Assuring Converged Infrastructure: Converged Management Strategies for Cisco UCS

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1 Converged Management Strategies for Cisco UCS An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) White Paper Prepared for CA Technologies April 2012 IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH, INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary...1 Mainstreaming Converged Infrastructure...1 Converging Management for Converged Infrastructure...2 The CA Solution: Converged Assurance for Cisco UCS...4 EMA Perspective...7 About CA Technologies...7

3 Executive Summary Converged infrastructure platforms are one of the hottest new answers to the ongoing challenge of establishing architectures that can deliver new applications and services in a flexible, cost-effective manner. These solutions pre-integrate traditionally separate elements such as networking, compute, and storage, and are especially intended to provide an optimized platform for server virtualization and cloud services. Enterprises and service providers are finding such solutions to be ideal for hosting virtual desktops, rich media, web infrastructure, and more. But with the advent of converged infrastructure comes a new mandate and opportunity to converge traditionally separate and distinct management tools and technologies so these new infrastructure solutions can be monitored in a systemic, proactive, service-oriented manner. This paper examines the most common forms of converged infrastructure solutions and the related need for converged management solutions. It then examines the CA Technologies solution for converged management of Cisco UCS, a fast-growing example of converged infrastructure. Mainstreaming Converged Infrastructure In the ongoing struggle between managing cost and providing flexible, business-enabling services and technology, IT is forced to embrace continuous change. Fortunately, a constant stream of industry innovations holds out hope for keeping pace. One such innovation is known collectively as converged infrastructure and represents a move toward highly integrated, tightly engineered combinations of traditionally separate IT infrastructure technologies. While there are a number of definitions of converged infrastructure and a number of layers at which such integration and optimization can occur, all carry common themes and objectives faster deployment, greater flexibility and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Converged infrastructure solutions promise faster deployment, greater flexibility, and lower TCO Numerous compelling converged infrastructure solutions are now available in the marketplace, and more are coming. Most bring compute platforms together with networking, and in some cases include storage technologies. The objective is one of vendor-certified integration, coupled with the ultimate goal of providing an optimized hardware environment upon which server virtualization can be deployed in ways that achieve the true potential of its transformative nature. In the broadest definition, converged infrastructures are solutions that bring together all technologies compute, network, and storage. One example is FlexPod, which combines NetApp, Cisco and VMware technologies, and another is the solution known as VCE Vblock from VMware, Cisco and EMC. Recent ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) research indicates that although adoption of these converged infrastructure solutions is still in its early stage, interest is growing rapidly. One of EMA s more interesting findings is that a significant gap exists between the perceived influences that converged infrastructure solutions are having on infrastructure management priorities amongst IT executives versus technical staff members. Executives believe converged infrastructure is an important initiative at more than twice the rate of staff members, indicating likely future growth in adoption that will be driven from the top down. Converged infrastructure can also be used to describe the Unified Computing System (UCS) offered by Cisco Systems. Cisco UCS ties together advanced blade-based, virtualized compute architecture 1 Page 1

