The 7 Secrets of Performance Management in Virtualized Environments

The 7 Secrets to
Performance
Management
of Virtualized
Environments
Presenters
Dave Bartoletti (Senior Analyst, Forrester Research)
Srinivas Ramanathan (CEO, eG Innovations)

© eG Innovations, Inc | www.eginnovations.com
Moderator
Holger Schulze
VP Marketing
eG Innovations
Holger.Schulze@eginnovations.com

Virtualization Trends
Dave Bartoletti
Senior Analyst
Forrester Research
dbartoletti@forrester.com

© 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited 4
The virtualization to cloud journey
2006 2008-2012 2014+
Increasing Use of Virtualization
Changing IT & Business Drivers
• Consolidation
• CapEx Savings
• Server Virt
• Tier 2 Apps
• App Sharing
• Optimization
• CapEx + OpEx
Savings
• Biz-Critical Virt
• Desktop Virt
• App Virt
• Agility / Speed
• New Revenue
• Private Cloud
• Public Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud

Performance becomes critical to success
2006 2008-2012 2014+
Performance is key to realizing virtualization & cloud benefits
• Consolidation
• CapEx Savings
• Server Virt
• Tier 2 Apps
• App Sharing
• Optimization
• CapEx + OpEx
Savings
• Desktop Virt
• App Virt
• Agility / Speed
• New Revenue
• Private Cloud
• Public Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud
IT Performance
is Important
IT Performance &
User Experience
are Essential
User Experience
is CRITICAL

Today, % of workloads
virtualized:
By 2014, % of workloads
virtualized:
2011 2012
52% 59%
2014-15 (est)
78%
Virtualization goes business-critical
Source: http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2012/09/addressing-the-perceived-challenges-to-virtualizing-sap.html
VMware customers are
virtualizing a significant
percentage of business-
critical, Tier-1 workloads:

Client virtualization brings new challenges
Which features are driving your firm’s interest in desktop/application virtualization, thin
client, or blade PC technologies?
Source: Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2012
Base: 977 North American and European IT decision-makers
53%
48%
48%
45%
38%
38%
23%
22%
21%
16%
14%
9%
2%
Supporting work from anywhere
Increasing manageability, patching
Lowering costs
Providing flexible remote access
Disaster Recovery
Better security
Improving compliance
Reducing PC energy consumption
Supporting access for tablets
BYOPC Programs
Enable Apple Mac computers
Don't know
Other reason
Performance Challenges:
• User experience
• Storage performance
• Network performance
• High density

© 2012 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
VDI and App Delivery – Many Choices
8
BUT THEY ALL REQUIRE ROCK-SOLID END-USER EXPERIENCE
Terminal Services (Shared Server-Based)
Internally Hosted Virtual Desktops
Cloud-Hosted Virtual Desktops
Locally-Deployed Virtual Desktops
Application Virtualization and Streaming

Performance challenges summary
2006 2008-2012 2014+
• Consolidation
• CapEx Savings
• Server Virt
• Tier 2 Apps
• App Sharing
• Optimization
• CapEx + OpEx
Savings
• Desktop Virt
• App Virt
• Agility / Speed
• New Revenue
• Private Cloud
• Public Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud
• Abstraction
• Mobility
• IT Silos
• Density Effects
• Network Impact
• User Experience
• Greater Scale
• Loss of Control
• Revenue Impact
Lack of performance -- Unhappy Users -- Unhappy Customers

Applications
Many places for performance problems to arise
Firewall
Network
Switch
Load
Balancer Portal
Identity
Manager
End User
Router
SAP
PSFT
Siebel
Web Services
3rd Party
Applications
Databases
Mainframe
Database
Web
Servers
Who is using
the network?
Are transactions
failing?
Is authentication
server slow?
Are the web
servers OK?
Is the Java EE
Server slow?
And why?
Are business
apps slow?
Is it a database
problem?
What is the cloud
performance?

The root problem? Growing complexity.
February 2013 “Realize Practical Application Performance Management”

Virtualization & cloud add instability to IT operations
SERVER VIRT
DESKTOP
VIRT
APP VIRT
CLOUD

Tame the complexity
SERVER VIRT
DESKTOP
VIRT
APP VIRT
CLOUD
HOW?
• End the finger pointing
• Leverage analytics
• Be proactive, not reactive
• Simplify

© 2012 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
14
1%
2%
2%
5%
11%
32%
44%
0%
2%
3%
5%
11%
30%
45%
11 or
more
6 to 10
5
4
3
2
1
2012 (N = 773)
2011 (N=804)
How many different virtualization management tools
do you use to manage virtual resources?
Source: Forrsights Hardware survey, Q3 2011;Q3 2012
Consolidate your management tools – no more silos
51% use more than one
more than one
management tool

The Forrester APM Reference Model

Yesterday: Build performance monitoring silos

Today: Unified performance management platform

MTTI
The objective: Reduce mean time to resolution
› Mean time to identify
› Mean time to know
› Mean time to fix
› Mean time to verify
› Mean time to resolution is a good Operations KPI
MTTK MTTF MTTV
MTTR
HERE is the
opportunity!

