How to Maximize Visibility & Optimize Transaction Performance in Virtualized Environments

By Motti Tal
published: Thursday, April 16 2009

As enterprises seek to cut costs, better utilize IT resources, and provide a more agile infrastructure, they are turning to virtualization. However virtualization has yet to be widely adopted for business-critical operations such as online banking, supply chain and client portals.

This is because the owners of these business services believe they will lose control over the performance of transactions in a virtualized environment. The reasoning is that virtualized environments are shared, so when conflicting computing demands arise, system performance might suffer. Managing shared resources without a business context to the resources being consumed is difficult and often leads to static use of virtualization. It is this lack of business context visibility that is hampering the adoption of virtualization.

One way to attain the needed level of visibility into IT architecture, identify transaction and application dependencies on virtual resources, measure SLAs, guarantee optimal QoS, and increase savings, is through Business Transaction Management (BTM). With BTM, IT can measure transaction performance from the user perspective while gaining granular visibility into transaction flow across the entire infrastructure and resource consumption (physical or virtual). Consequently, they can optimize the performance of transactions, and the applications and infrastructure that enable them, to provide a better, more cost-effective customer experience. In this way, BTM can help virtualization live up to its promise.

To optimize virtualization and provide clarity throughout the entire transaction lifecycle, companies should:

Conduct a pre-migration service performance and availability study. Prior to transitioning to a virtualized environment, it is crucial to set transaction performance and availability baselines and align expectations across business groups. This ensures that appropriate performance goals and SLAs are set by an objective measure and that you have visibility into the actual resources consumed by different services, to plan well for the migration.

Conduct a post-virtualization migration service performance and availability study. Once the application supporting the transactions has been migrated to the virtualized environment, it must be examined so that the impact on transaction flow, performance and availability can be identified. The configuration of the production environment can then be adjusted to achieve a successful, optimized migration.

Align service performance and availability with business needs. Once BTM has been implemented and transaction performance and availability baselines are set, it becomes possible to see which services are meeting SLAs and which are not to clearly understand which workloads and resources should be tuned.

Maintain virtualization visibility. With real-time visibility into virtualized environments, BTM makes it possible to discover problems in the quality of services so that issues can be fixed before they impact the business.

Utilizing BTM, both IT and business stakeholders can attain the visibility they need to ensure that their infrastructure is set to consistently provide optimal service levels - and that their applications continuously get the necessary resources to do so.

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