TechTarget Data Center Media Virtualization Management Best Practices, Market Trends E-Guide As enterprises continue to embrace virtualization, IT staffers see a need for better management tools for this key new technology. 75 percent of IT managers call virtualization management important to their operations, according to an October survey of 100 IT managers done at the Interop New York 2007 tradeshow. Among that 75 percent, 39 percent call virtualization management very important. In this E-Guide from SearchServerVirtualization.com learn about monitoring physical and virtual environments and concerns IT faces in today's infrastructure. Sponsored By:
Table of Contents Virtualization Management Best Practices, Market Trends E-Guide Table of Contents: Survey reveals virtualization management concerns Monitoring physical and virtual environments IT best practices Citrix XenServer s Orlando update on the way and chock-full of features Resources from Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and Intel Sponsored by: Page 2 of 10
Survey reveals virtualization management concerns Survey reveals virtualization management concerns Despite the growing prominence of server virtualization in data centers, many IT managers are concerned about their ability to manage virtual environments effectively. According to a new study sponsored by Islandia, N.Y.-based CA Inc. of 300 IT managers worldwide, 54% of large enterprises rate virtual machine management as a critical or high IT priority, but only 45% said that their companies are doing an effective job in managing the technology. Management is low on the priority list when it comes to virtualization, said Nasser Ansari, principal product manager at CA, which makes management tools. Companies are at the point where they are trying to get their hands on the technology and move it from test environment into production, so things like systems management and ROI analysis don t come until later. CA commissioned the survey, which targeted worldwide companies with more than $250 million in revenue, to identify virtualization user concerns and issues, and it will use the data to create management products over the next year, Ansari said. Virtual machine management on the rise? The study asked respondents about the primary drivers of virtualization, expected utilization rates for virtual and physical servers, important aspects of virtualization management, and a host of questions about virtualization technology uses. Among respondents, platform centralization has become a core concern. Among respondents, 56% use multiple platforms and vendors for server virtualization management, while 35% have standardized on a single platform. Sixty-eight percent of respondents rate the importance of centralizing the management of multiplatform virtualized or physical environments as critical or very important. Such responses showcase the gap between the investments in virtualization and in management; most people are managing on only one platform and need to centralize, said Lakshmi Pedda, a product marketing manager at CA. We think management will become more of a priority in the next eight to 10 months, as virtualization becomes mainstream and people start seeing issues like virtual server sprawl. Analyst Chris Wolf at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group said that a large number of enterprises run several virtualization platforms in production and want to manage all resources under one pane of glass. Management will always be tiered, and point products will always require their own management tools to manage some elements of their architecture, but top-level orchestration and reporting will be a very important part of data center automation, Wolf said. Even before we start seeing elements of the automated data center, the immediate reporting and management benefits of a consolidated management architecture are needed today, and all of the major enterprise management software vendors are developing tools in that area. Sponsored by: Page 3 of 10
Survey reveals virtualization management concerns Some of the companies offering virtual machine management tools, including VMware Inc., which bought virtual machine management company Dunes Technologies in September; Fortisphere Inc, Cassatt Corp. and Embotics Corp. Vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. also sell their own management software, such as the ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack for ProLiant servers. Of management concerns, security topped the list as the most significant challenge when managing server virtualization initiatives. In addition, those polled said that servers, storage and applications are the most important areas to virtualize. They had the most success in virtualizing servers, and the least success in virtualizing application grids. Of U.S. companies planning to invest in virtualization over the next 18 months, 88% said that they are investing in server virtualization, 65% in storage virtualization, and 47% are doing application virtualization. This confirms what we are hearing from our installed base: that server virtualization is becoming mainstream, said Pedda. Further, while many companies use virtualization to save on power and cooling costs, only 28% of respondents worldwide have been able to measure the ROI on virtualization. At the same time, 51% said they are confident that their companies have maximized the return on virtualization investments. According to Pedda, as virtualization becomes the norm in IT environments, ROI plans will become more prominent. Sponsored by: Page 4 of 10
