© 2012 VMware Inc. All rights reserved

Managing the virtual environment

Ashley Davies

VMware

2

Cloud Requires a New Approach to Management

Traditional IT Management

Applications & Infrastructure tightly

coupled into vertical stacks, creating

multiple silos

Business Agility Suffers Greater Flexibility = Agility

Cloud Management

Abstraction of applications from

infrastructure, with policy-based

coordination & automation

Cloud Infrastructure

3

VMware’s Differentiated Approach To Simplifying Management

VMware simplifies

management by

embedding and tightly

integrating

management

capabilities into its

cloud platforms

Embedded, Integrated

Management

VMware improves IT

effectiveness and

efficiency of disparate

teams and processes

through converged

management solutions

Converged

Management

VMware provides

effective visibility into,

and control of, costs

and risks to help you

run IT like a business,

leveraging both private

and public cloud

services

Run IT Like a

Business

4

VMware’s Cloud Management Portfolio

IT B

usin

ess M

an

ag

em

en

t

Application

Management

End

User Computing

Management

Infrastructure and

Operations

Management

vFabric Application

Management Suite

• Provisioning

• Monitoring

• Optimization

VMware

IT Business

Management Suite

• IT Financial

Management

• IT Governance,

Risk and Compliance

• Service Portfolio

Management

Comprehensive management solutions to simplify

management in virtual and hybrid cloud environments

vCenter Operations

Management Suite

• Performance

Management

• Capacity

Management

• Configuration

Management

5

The Automated Cloud Operations Workflow

Health

Degradation

Root

Cause

Analysis Isolate

Performance

Issue

Change

Configuration

Capacity

Shortfall

SLA Compliance

Proactive

Maintenance

Forecast

(Risk)

Optimize

(Efficiency)

Monitor

(Health)

Incident !

Health

Risk Efficiency

Fully

integrated

Tools

Remediate

6

vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0

vCenter Operations Manager Dashboard

What is it?

• Integrated and highly automated performance,

capacity and configuration management

• Industry leading Cloud Operations management

console that integrates with 3rd party solutions

• Continuous compliance analysis and remediation

Why is it unique?

• Patented analytics self learn “normal” in a dynamic

environment

• Integrated approach converges Operations

Management disciplines to enable proactive

incident avoidance

• Tightly integrated with vSphere and vCenter

• Designed and built for cloud; extensible to legacy

third party solutions

7

vCenter Operations UI - Two perspectives

Immediate

problems

• What is

happening

right now?

• What do I

need to pay

attention to?

Operations Short and Long Term Capacity

Forward

Looking

• Are there

areas that I

should be

concerned

about from a

capacity

perspective?

• Have I

deployed my

VI in the

most efficient

manner?

Health

Risk Efficiency

8

vCenter Operations UI – Major and Minor Badges

• High level

Understanding

• Calculated

from scores of

Minor Badges

3 Major Badges

8 Minor Badges

• Specifics

• Guidance

Health

Risk Efficiency

9

Cloud Operations Workflow – High-Level Indicators

Health: indication of immediate performance

and availability issues

• Consolidates thousands of metrics into a single

indicator of well-being

• Investigate and triage these first

Risk: projection of future capacity and

availability issues

• Trends long-term behavior and projects forward

• Some risk issues can be near-term, but to be

addressed after Health issues

Efficiency: identification of opportunities for

optimization

• Does not identify problems, but points our areas

for improvements

• Tackle these issues after Health and Risk issues

1

2

3

Health

Risk Efficiency

10

Operations: Major Badge – Health Health

Risk Efficiency

“How is our world doing?” One Source of Truth Across the Enterprise

Health Score - Objective measure of performance

based on underlying level of abnormal behavior

High Health is good (100-0)

Identifies current problems in the systems

Issues that need to be resolved immediately to avoid

problems

Analytics based, calculated from 3 minor badges

(Workload, Anomalies, Faults)

For any resource or grouping:

A single Server, Device, Resource

Entire Tier or Silo

Entire Application or Service

Entire Datacenter

Any Arbitrary Group of Resources

Heatmap

-> Provides quick view of many objects at once

-> Shows Health of all parent and child objects

-> Go back in time (6 hours) and see the

“weather” of the Virtual Infrastructure

11

Capacity Planning – Risk

Are there future risks to my systems

and virtual Infrastructure?

Risk score over the last 7 days

Low risk is good (0-100)

Identifies potential problems that could

eventually hurt the performance

Health

Risk Efficiency

Minor badges

12

Capacity Planning: Forecast - “What-If” Analysis

Current capacity

cross-over point

Actual VMs

deployed

VM count

capacity

Capacity state

today

New capacity

shortfall if I add

10 new VMs

Health

Risk Efficiency

13

Capacity Planning: Major Badge – Efficiency

Are there optimization opportunities in

my systems?

