Cloud and Virtualization Management discusses strategic roadmap and direction for VMware's management offerings (better watch at the VMworld site, else here're the slides and audio)

Before you dismiss this as another vendor pitch, let me note that industry experts have already recognized VMware’s new management approach with Best of Interop 2011 award.

As always, looking forward to hearing from you, so come join the discussion!
Jump in the discussion on any of our social media channels - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or community forum:
- on Twitter: @hemantgaidhani and @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
- at the Management Mastery site

Not trying to be controversial with a provocative title, but let's check the new IT reality and then review the fundamentals behind the traditional management tools:

• Traditional IT management tools focus on managing silos - applications running on dedicated IT infrastructure. Virtualization breaks these silos, decoupling applications from infrastructure.
• Virtual infrastructure is shared across various LOB applications, and resource entitlements can be changed real-time - traditional tools are not built to track "entitled" vs. "configured" resources. vSphere optimizations such as page sharing, thin provisioning to improve efficiency require a good understanding and careful approach to monitor and account for resources across different LOB application. Traditional tools are not updated to handle this.
• Traditional tools are optimized for static environments, carefully tracking smallest changes occurring in the environment to point out any drifts. On the other hand, change is inherent in the vSphere platform, courtesy DRS, vMotion and Storage vMotion.
• These tools rely on CMDBs that often discover what's new on a daily or weekly basis - way too slow to keep pace with dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure.
• These tools also tend to look at various management disciplines independently - performance, capacity, configuration, security etc. This approach does not work in the shared, dynamic cloud environment.
• Built-in management capabilities in vSphere such as high availability and business continuity has  made certain capabilities of these management tools obsolete.
• Traditional tools also rely on comprehensive integration strategy - often based on scripting - to manage across various silos - again this is not as relevant anymore or too slow and reactive in the new IT model.
• Virtualization also calls for new processes and teams to help IT adopt the new self-service model and become more like a service provider. Traditional tools are way too old to help IT in this transition into its new role as broker of IT services - irrespective of where these services are sources from - in-house or outside service providers.

Isn't it apparent that traditional management tools simply don't cut it for cloud management? What do you think?

Looking forward to hearing from you, so come join the discussion!
Jump in the discussion on any of our social media channels - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or community forum:
- on Twitter: @hemantgaidhani and @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
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Let’s take a look at the new reality of IT – a quick survey shows the following:

• Virtualization is now ubiquitous, with more virtual machines than physical.
• The traditional way of running IT – tightly bound vertical technology stacks – has given way to shared pools of infrastructure resources, from which business services are provisioned.
• Thanks to vMotion and DRS, these shared pools are also dynamic – promising automatic workload balancing across datacenter.
• Compute, storage and networking have converged together – with the ability to change resource allocation in real-time.
• Optimizations across the infrastructure stack e.g. page sharing, thin provisioning to provide higher consolidation ratios, and in turn better ROI
• Self-service portals enable end-users to request and provision business services – on demand
• Highly elastic environment scales up or down to meet business needs, and multi-tenant nature raises questions about security and configuration
• Virtual and Cloud admins managing many more VMs than physical servers per person
• CIOs and business owners expecting increased transparency and cost visibility from internal IT to match the cost benchmarks published on the Internet
• Internal IT competing with service providers to host and deploy business services for LOB owners

This is just a short-list of new trends – I’m sure you can provide quite a few more - indeed I'd like to hear from you what else do you see and what's impacting you.

The big question is how should management evolve to adapt to this new IT reality? E.g. how do you ensure performance and capacity in this shared environment? What about configuration and change management? Do the traditional tools, processes and teams still work for this new model? Is ITIL still relevant in this newmodel? What do you think?
 
Looking forward to hearing from you, so come join the discussion!
Jump in the discussion on any of our social media channels - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or community forum:
- on Twitter: @hemantgaidhani and @vmwaremgmt
- on Facebook: IT Management
- at the Management Mastery site