Monitoring physical and virtual environments IT best practices Monitoring physical and virtual environments IT best practices Pop quiz: How many virtual machines and physical servers are currently running on your production environment? If you can answer that, congratulations! Next question: Identify the top 10 physical or virtual machines based on resource utilization. For most IT organizations, both of these questions can be difficult to answer. Fortunately, there are ways to implement monitoring in an automated way. In this tip, I ll present some advice related to monitoring VMs and host computers in a production environment. Managing virtual machines vs. managing physical machines: Similarities In many ways, the tasks associated with monitoring virtual machines are similar to those of working with physical ones. Organizations that have invested in centralized monitoring solutions can continue to rely upon them for gaining insight into how applications and services are performing. Examples include: Establishing baselines: A baseline helps you determine the standard level of resource utilization for a physical or virtual workload. Details to track typically include CPU, memory, disk, and network performance. Root-Cause analysis / Troubleshooting: When users complain of slow performance, it s important for IT staff to be able to drill-down into the main cause of the problem. Performance statistics can often help identify which resources are constrained. Ideally, that will help identify the source of the problem and provide strong hints about resolving them. Generating alerts: In order to proactively manage performance, IT staff should be alerted whenever resource utilization exceeds certain thresholds. All of these tasks are fairly standard in many IT environments and are also applicable to working with virtual workloads. Managing virtual machines vs. managing physical machines: Differences Environments that use virtualization also have some unique challenges related to performance monitoring. Since it s quick and easy to deploy new VMs, keeping track of them is a huge challenge. Some additional features and functions that can be helpful include: Mapping guest-to-host relationships: While virtual machines have their own operating system, resource utilization is often tied to other activity on the same host server. Virtualization-aware monitoring tools should be able to uniquely identify VMs and relate them to the physical computers on which they are running. Automated responses and dynamic reconfiguration: In many cases, it s possible to perform automated tasks in reaction to performance-related issues. For example, if CPU usage of a single VM is slowing down the Sponsored by: Page 5 of 10
Monitoring physical and virtual environments IT best practices entire host, VM priority settings can be adjusted. Or, when excessive paging is occurring, the VM s memory allocation can be increased. Broad platform support: There s a good chance that you re supporting many more OS versions and flavors for VMs than on physical machines. A good performance monitoring solution will support the majority of virtual operating environments. Reporting and capacity planning: The primary purpose of performance monitoring is to facilitate better decision-making. Advanced reporting features can help track untapped resources and identify host servers that are overloaded. Tracking historical performance statistics can also be very helpful. Choosing the right tools for the job Most operating systems provide simple tools for troubleshooting performance issues on a single or a few computers. In environments that support more than a few VMs, automated performance monitoring and management tools are practically a must-have. Figure 1 provides some details into features that can be useful. Summary Overall, many of the standard IT best practices apply equally to monitoring physical and virtual machines. When searching for tools to get the job done, however, there are certain features that can dramatically reduce the time and effort required to gain insight into production performance. Sponsored by: Page 6 of 10
Citrix XenServer s Orlando update on the way and chock-full of features Citrix XenServer s Orlando update on the way and chock-full of features Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at Citrix Systems Inc., gave a preview of some of the 100 new features in the upcoming version of Citrix XenServer, which is due out sometime in September. It is currently available in beta. With this upcoming release of XenServer, code-named Project Orlando, Citrix seems poised to continue to co-exist and compete with Microsoft s Hyper-V and VMware. The upcoming iteration of XenServer will be even more compatible with Hyper-V and more interoperable with storage products, XenServer s central differentiator from VMware. Cautious not to pre-announce too many features of the next version, Crosby has offered up some general information on a few major features, including performance trending, improved Fibre Channel support, high availability and more. XenServer s Orlando chock-full of new features VM performance trending. In the most recent XenServer (version 4.1), performance metrics are not saved for very long, so performance trend data isn t available. The new version will cache performance metrics for a longer period of time for better VM trending data, Crosby said. VM