In a complex enterprise virtualized environment, knowing how to identify the workload isn't always easy. However, those who are serious about real 'cloud' benefits make this an important part of their project vision and ensuing architecture.

1. Targeting Workloads
Approaching Greater Efficiencies and
Performance
By
Mark MacInnis

2. What The Customer Wants
Keeping the Obvious in Front of Us
Useful
Functionality
Quick
Deployments
Good,
Consistent
Performance

3. Management
Resource
Consumption
Integration
Make the
workload a
tangible asset!
WORKLOAD
External Cloud
• Contracted
• Public
Enterprise Cloud
• Automation
• Self-service
• Management (int
and ext cloud)
Performance
Capacity Planning
Monitoring
Development
Profiles
Extended services
What Makes Up a Workload
(Now and Potential)
ComputeStorage
Network
Security
and AV
DR

4. • Identify the workload and ask:
• What does it consist of?
• What are its load cycles?
• Who is the ‘customer’ for this workload?
– External paying for advertised services?
– Internal (developers, etc.)?
• What are the requirements? (see SLA modeling)
• Does the customer care about what host, rack,
datacenter, network their app is running on?
The Customer Perspective

5. Enterprise Cloud Team’s Perspective
• Greater automation potential
• Portability
– Ability to move beyond traditional boarders.
• Across DCs
• Into and out of environments
– Pre-prod load testing
– Copy prod into Perf environment for troubleshooting
– Copy prod into Dev environment for code upgrades/fixes
– Into and out of hybrid cloud
– Virtual networking: Lose the IP restrictions

6. Performance Management and
Capacity Planning
Why Do I Care About Workload Management?
Useful
Functionality
Good,
Consistent
Performance
Quick
Deployments
• Environmental factors impact
performance.
• A well-managed workload
– Can be quickly identified in its
current and past environments
– Has a compliance identity (profile).
– Has mature change detection
– Should be subject to real-world
load testing.
– Can be measured predictively (i.e.
‘How would this behave if moved
to environment B’)
– Has a defined lifecycle

7. SLA Modeling
• SLAs can be viewed as services in themselves
• Similar to traditional datacenter tiers but
workload SLAs are more holistic in a true
cloud.
• Very simplified example of SLA models:
Bronze Silver Gold
Std Performance
Security L1
RTO/RPO L1
Std HA
High Performance
Std HA
High Performance
Security L1
RTO/RPO L2
Security L2
RTO/RPO L3
‘Always on’ HA