Enterprise Virtualization Management: BMC's New Products
Enterprise Virtualization Management: BMC's New Products
By VSM News Staff published: Tuesday, December 21 2004
BMC Software provides enterprise management solutions for managing IT infrastructure. Their solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. VSM spoke to Dan Hoffmann, Corporate Development Director, about BMC Software’s new products for virtual servers.
VSM: Good morning, Dan. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your experience at BMC Software with virtualization?
DH: I am part of our Global Alliances team, and I’ve been at BMC Software over 15 years, most of that time in R&D. Most recently I ran marketing for our storage business unit. VMware is one of my primary responsibilities as one of our Technology Alliance partners.
At BMC’s Business Service Management (BSM) event, hosted in New York City in October for a number of our top customers and industry and Wall Street analysts, Diane Green, the President of VMware, emphasized how VMware and BSM work together, and how they make so much sense. We think that the primary driver behind her company’s success is the great business value that it delivers. Our BSM strategy helps take this value further by enabling companies to move beyond traditional IT management to better manage their critical services from a business perspective.
VSM: What are you hearing from your customers about virtualization?
DH: There’s a lot of technology in the VMware products. Over the last several years we’ve seen by the way our customers behave, the way they buy, what they tell us they want, that they’re no longer fascinated by whiz-bang products. Their buying decisions require a business value to be delivered.
VMware enables people to do things that they’ve been trying to do for many years, and server consolidation is the most obvious thing that we see, and the thing our customers tell us they’re doing the most. While we’ve heard about server consolidation for years, it wasn’t going very well.
It was a combination of technical barriers that made it hard to move or consolidate workloads along with important organizational or political barriers inside a company. The factors that caused server proliferation included cheap hardware and the ease with which business owners could demand or require an isolated environment. Mixed in there were some legitimate concerns about isolation and security. That process went unchecked for many years, fed by the cheap hardware.
Now there’s a lot of hardware out there that’s not being utilized. Our customers are bothered by the fact that their hardware is only 10-20% busy and that it all has to be managed. A 20% busy server takes just about as much effort to manage as an 80% busy server. Those costs and difficulties are significant.
VSM: What specific difficulties did you hear about?
DH: One of the issues that made server consolidation difficult was that if a business owner had been promised an individual machine, they might not be willing to give it up. Having a robust virtual server environment knocks down that issue and several other barriers.
The business owner can still have an isolated environment. They may not have an isolated physical server, but their system image stands alone. They’re not sharing the operating system, or I/O, or virtual memory with anybody else. VMware, particularly with the server products, has made that much easier to do.
Two years ago we heard very little about this. One year ago we started to hear quite a bit. Now we are constantly hearing from customers who say they’re putting VMware in and need some help. Because they are our customers already, they are running PATROL and a variety of BMC Software products, and they want our products to support VMware as a platform equally as well as we support Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris or HP-UX.
That caused BMC Software to accelerate the delivery of new products to market. In particular we introduced PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers, available today as part of our Enterprise Performance Assurance product line.
Virtual Servers is the name we chose instead of VMware, because we are looking at virtual servers as a category, or a type of platform, rather than a brand-specific platform.
VSM: Will you be including Microsoft Virtual Server?
DH: There are no firm plans to do that, but the name would allow us to add that support to this product. We will make a business decision on doing that. It won’t be a technical decision. Right now we don’t have enough demand for Microsoft’s Virtual Server product to justify releasing a product.
Microsoft’s product will only support Microsoft operating systems, and VMware’s product will happily run Windows or Linux. BMC Software customers clearly are interested in Linux.
VSM: PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers is the first virtual server product for BMC Software?
DH: It might seem odd to people who have known BMC Software for a long time that we delivered this product before the other one we announced, PATROL for Virtual Servers, which will be released sometime late next quarter. Typically we would introduce a monitoring product first, because it’s the first thing customers want. That’s a natural progression for BMC Software because PATROL is a very widely deployed, very comprehensive, very modular systems management monitoring solution. It’s easy to add pieces to it to support a new platform.
But what our customers needed the most help with now, for server consolidation, was a capacity planning tool. One of the things that PATROL Performance Assurance (PPA) does is to model system behavior. If customers are running PPA for Windows, they can do very powerful performance analysis of Windows-based workloads, as well as for Linux and for Unix.