The benefits of a unified APM strategy
› Lower frequency of services outages
› Shorter length of service outages
› Higher IT operations efficiency
› Greater user acceptance
› Lower cost of IT operations

Busting the Myths
1. Virtualization makes performance management easier.
2. Resource reservation ensures that VMs don’t interfere
with each other.
3. The hypervisor view of virtual machines
is sufficient to manage a virtual infrastructure.
4. Virtualization platforms already include all tools and metrics
needed to manage the virtual layer.
5. Virtualization is just another silo that can be managed
independently from other tiers.
6. Scaling is linear - more hardware means
more performance.
7. VDI performance can be managed
using tools that support Virtual Servers.

Thank you
Dave Bartoletti
+1 415.294.8136
dbartoletti@forrester.com

Audience Poll
“What are your biggest
virtualization challenges?”
 Virtualization performance management is more complex
 Performance and user experience problems
 Inadequate performance management tools
 Lack of visibility into VMs and dependencies
 VM sprawl

About eG Innovations
Performance Assurance
Made Easy
 eG Innovations helps companies to dramatically simplify,
accelerate, and optimize performance management across
mission-critical virtual, cloud and physical IT environments
 Only eG Innovations award-winning root-cause diagnosis
technology can automatically pinpoint performance issues by
auto-correlating the user’s service experience with the
underlying infrastructure and application components
 Deliver exceptional performance, user productivity, and ROI
Worldwide
Locations
New York, New Jersey, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin,
Singapore, London, The Hague, Chennai
Customers Over 1,000 customers worldwide
Certifications &
Sample Awards

7 Secrets of Performance Management
in a Virtual Infrastructure
Srinivas Ramanathan
CEO & Founder
eG Innovations
Srinivas@eginnovations.com

Myth #1: Virtualization makes
performance management easier
Physical Virtual
 Performance management is more important with virtualization

Myth #1: Virtualization makes
performance management easier
 Scope for performance management remains the same
 10 servers, 30 guests => 300 virtual machines to monitor
 New elements and features that need to be managed
 Hypervisor, datastores, LUNs, resource
pools, cluster, DRS, vMotion, snapshots, vSwitches, …
 Higher complexity because of resource sharing across VMs
 VMs share CPU, memory, disk, network resources
 A single malfunctioning application in a VM can impact performance of
all other VMs
 Performance management is more difficult with virtualization

Myth #2: Resource reservation ensures
that VMs don’t interfere with each other
 Resource reservation not always possible, or practical
 Defeats one of the big advantages of virtualization – resource
sharing
 Resource sharing is a powerful concept, but …

Myth #3: The hypervisor view of virtual
machines is sufficient to manage VMs
• The Outside view shows the portion of physical
resources used by each VM (CPU, disk, memory)
• Provided by the virtualization hypervisor
• Useful for capacity planning and identifying certain VM issues
• Does NOT show why a VM is consuming resources
ResourcesofthePhysical
Machine
0
100%
VM1 15%
VM2 25%
VM3 20%
VM4
32%
0
100%
ResourcesofthePhysicalMachine
VM1 15%60% 10%
VM2 25%
10
%
45
%
5
%
30%
VM3 20%25% 60%
VM4 32%
12%
20%
40%
Apps inside a VM
• The Inside view shows the portion of resources allocated to
a VM that are used by each application and each user of the VM
• Provided by the guest OS (for Windows: WMI)
• Useful for user load balancing, identifying guest OS issues, misbehaving
applications, and unauthorized user activities
• Does show why a VM is consuming resources, accelerates fix

Myth #4: Virtualization platforms already
include all tools and metrics needed for
performance management
End User
LAN
Admin
Firewall
admin
Server admin
Virtualization
admin
Domain
admin
ERP Admin Sys admin Application
Admin
The server
is working
OK
No other
complaints
All lights
Are green
We don’t
see anything
wrong
Database
Admin
“My
application is
slow!”
VMs are lightly
loaded
Everything
Is OK
Not our
problem
Looks
fine Not mine
either
Talk to
the other
guys
IT Service
Manager

Myth #5: Virtualization is just another silo
that can be managed independent of other tiers
FIREWALL WEB SERVER
USER
APP SERVER DB SERVER
A problem in one tier can affect all the other tiers.
Is it the network, database, app server, or virtualization tier?
“My
application
is slow!”

that can be managed independent of other tiers
Disk reads
Streaming Media AppSlow Database Queries
Excessive disk reads by the one VM slows down application
within another VM

that can be managed independent of
other tiers
FIREWALL WEB SERVER APP SERVER DB SERVER
A problem in the virtualization tier can impact all the applications it
supports. Monitoring systems need to be “virtualization-aware”.
`
USER
“My
application
is slow!”

