I have been
writing about the cloud infrastructure products of VMware all this while. I
believe it is important to look at the management side of things as well. No
doubt Virtualization makes things easier for an organization and its
IT department; however things are good till the time they are small and easy to
manage. As the confidence of such organizations increases towards
Virtualization, you would notice a VM sprawl, which might someday defeat the
purpose of Virtualization & consolidation.
The result
of a sprawl leads to unpredictable behavior of the Virtual
Infrastructure, Performance bottlenecks, Waste of expensive resources, complex
troubleshooting procedures and issues around other day to day admin
activities. I believe any administrator of a medium/large
virtual infrastructure would agree to the brief description of the
pain points which I have listed above. If you categorize these problems broadly
they would fall under 3 Major Categories:-
I - Performance
Problems - This will include pain points such as:-
§ How is my
overall infrastructure performing?
§ How hard my
physical ESXi servers are working?
§ Am I looking
at a potential problem which might break my infrastructure?
§ Is there a
way I can predict issues and solve them before they are noticed by End Users?
§ Which areas
do I look at to troubleshoot any existing issues?
§ Is it a
storage issue or is it the hypervisor?
&, the
list is never ending..........
II - Capacity
Problems - Let's have a look at the pain points of capacity:-
§ Do I have
enough Physical capacity (CPU, MEMORY, NETWORK and STORAGE) to support my
virtual machines?
§ When do I
need to buy more hardware?
§ Am I wasting
any resources?
§ Have I sized
the virtual machines appropriately?
§ How should I
answer questions raised by my CXO's about capacity forecasts, buying
decisions etc.??
& many
more.....
III - Configuration
& Compliance Problems - A more critical problem
area, let's see some issues here:-
§ I am asked
to follow HIPPA, SOX or PCI compliance policies for my servers, am I compliant?
§ My
infrastructure is too big? How do I control changes in my Virtual
Infrastructure?
§ Is there a
way to maintain common standards?
The more you
dig here... the more issues you would find...
Well, the
list above is only a sub set of issues which we face while managing the Virtual
Infrastructure. As a reader of this article and an administrator you would be
able to add 10 more unique issues to this list when you read this article.
However, we still have a bigger issue on hand. I call it the BIGGEST issue.
Questions are always raised around:-
- There
are so many tools in the market who claim that they can help me with such
issues. Which one should I chose??
- What
should I do with my existing tools? That's a huge investment which I have
already made.
- Can I get
a Single Pane of Glass to solve all such issues? (The most
common one - People are fascinated with a single pane, I don't know
why?)
and another
long list of questions.........
I hope you
are with me so far and not lost into the issues which you are facing in your
Virtual infrastructure because now I am going to tell you how you can
solve such issues. I must tell you over here that the solution I am going to
talk about has been around for a good number of years, however I have taken my
own sweet time to start believing in this solution as it has matured over a
period of time. Now that I see this solution working for large enterprises, I
guess this is a good time that you can look into this for solving issues
related to Performance, Capacity, Configuration and Compliance in your virtual
infrastructures.
As the
headline of my post suggest, I am talking about vCenter Operations Manager
a.k.a. vCOPS. As an introduction, I would say that this VMware solution has
been stitched together in the recent past, by plucking out best
components from various industry standard tools which have been there in the
Industry for a long time. Though there are a number of functions available in
this solution, I would talk about the major life-savers here:-
Let me
explain each one of them in simpler manner:-
Patented
Performance Analysis - A set of 9 patented algorithms
which look at performance as a behavior and not a threshold. The engine learns
the behavior of your infrastructure by monitoring all the performance metrics.
It learns the Normal behavior and only alert you if it
observes an abnormal behavior which could lead to a potential
problem. Overall gives you the HEALTH of the infrastructure
and make you take right decisions in real-time. This was acquired as a part of
Integrien acquisition back in 2010.
Purpose
Built Capacity Planning & Analysis - This is VMware
Capacity IQ which is rolled up into this suite. Those who know the power of
capacity IQ would know that it is the only tool available today, which can
pin-point at things like, oversized & under-sized VMs, wasted resources,
time remaining & capacity remaining to provision new workloads and
potential RISKS associated to Capacity of your Physical Infrastructure. It
will also help you do tasks such as Capacity Trending & Forecasting for
better and accurate buying decisions.
Automated Configuration
& Compliance - This ability of the Suite is provided by vCenter
Configuration Manager which again is around for a while. It was a part of the
IONIX product portfolio, however later it was picked up by VMware from EMC to
weave it into vCOPS and complete the entire picture. This is one of the strongest
solution which I have witnessed for compliance and configuration management and
has the capability of working across virtual and physical infrastructure,
across OS platforms and across server architectures.
I hope this
gives you some insight on VMware vCenter Operations Manager. I know I am
leaving you with a few thoughts around what else this solution can do and how
it actually does what it promises to. There would be questions around financial
implications and licensing models as well. I will leave you with a few links
which will help you learn more about vCOPS and at the same time I will come
back with a few more articles which will help you use this solution effectively
in your infrastructures.
Before I
share those links, here is an interesting fact which might impress you, if you
are still not impressed by vCenter Operations Manager:-
The latest
version of vCOPS called vCOPS 5.6 (launched at VMworld Barcelona), has the
capability to work across multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud platforms
(private or public) and allows you to build Self-Healing mechanisms using
vCenter Orchestrator as the Workflow Orchestration Engine. Except
Capacity Management, this solution can extend into your Non-VMware
infrastructure for Performance, Compliance & Configuration Management.
(Storage, Networks, Other monitoring tools, HP UX, Solaris, Applications -
Exchange, Oracle, SQL, Amazon, Azure, XEN, Hyper-V etc)
I sure see a
revolution coming our way.. Get your seat belts on & sit tight :-)
Here are the links which you can use to learn more:-
Hope this
helps... If you liked this article, kindly share with others and let the knowledge
spread.......
With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, a number of new things have been introduced. While I continue to add content around what's new in my series on this new release, I always wanted to share some major changes int he way data is displayed and should be interpreted with the new release.