Focusing on Wintel environments, they can model any arbitrary application, not necessarily a purchased or brand-name one, and PPA will collect data for a period of time and then establish a mathematical model. The customer can track something like transaction volume for spikes based on the model.
Through a combination of PPA for Windows and Linux, and then PPA for Virtual Servers, customers can greatly improve their accuracy, and reduce the risk of combining physical servers using VMware.
VSM: VirtualCenter captures some data. What is the time frame that PPA can capture?
DH: The time period is tunable by the customer. Although PPA can be used in a real-time way, it’s typically used for planning and analysis, as opposed to tracking what’s happening in real time. PATROL is our product line for real time, and that real-time monitoring will come with PATROL for Virtual Servers. We’re using the VirtualCenter SDK and APIs in that product. It will collect a wide variety of data, discover VMware instances, and associate virtual servers to physical servers and represent that graphically on the console.
BMC Software views VirtualCenter primarily as a management platform and console product for VMware itself. It has as much an operational focus as it does a monitoring focus, and in fact its primary purpose isn’t for monitoring. That’s a perfectly sensible place for VMware to focus.
It was smart to create the SDK to make it easy for vendors like BMC Software to add value. We’re not going to do the things VMware can do. We’ve been able to monitor the virtual infrastructure world and monitor everything that runs in a virtual server. We can monitor Oracle, Windows, Linux, just about anything that would run in a physical server we can monitor in a virtual server.
Now we are looking at whether an agent is required to do these things. PATROL is an agent-based product. But we’re going to deliver PATROL for Virtual Servers so that it operates both with PATROL and with PATROL Express, our agentless remote monitoring product. Customers clearly like agentless products because they’re so much quicker to deploy, and they understand that these products have some technical limits.
We’re going to deliver PATROL for Virtual Servers for both worlds. It’s been designed so the server piece that interfaces with VirtualCenter can run on the PATROL Express remote server management module, or on the traditional PATROL agent. Those customers who have already deployed agents will find the new product seamless to use. And if they want an agentless product, we’ll be able to do that too.
VSM: Does this new product support VMware ESX and GSX?
DH: PATROL for Virtual Servers supports ESX only. We believe our enterprise customers are most interested in the performance and robust features of ESX Server.
VSM: Can you talk a little more about PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers?
DH: I mentioned PPA products for other environments such as Windows. What PPA for Virtual Servers brings that’s new is the ability to understand the impact a virtual environment has. With PPA for Windows you can model those workloads with a model of configured hardware and it can tell you how well it would perform. But that product doesn’t capture the impact that virtual operating systems have.
PPA for Virtual Servers recognizes the impact of virtualization. It recognizes the overhead for VMware. It recognizes how I/O is handled, how memory is managed, and allows customers to collect data for some sensible period of time, and size that workload to fit on a new server running ESX Server, and see if it will perform well. You might find that the CPU-busy would stay below 70%, but that workload #1 would face an I/O bottleneck.
Those are the kinds of things that the customer can find out with this product.
VSM: Who are your competitors?
DH: Certainly not VMware. VMware is happy to have leading third party products like our performance products that support their environment, because it’s clearly an enhancement and an enabler for them in the enterprise space.
Computer Associates is always an obvious competitor to BMC Software. At VMworld’s exhibit hall, we saw some smaller companies doing interesting niche products, focused on a particular area. Capacity planning and policy-based management are areas where people are trying to do things. We think PPA is superior already, and will be enhanced as we expand our capabilities for virtual servers.
Other monitoring solutions will always be available from smaller competitors who deliver a particular point product. But our customers have told us repeatedly that they prefer to have something that plugs in to what they’re already using. So other companies delivering a monitoring solution are competitors, but really not to us in our customer base.
VSM: Do you see the customers for these products being primarily existing customers, or do you see the potential for many new customers as well?
DH: I think it’s both. BMC Software’s history is with enterprise-class, Fortune 500, Global 2000 companies. What’s interesting is how rapidly VMware has moved into production workloads over the last year. The enterprise customers have dealt with virtual environments for years, and once they got over the aversion to risk, and got some comfort with VMware, they understand it and are deploying it at a very high rate.
VSM: Many of these enterprises used virtualization with their old mainframes.
