1. TECHNICAL BRIEF
The Easy Way to Ensure Uptime for Your
Critical Applications and Dependent Infrastructure
Written by
Ben Scheerer
Quest Server Virtualization Group
Quest Software Inc.
How to Virtualize
with Confidence
2. How to Virtualize With Confidence 2
Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................3
How to Virtualize With Confidence.................................................................................................................................4
Challenges of Virtualizing Critical Infrastructure .........................................................................................................4
Visibility for Accurately and Quickly Resolving Performance Issues………………………………………………..…….5
From Detection to Diagnosis and Resolution……………………………………………………………………………..….9
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...10
About the Author………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….11
3. How to Virtualize With Confidence 3
Introduction
Many organizations are successfully virtualizing and consolidating the “low-hanging fruit” such as file/print servers,
non-critical applications and the like. As virtualized workloads continue their upward trend, the next steps are almost
quantum leaps. The leaps are commonly made into both critical infrastructure (e.g., Microsoft Active Directory) and
tier 1 packaged applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange).
What makes these leaps? Primarily it’s because so many organizations are ill-prepared or poorly equipped with the
tools and/or processes to manage availability and uptime deep into the layers of critical application infrastructure.
Problems worsen when organizations must deal with the complexity of mixed physical/virtual implementations in
which only partial components are virtualized, while others still reside on physical servers.
As you continue to virtualize more and more of this critical infrastructure, you want to be 100 percent sure you can
deliver the performance and uptime your stakeholders expect. The key to gaining confidence is proper monitoring
and management of your entire environment -- and that means reducing risk and increasing efficiency. In this
technical brief, we’ll discuss the challenges you’ll face in doing so. You’ll also learn what you need to overcome the
challenges, and how one powerful solution provides the most extensive set of capabilities on the market, yet is easy
to use. You will learn to worry less and less about keeping your users happy and maintaining availability.
4. How to Virtualize With Confidence 4
How to Virtualize With Confidence
Challenges of Virtualizing Critical Infrastructure
When organizations virtualize critical infrastructure components, such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD), they face
new and unique challenges. Typically, administration of AD proves more difficult than expected because of the
difficulties of identifying and understanding the demands of replication, performance and availability. These difficulties
are compounded when AD resides in a mixed physical/virtual environment. That’s because administrators must
pinpoint precisely where problems reside—are they in the underlying infrastructure (physical or virtual), or within
virtualization technology itself? The search for answers compels administrators to address the following:
Understanding the AD component relationships between forests, domains, sites and other infrastructure in
mixed physical/virtual environments
Detecting, diagnosing and resolving performance and availability issues affecting AD and underlying
infrastructure
Communicating state- and service-quality information to stakeholders
The same difficulties surface when virtualizing into tier 1 applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange). With Exchange,
administrators must manage across both physical and virtual boundaries, as well as accurately identify and
understand the causes of performance and availability issues. Exchange also poses unique difficulties in exposing
state and health information in relation to virtual environments.
Current management tools may fall short in supporting needs such as:
Understanding the relationships and interactions between Exchange application components (roles, servers
and sites) plus supporting infrastructure
Detecting, diagnosing and resolving performance and availability problems specific to the Exchange
application environment
Communicating state- and service-quality information to stakeholders efficiently and thoroughly
5. How to Virtualize With Confidence 5
Visibility for Accurately and Quickly Resolving Performance
Issues
The inherent risk in virtualizing critical tier 1 applications and infrastructure lies in both ensuring and communicating
the vital state and heath information of the virtual and physical infrastructures. To do so, organizations must adopt a
solution that is not only virtual-aware, but also virtual-exploitive. This solution should deliver capabilities for
diagnosing, detecting and resolving issues in the virtual and physical infrastructures side-by-side
Furthermore, accurate diagnosis must allow a drill-down into the root cause of issues in the infrastructure. For
example, if the Exchange e-mail service is experiencing delays related to a memory problem, the best approach
would be: first, to identify the locations of the components where problems exist (in both virtual or physical
environments); then, if the problem is in the virtual infrastructure, administrators must be able to drill down to find it
quickly, as well as obtain details about the alerts and visual presentation of the situation (for example, high CPU-
ready values on the VMware ESX server). Finally, administrators must be able to access either guidance on how to
resolve the problem, or launch an in-context automated workflow to correct it. Figure 1 shows ideal visibility of the
virtualized Exchange Server (virtualized state indicated by the blue tag in lower left corner of server icon), as well as a
quick view of the health of the supporting four core resources and the common monitoring components:
CPU
Memory
Network
Storage
Exchange Domain Controller Connectivity
Figure 1 also shows a dashboard that provides extensive visibility into resources highlighted by spinners,
send/receive and read/write motion indicators that change color on overall consumption or deviation from normal
values. This allows administrators to quickly detect, diagnose and resolve problems.