4 (based on the VMware hypervisor) with intelligent networking technology. As such, Cisco UCS is a fundamentally different blade computing platform than others available in the marketplace by virtue of its architectural optimizations specifically brought to bear for hosting large volumes of virtual systems. Cisco UCS, introduced to the market in June 2009, has rapidly grown to become one of the top three blade compute solutions globally today. The reason for this meteoric rise is a combination of capabilities on a functional level, such as innovative CPU and memory management coupled with high degrees of automation resulting in compelling Virtual Machine (VM) densities per blade and a highly competitive TCO. Since Cisco is a new player in the compute platforms market, wherever the Cisco UCS is under consideration or deployed it is regularly accorded significant attention and maintains a high profile of awareness across the organization, both vertically and horizontally. This means that stakes are higher for success or failure than might be the case for other well-known compute procurements. With converged infrastructure solutions now beginning to count years in the market rather than months, deployment projects are steadily moving beyond the pilot phase and into standard production. In many cases, deployments are being driven by or attached to high profile technology and application/service initiatives, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), enterprise video, collaboration, Unified Communications (UC), Oracle/SAP migration, and internal private cloud initiatives. This transition brings along with it the need to match cost advantages realized during procurement with operating cost advantages in the production environment. Integrating new converged Infrastructure technologies such as Cisco UCS into operational management tools can be difficult and disruptive This represents a significant challenge, since integrating new converged infrastructure technologies such as Cisco UCS into operational management tools, technologies and practices can be both difficult and disruptive. In particular, converged infrastructure systems represent a stress point as well as an opportunity to converge operations management. Converging Management for Converged Infrastructure Converged infrastructure has been described as cloud in a box or as data center in a box. Regardless of which way you choose to look at it, these solutions collapse together two or more of the fundamental enabling technologies and the management obligations required for delivering business services. EMA has long recognized and documented that the move toward service-oriented operations requires management integration (a.k.a. convergence) across technology silos. Integration of multiple silos within converged infrastructure represents a unique opportunity to converge management, ultimately opening the door and closing the gap for delivering service-oriented operations. Management practices primarily deal with two complementary task domains configuration/ provisioning and operations monitoring. Configuration and provisioning require coordination of tasks and command via interfaces that are specific to the underlying technology components. In the case of Cisco UCS, this coordination can be done using Cisco UCS Manager alone or integrated with cross platform automation solutions. For operational monitoring, it s more likely that management tools will come from partners who have a long established multi-vendor, multi-platform capability and credibility. 2 Page 2

5 EMA research indicates that service-oriented management typically starts with integration on the operations side. This means looking across technology domains for the purposes of monitoring, troubleshooting and collaboration/reporting so that the objective of delivering an application or service to end users and customers can be the focal point. Operational monitoring for Cisco UCS will likely come from (Cisco) partners who have long established multi-vendor, multi-platform capability and credibility. Monitoring: The primary objective of monitoring the operations environment is to keep an eye on the health of the infrastructure as well as understand how well applications and services are being delivered to IT consumers, whether internal or external. This requires coordinated collecting of metrics and statistics across all interconnected parts of the infrastructure in a manner that is as near real time as possible. When issues do arise, an ability to recognize the severity as well as the potential impact to the served organization is essential for planning and executing corrective responses. For Cisco UCS deployments, this means collecting and relating operational intelligence across physical and virtual elements within the compute blades, enclosures and the intrinsic networking technologies. Troubleshooting: When issues occur that reach the point of actual or threatened service disruption, focus must be placed on a rapid assessment and diagnosis, aimed specifically at identifying the root cause. Since so many elements must work together seamlessly to deliver applications and business services, the warning sign that sparks an investigation can originate from a number of components or relationships. Workflows must direct where corrective actions can be taken as quickly as possible. For Cisco UCS deployments, this means recognizing and navigating between related elements in the physical or virtual systems and network realms. The starting point may be a physical systems alarm, a network performance threshold alert or an end-user responsiveness complaint. Collaboration/reporting: Beyond live operational support, longer-term trends typically become evident by looking at historical reports of usage, activity and performance metrics. While many operations monitoring systems will collect and present such information, the ability to share such data across technology teams as well as with customer-facing support and even line of business personnel has moved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have. Reports must come pre-defined or be easy to define and customize and must be fronted with an access control approach to ensure that the many readers are only able to see that data to which they are entitled. For Cisco UCS deployments, interested parties who may need access to such dashboards and reports will include data center infrastructure managers, systems administrators, network managers, virtualization teams and application support. As should be clear at this point, there are a number of common technical challenges facing converged operations management of Cisco UCS deployments. First and foremost, management solutions must be able to recognize all of the physical and virtual components within the Cisco UCS platform as well as the relationships between them. This must be done following initial deployment and then kept current as inevitable changes ensue. Next, relationships must be recognized between the ultimate payloads that Cisco UCS will host the applications running within the VMs and the internal physical/virtual infrastructure components related to each one. Lastly, the data and statistics harvested during the monitoring process are of interest to a broad cross-section of the organization and must be translated and accessible for use by means of a wide range of viewpoints. 3 Page 3

