Gestio: Virtual Infrastructure Management for NetIQ AppManager
Gestio: Virtual Infrastructure Management for NetIQ AppManager
By Ann Ernst published: Wednesday, April 06 2005
A Q&A with Peter Stevens, CEO of AK Computer Services, about how Gestio Virtual Infrastructure Protection™ can monitor your VMware infrastructure using your production systems management application.
VSM: Can you tell us something about the company, its history and management?
PS: AK Computer Services Ltd was founded approximately two years ago by Seskin Kelly and I, both former NetIQ employees. We were founder members of the NetIQ Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA) team, and took the company from 4 employees in Europe to over 100, whilst the company grew from 60 to over 1,200.
Seskin was the first NetIQ employee in Europe, and as the European Technical Director was responsible for the initial European AppManager sales and deployments. Having been based in the States for over two years running worldwide support for NetIQ, I decided to return to the UK and restart a consulting business focusing on Systems Management Solutions.
Now based in the UK, we have hundreds of customer worldwide who use our Gestio Modules for AppManager to monitor Business Critical applications. We continue to provide AppManager consulting services to customers in Europe and the States.
Gestio is the brand name used by AK Computer Services Ltd for their range of Systems Management products. Development is all done in-house, with a small team of engineers who are responsible for the coding. We are a NetIQ Technology Partner and a VMware Technology Partner. Seskin is Technical Director, and I am the Managing Director or CEO.
VSM:Could you describe what Gestio VIP does, its features and benefits? When was it introduced?
PS: Virtual Infrastructure Protection™, or VIP for VMware, is a new AppManager product launched on the 15th February 2005. VIP for VMware allows you to visualize your entire Virtual Infrastructure within the AppManager console - VirtualCenter, ESX Server, GSX Server and all the VMs - enabling you to monitor multiple VirtualCenters from a single console.
Not only does VIP for VMware monitor the performance and availability of your Virtual Infrastructure, but it also allows you to keep a full audit of changes made within the environment, tracking when VMs are added, moved, deleted or renamed. You can ensure the power status of particular systems. For example, during normal working hours you may want to ensure that specific systems (VMs) are powered on, and you may equally want to ensure that some systems are powered off during the day. VIP for VMware will allow you to quickly and simply enforce these rules.
Integrating VMware monitoring into a production Systems Management solution allows you to leverage the power of an enterprise-scale product for automation and escalation. Ensuring that you use the same processes, policies and escalation processes for your Virtual Infrastructure as you do for your production systems means that you can use Virtual Infrastructure for production tasks. The philosophy of integration also means that you can monitor and correlate application performance with the performance of the underlying hosts systems. If the SQL database is performing slowly, is it due to excessive load on the SQL VM, or is it due to the ESX host being underpowered?
VSM: Why did you feel it was important to bring this product to market?
PS: We developed the product as a result of ongoing interest from customers. Our active consulting practice means that we get practical feedback from customer on a daily basis, and we had customers asking if it was possible to monitor VMware infrastructure using AppManager. After discussions with both VMware and NetIQ we decided that the best approach was to base the product on the Virtual Center Web-Services. This will allow us to utilize the full facilities of the ESX and GSX systems, allowing us to add automated facilities like VMotion in the future.
VSM: How does VIP ease the use of VMware in production?
PS: VIP for VMware simplifies management by allowing you to apply consistent monitoring and escalation processes and policies across the infrastructure. This is now implemented regardless of whether the systems are physical or virtual. You can use the same escalation processes and “single pane of glass” to ensure a consistent approach to monitoring. VIP for VMware allows you to monitor multiple Virtual Centers consistently and provide historic reporting correlated with application performance.
VSM: What business drivers would cause companies to look to your product?
PS: Companies wishing to invest in virtualization technology want to be able to use production scale processes, policies and escalation to monitor the virtual. VIP for VMware allows them to provide production monitoring of their virtual infrastructure – which in turn allows companies to reap the rewards of virtualizing a production, or Business Contingency, environment without compromising on monitoring, management, escalation and reporting.
VSM: Who is your target customer? Do you specialize in a geographic region?
PS: Our ideal target customer falls into one of two categories. The first is the existing AppManager customers who wants to extend their production monitoring and management solution to cover their entire Virtual Infrastructure. The second is VMware users who are looking to utilize the power of a Systems Management solution to facilitate escalation and alerting along with the reporting and capacity planning facilities of AppManager.
We don’t have a particular geographic region in which we work. We have resellers in The United States, Canada and EMEA.
VSM: Is there a trial or evaluation available?
PS: A 30 day evaluation of the VIP for VMware module is downloadable from the Gestio website at www.gestio.co.uk. It includes the monitoring of unlimited Host systems during the evaluation period.
Note that you will need AppManager installed to be able to use the module. It is not a standalone monitoring solution.
VSM: Do you plan to introduce a similar product for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005?
PS: It is something that we have looked at and know that technically we can achieve a similar module for Virtual Server. However we do not believe that Virtual Server currently has sufficient market penetration, within the production environment, for us to make the necessary investment and commitment at this time. We expect that this will change over the coming months and we will be keeping a close eye on the market.
VSM: What future plans do you have for Gestio VIP?
PS: The next release will look at adding functionality around VMotion and possibly integration with software patching technologies. Rather than just providing monitoring we want to extend the control and automation functionality to reduce the overall management workload of using virtualization technologies.
We want to be able to do things like:
Automatically migrate a VM to a new Host if the application is performing poorly due to Host overload and there is a “better” host available.
Investigate the integration with Patch management and Anti-Virus technologies to do things like:
Out of regular work hours spin up every VM and compare it to a defined patch state, and either auto-patch or blacklist depending on defined rules.
Automatically ensure that every VM has anti-virus software enabled, otherwise reconfigure the network settings to disable internet access.
Keep up to date with VMware, Microsoft and new virtualization technologies to ensure that VIP is the virtualization management software of choice.
VSM: How do our readers learn more about your company and products?
PS: Details on the Systems Management Products can be found on the Gestio website at www.gestio.co.uk. All of the products are downloadable for a 30 day evaluation.
