top 7 vmware management challenges in...

Top 7 VMware Management

Challenges in 2012

Eric Siebert: vExpert, Author, Blogger

Twitter: @ericsiebert

Blog: http://vsphere-land.com

http://vsphere-land.com/



Administrative points on this webinar

Questions ● Can use the virtual Q&A panel.

● This webinar is recorded and available for replay after a few days.

● At the end of the webinar, we can raise virtual hand for dialog

questions.

● Stick around until the end of the webinar!

− Winners will receive a choice of books!

Overview of Veeam

About Veeam

Veeam Software develops innovative products

for virtual infrastructure management

and data protection.

Reduce costs, mitigate risk, and fully realize the promise

of virtualization with Veeam.

Agenda

Topic overview ● Identify 7 common management challenges with VMware

environments.

● Provide detail on what the management challenges are and why they

occur.

● Provide tips on dealing with management challenges.

● Show you how Veeam can help you overcome your management

challenges.

Questions and answers

Drawing and wrap-up

Overview

Virtualization provides many benefits that are well

publicized.

But it also introduces many challenges as well that

aren’t as well known.

Virtualization effects everything in the data center.

When you virtualize your servers you have to virtualize

your management as well.

A virtual environment is like a city, manage it properly

and it will prosper and flourish.

If you don’t manage your virtual environment properly it

will overwhelm you and become a slum.

The 7 VMware Management Challenge Areas

VM Sprawl

Storage Management

Business View

Change Management

Monitoring & Reporting

Capacity Planning

Big Picture View

Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl

If you’re involved with virtualization you have probably

heard the term VM sprawl at some point.

VM sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of virtual

machines, it’s a very real problem that can occur in any

virtual environment.

If not dealt with it can end up costing you wasted

money, time & resources.

VM sprawl is not always obvious

and doesn’t occur over night.

Not a technical problem, can’t fix

with settings or patches.


Star Trek fans can relate to this from the popular

“Trouble with Tribbles” episode where the tribbles

reproduce so quickly that they threaten to overwhelm

the host ships food supplies.


VM sprawl is similar as VM’s are often created without

any regard for the resources that they consume and the

possibility of overwhelming a host server’s resources.


When you virtualize mindsets change because you no

longer have to buy new hardware to create servers.

Creating VMs is way too easy!

Requests for new VMs typically meet little resistance.

Un-checked growth of virtual machines is not the only

cause of VM sprawl.

Over-allocation of resources to VMs

defeats the purpose of virtualization.

VMs need to be right-sized to

avoid wasting resources.


VMs are not free!

Many consider VMs as “free” servers since they do not have a physical presence and creating them is easy.

In non-virtualized environment if a new server is needed you typically have to go through a process: ● Requirements, PO, Approval, Order, Wait, Assemble, Connect

The whole process from start to finish can take weeks and cost many thousands of dollars.

VMs do have a resource cost, while not as obvious as writing a check it is still very real.

Virtual environments are expensive and have a limited set of resources.


Use the same justifications and processes that you

would use when new physical servers are requested.

VM sprawl has no clearly defined symptoms.

If you look at the size of your virtual environment at two

different points in time it becomes much more apparent.

To eliminate VM sprawl look for

over-sized, stale or zombie VMs.

Zombie VMs are powered-on

VMs that have been forgotten

about and no one uses anymore.


vCenter Server lacks reporting capabilities.

Veeam provides reporting, monitoring and chargeback

that can help you with much of this!

Ways to prevent VM Sprawl ● Limit access for creating VMs, don’t be afraid to say no!

● Be stingy when assigning resources to a new VM.

● Actively monitor VM resource usage, workloads can change over time.

● Document the who, what, why and when of a new VM.

● Implement a chargeback application so you can help the business

understand the cost of virtual machines.

● Use resource pools to segregate a host’s resources.

● Implement a formal process for requesting new VMs that requires

justification & approvals.