6 The CA Solution: Converged Assurance for Cisco UCS CA Technologies is a well-established supplier of enterprise-class operations management solutions that span the multiple technology domains represented by converged infrastructure solutions such as Cisco UCS. The CA Application Performance Management, CA Infrastructure Management and CA Service Operations Insight solutions deliver an integrated operations management capability for converged infrastructures. Since the CA Technologies solution spans availability and performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and collaboration/reporting, it is a service-oriented management solution that provides all of the data necessary to put operations pros in a position to keep the risk of downtime and performance degradation to an absolute minimum. CA Technologies has developed management capabilities for Cisco UCS by working with Cisco Systems and VMware, leveraging a combination of the Cisco UCS Manager and VMware vcenter APIs, and building on a record of success managing Cisco and non-cisco networking equipment and compute platforms. The CA solution brings together a best-in-class approach spanning the following major functional areas of operations assurance: Visibility Operational assurance starts with being able to discover and visualize the managed infrastructure. A key challenge here is delivering a solution that can find and recognize all the interconnected components that make up Cisco UCS, and allow easy navigation between the elements while also providing context revealing how each element relates to others. The CA Infrastructure Management solution addresses this with its underlying technology, including CA Spectrum for physical and virtual element discovery, modeling and availability monitoring. Through initial and ongoing discovery, CA Infrastructure Management creates a software model representation of the physical infrastructure within the Cisco UCS chassis (see figure 1) such as blades, fabric extenders and network interfaces as well as the hypervisors and virtual machines, virtual network interfaces and virtual switches running within and between the hypervisors. Figure 1. CA Infrastructure Management console view of a managed Cisco UCS environment 4 Page 4

7 Perhaps even more important, CA Infrastructure Management recognizes where each Cisco UCS has been connected into the broader physical infrastructure, and models those topological relationships as well. This includes both physical and logical topologies across both physical and virtual network constructs. Operationally, CA Infrastructure Management provides a primary dashboard for technical personnel to manage Cisco UCS alerts together with those from all other parts of the managed infrastructure, and applies automated alarm suppression wherever appropriate to help operators focus on the root cause of the alarm. A second component of visibility is the regular collection of performance metrics. CA Infrastructure Management does this using its embedded CA ehealth technology to track operational performance metrics across all levels of physical and virtual elements within the Cisco UCS, such as CPU and memory usage per blade, chassis power and temperature levels, virtual switch traffic volumes, and fiber connect port bandwidth usage. CA Infrastructure Management also delivers a wide range of live and historical dashboards and reports for deeper problem and trend analysis. Finally, the CA Infrastructure Management solution provides pre-defined performance indicators based on best practices. Once in use, it collects performance data and uses this information to dynamically build thresholds based on time of day and day of week. Using this self-learned performance insight, the solution can generate alarms when it detects abnormal deviations and will also adjust thresholds over time to better reflect the dynamic nature of Cisco UCS applications. This aspect of visibility gives the Cisco UCS administrator an early warning system for persistent problems rather than simply waiting for service-impacting incidents to fully develop. Diagnostics While sustained operational visibility is excellent in helping operations teams stay on top of current state, assurance platforms must also facilitate the diagnostic and troubleshooting process when problems occur. Whether originating as a performance threshold violation or SNMP event/trap, alarms provide a starting point for many troubleshooting workflows. The CA solution offers a number of diagnostic supports, such as automated root cause analysis (as mentioned above) and logical traversal of relationships between the physical and virtual realms by leveraging the internal infrastructure model created and maintained by the CA Spectrum technology. For example, a performance issue for a particular VM could have a number of root causes. First, the application on that VM may be CPU-bound or there may be a problem with shared memory on the blade where the VM is running. Further, the issue may be systemic for all blades in a particular Cisco UCS chassis that is suffering from an environmental controls issue. CA s Infrastructure Management solution extends beyond deep Cisco UCS visibility to also deliver diagnostic capabilities and business/service alignment perspectives Alternatively, the root cause may be resource contention for an inbound or outbound storage system interface. The CA Infrastructure Management solution allows easy traversal between related components via drill-down navigation, starting anywhere and going in multiple directions. With a complex mix of elements such as those Cisco UCS brings to the table, such flexible navigation is essential for facilitating diagnostics. 5 Page 5

