In today’s data centers, good planning may be a key to successful deployments, but it doesn’t guarantee ongoing success. For that you need to continuously monitor and optimize every aspect of your workloads. You must monitor, analyze, and react to hundreds or thousands of potentially rapidly changing data points, and that assumes a smoothly operating environment. Introduce an extra bit of entropy into the mix, something unexpected like a storage tier going down, and if you weren’t overwhelmed before, you will be.
VMware vRealize Operations continuous optimization capability identifies and removes things like contention. This feature, just one among its many that support the goal of delivering a self-driving data center, minimizes the need for manual monitoring and troubleshooting, and saves data center staff valuable time so they can focus on more business-critical activities. Operating proactively, it helps to protect critical workloads from degradation due to a variety of potential infrastructure issues, resulting in increased uptime delivered to the application consumers.
Additional capabilities supporting this goal are a myriad that work together for a more intelligent and self-optimizing data center, including:
- Automated workload balancing
- Continuous and automated workload placement throughout the virtual machine (VM) lifecycle
- Automated host-based placement, driven by business intent
- Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) performance optimization
- Predictive distributed resource scheduling.
Automated Workload Balancing continuously balances workloads across clusters, based on business and operational intent. Decisions can be made automatically based on how you choose to operationalize the business intent behind the requirements of your applications. You can optimize your workload balancing using a number of criteria including cost, performance, software license management, compliance, or density. vRealize Operations provides continuous verification of application and workload performance against the desired intent, applying predictive analytics to forecast future requirements, and balance workloads automatically and immediately, or within defined maintenance windows.
Continuous and automated workload placement throughout the VM lifecycle using vRealize Operations in conjunction with vRealize Automation allows for initial workload placement according to defined criteria. It also enables ongoing placement changes to meet utilization requirements and business intent. Let the system move workloads as needed, rather than a data center engineer having to monitor and make decisions on mundane operational decisions.
Automated host-based placement, driven by business intent allows you to create placement zones across hosts regardless of cluster boundaries. This optimizes the placement and balancing of workloads based on software license enforcement, tiers, and a variety of other tags. This also allows for application of business intent to VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and automation of DRS management.
Predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is made possible by combining predictive analysis from vRealize Operations with DRS, allowing for accurately predicting future demand or contention and proactively moving workloads to avoid the issue. Adding intelligence to DRS brings a lot of capabilities to the system, including intelligent workload placement, tag violation remediation, and more. Instead of having to specify that the Windows application you’re deploying requires a Windows-based host, the system understands that already and can make decisions, or suggest behaviors, appropriately.
HCI Performance Optimization allows data center engineers tasked with management of HCI systems and workloads to optimize the performance of vSAN clusters to workload balancing that is re-sync-, slack space-, and storage policy-aware. Automating your infrastructure doesn’t mean your tolerance for problems has to increase. Maintenance mode data evacuation, rebalancing operations, and snapshots are all critical potential operations, and vRealize Operations is intelligent enough in its workload balancing operations to not cause you headaches. You automate to make things easier, after all.
Facilitation of modern data centers both today and well into the future requires a level of automation and orchestration not seen until recently. The density of workloads is reaching staggering proportions, and is climbing well beyond the reach of traditional tools and methodologies to manage and operationalize efficiently. Increasing hiring to match isn’t tenable, even if our available tools for static monitoring could keep pace. And it’s not enough to prescriptively orchestrate a data center according to monolithic rulesets based on triggers and metrics that may be out of date before they’re deployed.
VMware vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation work together to introduce and operationalize machine learning and artificial intelligence into the modern data center. This allows for your data center to become truly self-driving for all but the most complex cases. No longer do your most skilled engineers have to spend their time responding to mundane events in an attempt to keep the system running smoothly. They can help the business realize a quicker time to value by operationalizing business intent in a fraction of the time.
If you aren’t already using vRealize Operations, I encourage you to try and hands-On Lab or download an evaluation of vROps! If you are using vRealize Operations, I encourage you to upgrade to the latest version and begin leveraging some of the new and innovative features! You can learn about the new 7.5 features in this 4 part technical overview of what’s new in vRealize Operations 7.5 !