• Save £££ by better utilizing resources

How to run a leaner datacenter

High Efficiency is good (100-0)

Graph Depicts VMs by Percent

• Optimal – Optimally Provisioned VMs

• Waste – Over Provisioned VMs

• Stress – Under Provisioned VMs

Efficiency Score calculated from Minor

Badges

• Reclaimable Waste

• Density

Three Resources Considered

• CPU

• Memory

• Disk Space

Health

Risk Efficiency

14

Sub-Badges - Optimization Opportunities

Reclaimable Waste: lists excessive

resource allocation

• Identifies VMs with too many

CPUs/vRAM and hosts with too few VMs

Density: computes the ideal

consolidation ratio

• Computes optimal VMs per host to

maximize resource utilization without

sacrificing performance

Health

Risk Efficiency

15

Opportunities for more efficiency?

On average, customers find out that 90% of their VMs are

overprovisioned

Health

Risk Efficiency

16

Business cases around Capacity Costs Avoidance

Capacity Management analyses findings from a real customer site

Immediate opportunities for:

• Better consolidation ratios

• Deferred investments in servers and related additional hardware and software (Network & Storage

connectivity, OS….)

• Storage Reallocation:

• Deferred investments. Costs savings based on Storage Tiers (340 k$ for Tier 1 Storage)

• License costs savings

• vRAM/CPU based software licensing – vSphere!

• Depends on application software licensing model

Health

Risk Efficiency

VM type Quantity Resources Possible savings

Idle 265 vCPU 2226

Powered off 502 vRAM 9.2 TB

Oversized 6879 Disk Space 22.5 TB

17

Smart Alerts – Before problems happen….

Overview

Proactive alerts that provide early

warning on building issues

Identify upcoming health,

performance and capacity issues

Automatic root cause analysis of

offending metrics across all layers

Benefits

Advance notification of abnormal

behavior help avoid incidents

Immediately focus on the root cause

rather than symptoms or false alerts

Root cause and

potential impact

Early warning

Smart Alert

Health

Risk Efficiency

18

Application and Infrastructure Dependency Mapping

Overview

Automated Discovery and

Visualization of Application and

Infrastructure Dependencies

Pre-built knowledge base for easy

and accurate labeling of

application names and version

numbers

Integrated with Site Recovery Mgr

for more complete DR protection

Benefits

Application-aware operations

management eliminates risk of

human error

Visualize application dependencies

and DR-protection status

Automated discovery of application

services, relationships and

infrastructure dependencies

Health

Risk Efficiency

19

Example of OPEX Savings with vCenter Operations

Before

400 critical alerts/hour

End user complaints

alerted IT to the problem

End users impacted (avg. 2

hours/outage)

12 Level-2 engineers on

bridge call to address

problem

After

20 alerts/MONTH

3 hours advanced warning

of slowdown w/root cause

NO end user impact

1 Level-2 Engineer and 1

DBA to address problems

Learn Normal

Smart Alerting

Root Cause

Solve performance

issues BEFORE

end users are affected

and reduce total alerts

20

Enterprise

vCenter Operations Management 5.0 Suite Packaging

Automated Operations Management

Small and Mid-size

Enterprise

Plus Edition

Enterprise

Edition

Standard

Edition

Advanced

Edition

Performance Management

Capacity Management

Application Dependency Mapping

Cost Visibility

Extensible to

3rd party

data sources

Adapters for

3rd party data

sources

included.

Configuration & Compliance 1 2

vSphere only

1: vSphere hosts ONLY

2: vSphere hosts and VM “Guest OS”

vSphere + physical

Key New Features in 5.0:

• Operations Dashboard

• Smart Alerts

• Application Topology

• Compliance for vSphere Hosts

• Cost Visibility

21

vCenter Operations Customer success story: TUI InfoTec

Industry

Headquarters

Employees

“Through virtualization we have established the foundation for our IT

Transformation. However, the pace and scale of our operations has

greatly accelerated, and our current approach to IT Management is

standing in the way of our ability to achieve the agility and operational

efficiency we need. VMware uniquely understands the challenges we

face. Their strategy and solutions will deliver a modern approach to

IT management that will enable us to take the next step in our

journey to the cloud.”

— Helmut Clemens, Head of Windows Operations, TUI InfoTec

Objectives

• Reduce existing performance issues

• To have the ability to measure end to end performance

VMware Solution

• vCenter Operations has provided simple analysis of any problem

areas in the existing infrastructure. It has also allowed the IT team

to determine the level of normal latency on storage, enabling an

alert when the storage latency threshold is exceeded

Business Impact

• 50% reduction in time taken to troubleshoot issues

• Improved operational efficiency and performance of existing

infrastructure

PROFILE

Information Technology

Germany

420

VMWARE PRODUCTS & SERVICES

• VMware vSphere

• VMware vCenter Operations

• VMware View

• VMware ThinApp

• PSO: TAM

Podcast available on www.briefingsdirect.com

22

Automating Your Cloud Operations – Summary

Purpose Built for dynamic Cloud environments – best for vSphere

Proactive smart alerts for service health degradation before end users are

impacted – patented analytics & actionable intelligence

Visibility into capacity and configuration changes and understanding of

correlation with performance issues

Issues fixed quickly through right-click remediation

Q & A

Thank You!