6. How to Virtualize With Confidence 6
Figure 1: vFoglight provides extensive visibility into the virtualized state and health of Exchange
Visibility must not only extend deeply into the AD and Exchange virtual and physical layers, but it must also be able to
reveal the information required for successfully managing the environment across the virtualized layer and within the
critical application infrastructure. For AD, visibility and analysis of key components—including forests, domains, sites
and domain controllers—must encompass both broad and granular data. With Exchange, key components to monitor
include roles, servers and sites. Figure 2 presents a “perspectives” view that includes data on critical components of
AD and Exchange in both VMware and Windows environments.
7. How to Virtualize With Confidence 7
Figure 2: This “perspectives” view provides insight of AD and Exchange components in both physical and virtual
environments.
With the data provided in Figure 2, administrators can get a quick assessment of the current state of the
environments. They can conduct further investigations into issues using color-coded symbols, which lead them to
problem areas. By clicking the “Explore” button, they can drill down to details. Figure 3 shows an example of a drill-
down into the data for two virtual servers hosting domain controllers in a caution state.
8. How to Virtualize With Confidence 8
Figure 3: Presentation of detailed data on health of AD and its associated components after administrators drill down
through the interface.
From Detection to Diagnosis and Resolution
Visual cues, along with essential alerts and reports, provide a clear understanding of the health of both virtual and
physical environments. These capabilities guide administrators to accurately diagnose problems and fix them quickly.
This level of management must provide:
Visibility through logical and architectural representations of the AD and Exchange state and relationships,
including associations to the physical and virtual infrastructure
Out-of-the-box alerts, with expert advice, to help administrators reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for
incidents and problems affecting AD and Exchange performance and availability
Service-level performance and availability reports to show how AD and Exchange infrastructure is
supporting the business
An effective solution must help administrators accurately identify the root cause of issues and resolve them quickly.
Moreover, the solution must provide views that show data about the critical infrastructure and applications from the
operating system to the hypervisor (if applicable).
9. How to Virtualize With Confidence 9
Conclusion
Success in server virtualization depends on innovative performance-management technologies and practices.
Examining the virtualization layer in depth with a solution specifically designed for managing virtualized environments
from the ground up is essential.
When virtualizing AD and Exchange environments, the solution must be built to manage and monitor performance
across the multiple, diverse components in both physical and virtual environments. The ability to detect, diagnose and
resolve issues related to their interdependent components is also necessary.
Quest® vFoglight®, along with the Foglight® for Active Directory and Foglight® for Exchange cartridges provide the
capabilities for managing the entire infrastructure with greater efficiency and less risk. They allow administrators to
detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting AD and Exchange -- as well as related components -- for both virtual
and physical environments. With vFoglight, administrators can visualize the AD and Exchange state and relationships
through logical and architectural representations. They can also use out-of-the-box alerts and built-in, expert advice
to maintain performance and availability. Service level agreement reports show how effective management of the
environment supports the business.
10. How to Virtualize With Confidence 10
About the Author
Ben manages product marketing for the Quest vFoglight virtualization monitoring solutions. His 18 years of industry
experience includes CA, Inc. and Vizioncore (which Quest acquired). Ben has served in a variety of roles, including
software sales and as consultant for product and solutions marketing. He speaks frequently at industry events and
has published a host of articles and white papers on IT management topics. Ben holds a master’s degree in
computer information systems from the University of Denver as well as a bachelor’s degree in marketing from
Western Michigan University. He is ITIL
®
V3 Foundation-certified.