8 Business Alignment The most sophisticated way of understanding any IT infrastructure is in terms of how it works together to deliver the business services it supports. This means recognizing the relationships between an application hosted in the data center on a particular blade within a particular Cisco UCS chassis and the other applications or users that need to access that application. Using CA Service Operations Insight, it is possible to define these services and recognize and track both the risk and impact of outages or degradations experienced by any individual elements within a complex infrastructure. Figure 2. CA Service Operations Insight view of Cisco UCS-hosted services on a VCE Vblock Platform CA Service Operations Insight provides a dashboard by which services can be defined and tracked, including current health, quality and risk combined with an assessment of whether service-level agreements (SLAs) are in adherence (see figure 2). In this instance, a service comprised of VDI applications running within VMs on a Cisco UCS within a Vblock is shown. While those infrastructure details are not immediately apparent, any operational issues recognized with the Cisco UCS platform would contribute to the health, quality and risk analytics for that service, and underlying infrastructure details can be reached via drilldowns. Such a dashboard can be shared collaboratively across the organization to support a broad understanding of the delivery of a business service, providing both context and clarity around the end user experience. As a front-end dashboard for IT operators, CA Service Operations Insight provides the top level view of services hosted on converged infrastructure, imparting immediate understanding regarding how they are performing versus expectations coupled with an ability to drill directly into related details whenever conditions warrant. This integration of operations management capabilities represents a complete, holistic approach to moving beyond simple availability and performance monitoring and toward true proactive service assurance. This allows operators to ensure that Cisco UCS deployments, together with surrounding and supporting infrastructure, are playing their intended role in the organization. 6 Page 6

9 CA Technologies foresees additional opportunities to expand upon this base of visibility, diagnostics and business alignment, through the future addition of operational insights coming from other elements within the CA Service Assurance portfolio and by applying additional layers and techniques for automating monitoring, diagnosis and closed-loop corrective actions. EMA Perspective Without question, converged infrastructure is here to stay and represents effective innovation through well-engineered integration of information technology components. Such solutions hold great hope for allowing IT to keep pace with the endless onslaught of demand for newer, faster, cheaper services for the organizations they serve without bloating operational cost. Cisco UCS is a prime example of innovative converged infrastructure, introducing compelling technical capabilities combined with a compelling TCO. And yet, as organizations seek to reap the rewards of investments in converged infrastructure, they face practical barriers regarding how to capture the best returns. Key to long-term success will be the ability to converge management tools, technologies and practices to mirror the converged nature of the infrastructure. Unlocking the full potential of Cisco UCS requires keeping pace with the dynamic growth and high rates of change that come with such highly virtualized computing environments. Converged management on the configuration and provisioning side must be matched with converged management on the operations monitoring and assurance side. EMA research has repeatedly shown that such integration and convergence in management is a high priority among all organizations, but particularly among those that are attempting to transform around service-oriented ideals, such as those commonly associated with internal private cloud initiatives. With its combination of application, infrastructure and service operations management solutions working as an integrated whole, CA Technologies offers complete support for integrated, converged operations assurance for Cisco UCS deployments. CA has combined application, infrastructure, and service management to offer a complete converged operations assurance solution for Cisco UCS deployments Whether standalone or deployed as part of larger converged infrastructure solutions such as Vblock or FlexPod, CA Technologies can assure Cisco UCS deployments via monitoring, troubleshooting and collaboration/reporting, putting operations professionals in position to protect and optimize the investments being made in these strategic and innovative new assets. About CA Technologies CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is a management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies solutions enable enterprises, government agencies and service providers to manage and secure technology environments and deliver more flexible business services to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500, government agencies around the world and more than 250 service providers rely on CA Technologies to manage evolving their technology ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at and our Cisco partner page at 7 Page 7

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