Myth #6: Scaling is linear, more
hardware means more performance
It is critical to understand the overall performance
at all levels and identify the bottlenecks

Myth #7: VDI performance management
can be done using tools that support Virtual
Servers
Citrix XenServerMicrosoft Hyper-V
Virtualization
Desktop
Brokers
and
Support
Systems
VDI
Management focus should be:
 Beyond the
virtualization tier
 On users, not VMs
 On the desktop
Performance management for VDI is
extremely unique as you need a
solution that combines multiple
different performance management
methodologies

The New Reality!
 Virtualization makes performance management more challenging.
 Conventional management tools not sufficient to handle the new
dependencies and dynamicity that virtualization introduces.
 IT operations teams now need virtualization-aware, unified
management solutions
 360 degree visibility into every layer, every tier - networks, physical
servers, virtual machines, hypervisors, storage, applications
 Correlation across these diverse metrics to pin-point the root-cause
 Management tools need to be domain-specific – VDI vs. virtual
server

eG Enterprise Service Manager
Identify & resolve
problems preemptively,
before users call!
Network? Database?
Application?
VMware?
Storage?Profile Server?
The Service Manager is a General Practitioner for your IT infra.
eG Enterprise ManagerBusiness Service Owner

Live Solution Tour

Virtualization-Aware Root-Cause Diagnosis
Response time metrics for the web-based service: ISG_WEB
Checkout and
TransferBalances
transactions have
unusually high
response times
Clicking on any of these
transactions displays the
service topology diagram
for this web-based service

• Know which tier of a business service is impacted
The dependency arrows and color
coding make it clear that a problem
with the MS SQL Server is impacting
the web server.

• Know where the root-cause of a problem lies:
The SQL Server VM is hosted
on an ESX Server, and
something in the ESX Server
itself is impacting the SQL
Server VM.
Clicking on this icon brings up
the layer model for the ESX
server.

Something is wrong with
CPU usage of the ESX
console.
The ESX console is taking
up close to 50% of the
server’s physical
CPU, which is very
unusual !
• Know which layer is impacted – Network? System? Application?
The problem is at the OS
layer.
Clicking on the diagnosis
button lets us find out
why.

List of the top 10 CPU processes running on the vSphere/ESX service console
A Samba backup job is
using almost 95% of the ESX
console’s virtual CPU !
This is the root-cause of the
web response time issues !

Without root-cause diagnosis, you have no idea where the problem lies
The root-cause
of the problem
The effects of
the problem
Simply clicking on this
diagnosis button shows the
root-cause of the problem: the
Samba issue shown in the
previous slide
All the problems appear
to be equally important.
With root-cause diagnosis, you have a clear idea of what to do to resolve the problem.

The eG Universal Agent
•A single agent license for
Microsoft, Linux, Sun Solaris, HPUX,IBM
AIX, VMware, Tru64
•A single price, regardless of OS or server
configuration - 2, 4, 8, 16 CPUs
•A single agent for monitoring any
application
•A single price to manage multiple
applications on the same server
•Auto-upgradeable
•Agentless monitoring option
•100% web-based – HTTP/HTTPS

Web-Based Reporting
Executive & Operations Reports
Network, system, application reports
Enables triage across disparate
infrastructure components

Real-time or post-mortem
analysis

Ideal for trend analysis,
capacity planning


Get More Out of Your Investment
• Track user sessions on each server
A few of the servers
are handling most of
the sessions

ROI of eG Innovations
• Reduce downtime
• Increase application availability
• Boost user experience
Boost
User Satisfaction
& Productivity
• Simplify, automate & accelerate
diagnosis & troubleshooting
• Optimize staffing levels & reduce OPEX
Reduce
IT Support
Cost & Complexity
• Increase hardware utilization
• Leverage investment in software
• Right-size & optimize environment
Reduce
Infrastructure Cost &
Avoid Cost Overruns
• Accelerate deployments & rollout
• Reduce risk, deliver successful projects
& peace of mind
Deliver Projects
on Time, on Budget,
on Target

Customers using eG Innovations

Next Steps
More details
www.eginnovations.com
Send an Email
info@eginnovations.com
Call Us
+1 (866) 526 6700

The 7 Secrets of Performance Management in Virtualized Environments

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