If you are reading this, you may be one of the 69% of enterprise organizations that are planning to increase cloud spending in 2013 and 2014 (Source: 451 Research). And for 35% of those organizations, building an internal private cloud is #1 priority.
With huge benefits such as datacenter consolidation and reduced hardware cost, energy efficiency, rapid time-to-value, deployment agility — and a low overall TCO —, enterprise IT teams are embracing virtualization technologies like VMware as the ideal platform for the deployment of new and existing applications. Yet virtualization is also disruptive technology driving the transformation of IT, which means that there are some risks associated with it.
Virtualization challenges and risks for IT enterprise teams
VMware offers full/native virtualization by inserting a brand new layer of software directly on the computer hardware or within the hosted operating system, and therefore, introducing a brand new set of potential points of failure for your applications. In addition, triage and troubleshooting will be harder, since the average deployment ratio for enterprise customers is 6 virtual servers per physical host. Just do the math- it will be much harder to rapidly locate root cause of performance issues in a virtualized environment.
In addition, VMWare has done a good job in terms of measuring the additional overhead that the virtualization layer introduces to individual physical servers for key performance metrics such as CPU usage, memory, network, or timing. While these metrics are a good reference to start your planning, they don’t provide a complete indicator of the overall impact that a virtualized underlying infrastructure will have on end-to-end application performance, as perceived by your end-users. And this is a huge risk, since IT success is directly determined by how well they service the end-users they support. Therefore, monitoring application availability and response time from your users’ perspective is more critical in a virtualized world!
Here are some quick tips to help you get started.
1) Monitor end-to-end application availability and response time — pre and post-virtualization deployment— from your user perspective. For example, if you are working in healthcare, you should monitor end-to-end access to healthcare data by clinicians (log-in, retrieve a patient record, add information, save and log-out). Similarly if you are a retailer you should continuously oversee your shopping cart (log-in, browse catalog, add to shopping cart, enter credit card information and log-out).
2) Closely oversee physical and virtual resources such as VMs, CPU, interface, memory, and disk utilization on the back-end.
3) Put strict controls in place for VM creation to reduce the risk of virtual sprawl (or the rapid proliferation of virtual servers in your organization). For example, just like you probably have a “new hire form” when an employee starts, consider establishing a new formal process to govern VM creation and deletion.
4) Use Resource pools allowing production servers to take precedence over hardware.
5) Overlay compliance and data security policies and organizational and management requirements. Follow the motto that “a virtual server is still a server”, with all the policies and security and management concerns of a physical box.
Are you ready to monitor virtualized applications from your users’ perspective and find problems before they do?
Check out Tevron’s CitraTest APM: 24x7x365 proactive end-user centric monitoring for ALL your applications, regardless of where they are deployed –datacenters, private and/or public clouds.
By automating the driving of ANY virtualized application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and taking response time measurements along the way, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of a virtualized application or service are available and working effectively for your users, instantly alerting you at the first sign of trouble. Combine that with CitraTest APM’s deep visibility into back-end performance metrics for physical and virtual resources and you will have all the information you need to troubleshoot, analyze and correct performance issues –before your users are impacted.
Plus no additional new add-ons purchasing is required if your needs evolve and you want to monitor new applications –every application is supported with Tevron’s powerful one solution / one investment model.
Just check out the full list of supported environments here.
Good luck with your VMWare deployment!