Challenge 2 – Storage Management

Storage is the most critical and valuable resource in

virtualization, it’s also the most costly.

Storage can make or break your virtual environment.

Ensuring good performance and sufficient capacity is

very important.

Managing storage resources is a constant challenge.

Snapshots and thin disks represent a double threat.

Over-committed datastores and snapshots must be

constantly monitored.

Running low on disk space on

datastores can be a very bad thing.


Storage is the slowest VM resource.

Storage I/O bottlenecks can choke the life out of your

VMs.

Storage is a complicated resource, many things can

impact performance. ● Disk alignment

● Multi-pathing

● Improper settings

● Improper architecture & design

● Excessive I/O

● Too many snapshots


Having a good storage reporting and monitoring solution

can make storage management much easier.

Getting information out of vCenter Server can be

difficult.

Veeam Monitor provides full storage monitoring

capabilities, including disk space, disk issues and

datastore monitoring.

Veeam Reporter can help you keep an eye on over-

provisioned datastores and provide trend analysis as

well as optimize VM placement.

Challenge 3 – Business View

Virtualization causes our hosts to become melting pots

of virtual machines.

VM density on a host has rapidly increased with

advances in CPU, memory, disk & network resources.

Even smaller hosts can hold dozens of VMs.

VMs with different functions, departments and business

units often get lumped together.

Not efficient or cost-effective to

physically segregate VMs on hosts.

Organization is needed to more

effectively manage VMs.


Organizing VMs is very useful for chargeback, reporting,

monitoring and to control VM sprawl.

Allows you to manage your virtual infrastructure based

on business needs and priorities.

Commons ways to categorize servers: ● Server role (i.e. database, email, web, etc.)

● Service level agreements (SLA )

● Operating system (Linux Distros, Windows)

● Department (sales, IT, marketing)

● Company or Business Unit

● Geographical location


VM folders can be used to organize VMs, maintaining them can be a pain in the rear.

VM folders are one dimensional.

Can also use custom attributes or Notes field to add info to VMs, also a pain to maintain.

Veeam Business View is free and provides an automated, flexible and dynamic way to group your virtualization objects within different categories.

Business View allows single/mass manual attribute editing, or automatically based on pre-defined rules.

Challenge 4 – Change Management

Managing changes that occur in the data center is a

necessary and critical task.

With virtualization change management becomes even

more critical.

VMs all share common

infrastructure and resources.

Seemingly innocent and minor

changes can have big impacts

in a virtual environment.

Changes can have ripple

effects across many hosts.


Change management is especially critical for

troubleshooting.

The first question asked when problems seemingly

occur out of nowhere is: what changed?

Virtual environments are complicated,

there are many moving parts, hunting for

the cause of a problem can be very

time-consuming.

Problems usually have big impacts,

time isn’t a luxury you can afford in

virtual environments.


Too many cooks in the kitchen can make figuring out

who changed what even more of a challenge.

Veeam Reporter captures the "who, what, where, when

and how" of every change.

Reporter can improve change workflows and investigate

problematic changes.

Reporter provides instant visibility

of changes that have occurred.

Allows you to easily isolate the root

cause of performance slowdowns

and availability issues.

Challenge 5 - Monitoring & Reporting

Virtual environments are like small

children, they require constant

monitoring and attention.

If you don’t monitor them you could

end up with a mess on your hands.

Performance monitoring with virtualization is much more

complicated than with traditional servers.

With virtualization there is more to monitor and

interpreting the results can be difficult.

Guest OS is no longer seeing the physical hardware of

the host so monitoring there is no longer effective.


Virtual hardware is emulated by the hypervisor, the

guest OS doesn’t know the big picture.

Monitoring needs to be done at the virtualization layer,

there are many statistics unique to virtual environments.

vCenter Server can provide performance statistics but

doesn’t help you interpret them.

vCenter Server doesn’t extend to far into the guest OS

layer & does not provide a complete monitoring solution.

