Data Center Management / Virtualization Management Dynamics

Virtualization software brings the tremendous benefits of provisioning ease, deployment ease, standardization on hardware architecture, and of course, server consolidation. For these advantages, the IT community is witnessing the rapid adoption and proliferated use of VMs in the data center.

However, a byproduct of virtualization is VM sprawl, VM contention and dynamic network architecture due to vMotion.  This greatly intensifies data center management complexity by many levels of magnitude.

Now with applications running in a guest OS that constantly moves to different vSwitch or content switching port, due to load balancing and dynamic resource allocation, pinpointing which layer having a problem is extremely difficult.  Is there an application problem that is causing the performance problem, or is it the OS layer? How about the ESX layer? But sometimes the problem could be in the vSwitch layer too! Because VM images are stored in the enterprise network storage, trouble shooting the problem would also need to consider the storage layer and the content switching layer.

Given the above virtualization management issues, it becomes more difficult to triage a virtualization issue in a timely fashion and readily know:  what is the true problem and where is the problem? If the root cause is due to change, who and what trigged the change?  What resource limits have been reached? Where does the VM (and respective OS and application) reside and where/when did it move.  And more importantly, what is the impact of excessive VM movement, VM problems or hardware issues to the delivery of IT services.

AccelOps data center management solution cross-correlates information from all layers in the networking stack: information from applications, processes, guest OS, the ESX, the HW, network devices (e.g. a content switch), storage, etc. across performance, availability, security and change management. By doing so, the solution is capable of eliminating many other possibilities in order to efficiently get to the true root-cause. In addition, AccelOps’ agent-less approach to data center management / virtualization management makes it non- intrusive and easy to implement.

AccelOps’ interactive virtualization dashboard puts critical ESX, hardware, VM, guest OS and application health, key metrics and events at the operator’s fingertips – providing immediate means to assess resources, preempt issues and pinpoint the root-cause of sophisticated problems in the dynamic virtual infrastructure.

Armed with this intelligence, AccelOps virtualization management capabilities answers such questions as:

• What is our overall VM environment health; ESX server, VM, Guest OS and application performance, availability and security status, issues and trend?
• Did a configuration change, patch or VM provision impact business services?
• Are resource reservations resulting in VM contention?
• Are network or hardware issues affecting ESX performance and availability?
• Where is there excessive VM movement?
• Are virtualized hardware investments accounted for and optimized?
• How are VM and physical resources linked to business services?

To learn more about how AccelOps data center management software complements VMware Vcenter and enables organizations to enhance  virtualization management visit http://www.accelops.net/product/virtualization-management.php or visit us in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace @ http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/296113.

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