Three Fundamentals for Managing Your Virtualized Infrastructure
Virtualization and cloud computing are causing a major disruption for how enterprises do infrastructure performance management (IPM). Traditional management solutions are inadequate to ensure high performance of these new environments, particularly when it comes to mission-critical applications. According to a Gartner report, more than 80 percent of corporations have a virtualization program, but only about 25 percent of all server workloads are in a VM.
The reason why? IT managers lack the confidence to entrust their most critical applications running in the form of server VMs because existing legacy management solutions are inadequate to manage the dynamic and virtualized data center. IT needs assurance that they can maintain application performance and availability in a virtualized environment. They must be able to manage and troubleshoot all the cross functional areas within the data center – end users, applications, storage, networks and servers – and all in conjunction with one another.
If you understand how virtualization works, this management complexity is no surprise. By enabling VMs and their applications to be dynamically shifted to the right resources at the right time, virtualization gives IT an automated model to optimize the use of their resources.
The flip side is that virtualization itself effectively breaks the old model of silo management, and troubleshooting and operational support become considerably more complex given the constant state of change.
The workload may have been moved to another server, or the server may have been used to test something and then was shut down. Whatever the reason – without visibility into entire infrastructure – across both physical and virtual domains – it is impossible to know which exact application workloads are running on which physical servers.
Clearly, change is in order. In order to maximize the benefits of virtualization, companies need to migrate over their mission critical applications – this can only be done with a new management model. A transformational architecture begets a need for transformational management. This IPM model must have management and troubleshooting capabilities that incorporate the following fundamentals – visibility that is real-time and continuous supported by advanced analytics that can be easily implemented.
Fundamental #1: Increased Visibility is Paramount in a Virtualized Infrastructure
IT needs visibility into what’s occurring in the infrastructure that’s presented in a clear and easy-to-use yet comprehensive way. Unfortunately, existing management solutions do not provide this capability.
Because they have been built to support more static environments, legacy management software cannot show VM to VM communications. But if you can’t see the applications or data being moved, how can you effectively manage and troubleshoot potential pitfalls?
Effective management of virtual infrastructures requires deeper insight into the interplay between physical and virtual environments. This requires knowledge of all areas of IT – servers, VMs, applications, end-user devices, network and storage.