Veeam Monitor provides visibility all the way down to the

individual VM and the applications running inside it.


Hundreds of performance stats available in vSphere,

there are a few key ones that you should know. ● CPU Ready - the amount of time in milliseconds that is spent waiting

for a CPU to become available.

● MEM Swapped - the amount of memory that is being swapped to/from

a VMs virtual disk swap file by the VMkernel.

● Disk GAVG - the average amount of time in milliseconds (latency) that

it takes to process a SCSI command issued by the guest OS. This is

the sum of latency in the VMkernel (KAVG) and latency in the storage

device (DAVG).

● DISK Commands - disk (SCSI) commands show the number of I/O

operations per second (IOPS) that are occurring.

● NET Usage - the combined transmit and receive rates measured in

KBps.


You can’t afford to be reactive when it comes to

performance, you must be proactive to prevent big

problems from occurring.

Monitoring should be done constantly, otherwise how do

you know if you have a problem today or if it’s been

there all along.

Monitoring & reporting work together to provide

maximum visibility into your virtual environment.

Your virtual environment might be trying

to tell you something, if you’re not

listening you won’t hear it.

Challenge 6 - Capacity Planning

Traditional physical server environments are easy to

plan capacity for, just buy more servers when needed.

A virtual environment is like a city, lots of shared

infrastructure working together as a whole unit.

Planning capacity for virtual environments is much more

difficult.

In a virtual environment you

need to leverage historical

growth and trend statistics

as a whole to accurately plan

capacity.


Capacity Planning is more than just predicting future

resource needs.

It’s also about right-sizing and optimizing your current

resources.

Virtualization is all about efficiency, wasted resources

reduce your ROI and decrease efficiency.

If you have too much stuff in

your house, don’t buy a bigger

house, get rid of what

you don’t need anymore.


There is more to calculating capacity than totally up

resource usage numbers.

Spare capacity must also be factored in for host failures.

Veeam Reporter tracks your virtual environment’s

configuration and its past and current utilization.

Reporter can be your crystal ball to perform “what-if”

analyses to evaluate the impact of

adding or removing hosts and VMs.

Reporter provides recommendations,

justification and confidence you need

to go to management for funding.

Challenge 7 – Big Picture View

Managing silos in the data center can be challenging.

Having multiple tools to manage multiple systems

results in multiple headaches.

Layers in the computing stack are often managed

separately.

Having as few panes of glass as possible to look

through makes management easier.

Most data centers that use VMware for virtualization

also use Microsoft for OS and apps.

Many VMware admins are also Microsoft admins and

vice versa


VMware management tools are designed to only

manage the virtualization layer.

Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is often

used to manage Microsoft servers.

More data centers are starting to

use a mix of vendor hypervisors.

Why not extend SCOM & SCVMM

to manage VMware as well.

Single management pane of glass

brings silos together & allows

easier management & monitoring.


Veeam nworks Management Pack fully integrates with

Microsoft System Center providing a unified view of your

physical servers, virtual servers and applications.

nworks MP enables you to use

SCOM as your one console

to rule them all.

nworks MP collects data

agentlessly from the vSphere API.

Enables all System Center functionality for all VMware

components, including vCenter Server, clusters, hosts,

virtual machines, storage and hardware.


Provides end-to-end visibility from the physical server, to

the hypervisor, to the virtual machines and the

applications and services running there.

nworks SPI also available for HP Operations Manager.

Summary

Virtual environments have unique challenges and issues

that must be dealt with using the proper tools.

If you are going to invest in virtualization, you should

invest in the proper management tools as well.

Veeam provides the tools needed to overcome the

challenges you face that will help ensure that your

virtual environment stays healthy and problem free.

Watch for the upcoming companion white paper that will

cover this topic in more detail.

Questions and Answers

Winners receive a choice of the following books

Thank you for attending!

Resources: ● Twitter @Veeam

● Facebook: VeeamSoftware

● Blog: http://www.veeam.com/blog

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