DH: That’s right. And BMC Software’s history includes mainframes. That’s how we got our start in 1980. Now we have both the agent and agentless products in PATROL and PATROL Express respectively to support all consumers of VMware.
BMC Software’s key business strategy is Business Service Management. Early on we built really cool products that did some very powerful things, and customers felt they had to have our products, because they delivered such obvious benefits. Today customers have challenged companies like BMC Software to make sure that our products actually improve their business.
That’s what BSM is all about. It’s supposed to connect IT to business, to make sure that things that are happening in IT make a positive difference. If they don’t make a positive difference, you might not want to do them at all, or you certainly should figure out what’s wrong with your IT. We’re building products to make that connection clearer and stronger.
With the virtual server products and virtual infrastructure, the key driver that’s making server consolidation interesting is a business issue. It’s not a technical issue. The business issue is the huge amount of management it takes for hundreds or thousands of servers.
So what we’re going to focus on in virtual infrastructure is to help it complement the business. It’s not just about bare metal operating systems. We want to be sure that if we raise an alarm on a virtual server supporting a critical business application, that the alert shows how the issue is impacting business operations so IT knows how quickly the problem must be solved. These products were designed to work inside our BSM strategy. We are going to fully incorporate virtual infrastructure into that capability. Not all of it is there today, but our customers are doing this, and they’re going to want virtual infrastructure managed the same way.
VSM: Many companies using virtual infrastructure want to be able to manage billing their internal customers.
DH: Yes, that’s an interesting topic. When somebody had a whole server for their application, the cost of that was pretty contained. If it was a $5,000 server, it was a $5,000 capital purchase. There are some factors that can be applied, whether they’re unique to the company or industry standard, for lifetime and annual costs. So associating costs to that application might be relatively easy.
But if you’re running on a virtual server whose CPU allocation varies from day to day or week to week, or is moved around dynamically based on availability or performance, resource consumption and resource costing becomes an interesting problem.
Mainframes had a rich collection of data, where you could count I/Os and CPU seconds. That instrumentation is not commonly available in the Wintel world. At VMworld I had customers express great interest in reporting and metrics that if not used specifically for charge-backs, would allow them as accurately as possible to capture resource cost information.
VSM: Is that something that BMC Software is looking to do?
DH: We have never offered a charge-back system, but we have offered products that, to the degree we can collect the data, can be reported any number of ways. PPA is a very powerful analysis tool with very robust reporting. I don’t believe that we have a resource cost report out of the box right now, for virtual environments. But we’ll be paying close attention to what our customers ask for as they take delivery of this product and put it into production.
VSM: That will be interesting to follow, because we hear from companies that tracking users is different and very important.
DH: Yes, when a company goes from 1,000 physical servers to 200 physical servers running virtual environments, the CIO might initially be happy enough to know he got rid of 800 servers. But there will be plenty of people who want to know what other costs were changed, what other ROI was delivered. And the business owners will want to know if they get some savings in their budgets because their physical servers were taken away.
VSM: Where do you see virtualization going in the future?
DH: The virtual server environment is clearly very real. There’s strong momentum. Our own customers have told us what they’re doing, and as VMware becomes more and more accepted, and with Microsoft’s product serving as further endorsement of the concept, there seems to be no stopping what is at a very early stage right now.
One interesting thing to watch is the impact on non-Wintel environments, what will this do to proprietary Unix systems. Initially it won’t do anything, because these are existing Wintel workloads that are being moved around. But will people start to deploy applications on virtualized Wintel systems where they would have deployed them before on another system?
VSM: Sun is working on the N1 Grid platform, for example.
DH: And how does this impact Oracle and other major database application systems? There’s the very real issue of support, the support of workloads and certification of workloads in virtual environments. It will be interesting to see how ISVs handle that. No one wants to be caught in a very difficult customer support situation where we have fingers pointing everywhere about where the problem is.
We’re working on clarifying our support position on VMware. In general, we do “best effort”. We’re going to support the customer and assume there isn’t a problem related to the virtual environment. If at some point it becomes one, or we suspect it is, then we’ll work with VMware or the vendor to satisfy the customer.
VSM: Thanks for your time, Dan. How can readers find out more about BMC Software’s products for virtual servers?
DH: They can visit the Website at www.bmc.com, and find out more about PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers here.