grouping, searching and tagging. A new VM tagging feature enables administrators to tag VMs running applications they need to watch and can base their user interface display on a search of the tags. So instead of seeing every VM in a large server farm on their screen, an Exchange administrator can tag Exchange-related VMs and see only those on their interface screen. This will be useful in large-scale XenServer projects with hundreds of thousands of VMs, Crosby said. You can also base the tags on lifecycles, locations, anything, and the tagging works for both physical and virtual environments, Crosby said. Automated high availability. Crosby said that XenServer customers have moved from basic server consolidation to using virtualization for high availability in disaster recovery, so there are numerous features focused on those areas as well. Xen Convert. The new edition of XenServer includes a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration tool that moves existing server workloads to the XenServer platform without using a third-party P2V migration tool. Users can run Xen Convert on a Windows server or desktop systems and export the workload as a VHD format file or as an XVA appliance file, or they can directly import it into a running XenServer instance. Registry and device conversions are handled in the process, according to Roger Klorese, the senior director of product marketing for Citrix XenServer. On his blog, Klorese wrote that for production migrations, many customers may find that the capacity planning features, greater release support, etc. that existing partner products (such as PlateSpin s PowerRecon and Sponsored by: Page 7 of 10
Citrix XenServer s Orlando update on the way and chock-full of features PowerConvert, or HP s ProLiant Essentials Server Migration Pack) offer may be an even better solution. But XenConvert makes it easier to get started and is a great solution for many users. Recent posts on the XenServer Orlando beta site indicate that users have issues like long convert times with the beta version of Xen Converter. Improved Fibre Channel support. The upcoming version of XenServer includes multipathing support for Fibre Channel and iscsi storage back ends. Joel Stocker, a technical product manager for XenServer, said on the Orlando beta forum, By default, [Orlando] uses round-robin mode load balancing, so both routes will have active traffic on them during normal operation. Multipathing can be enabled in XenCenter or on the command line. Stocker also reported that Citrix added support for QLogic and Emulex 8 GB Fibre Channel host bus adapter devices. XenServer s storage interoperability. The new version of XenServer will also be interoperable with a greater number of storage products, which Crosby said is the key differentiator between XenServer and VMware Inc. We are naturally aligned with storage vendors because we use the features they build into their products and give users visibility of VMs from the storage domain. And wherever storage vendors offer management features, we use them with XenServer. This is the exact opposite of what VMware does, he said. The storage industry is really fed up with VMware, and we are far ahead of them in this area. Some storage vendors have issues with VMware because VMware s most commonly used option for storage deployment is its proprietary virtual file system, which competes with other storage products. Competing against VMware and Hyper-V The upcoming release of XenServer comes at a time when questions about XenServer s lifespan have swirled around the industry. According to initial results of SearchDataCenter.com s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey of more than 600 IT administrators, 38% use VMware ESX 3.5 as their primary virtualization platform, while only 3% use Citrix XenServer as their primary platform. More than 50% of respondents said they planned to deploy VMware ESX 3.5 over the next 12 months, while a mere 8% plan to deploy Citrix XenServer during that time. Still, there is a huge vendor ecosystem being built around Xen, and XenServer in particular. Hewlett-Packard Co., Symantec Corp., Marathon Technologies, Stratus Technologies, Hyperic Inc.and many others have made substantial investment in integrating their products with the XenServer platform, according to Burton Group virtualization analyst Chris Wolf. Citrix s public proclamations that they will fully support Hyper-V have caused some to question their commitment to XenServer, so I understand the concerns, said Wolf. Still, Citrix has poured a ton of effort into the upcoming Sponsored by: Page 8 of 10
Citrix XenServer s Orlando update on the way and chock-full of features XenServer 4.2, and I think the 4.2 release will mark the moment organizations start looking seriously at XenServer for production workloads. Keep in mind that XenServer has features that Hyper-V doesn t have today, such as live migration. Combine that with the fact that Citrix and Microsoft have worked closely to allow VMs to be easily migrated from a XenServer to Hyper-V platform. So it s conceivable that organizations with a long-term eye on Hyper-V and shortterm requirements for live migration may view XenServer as a good platform to start their path toward virtualization, knowing that they could always move to Hyper-V in a year or two Wolf said. Sponsored by: Page 9 of 10
Desktop Virtualization: Goals, Options, Approaches and Solutions Resources from Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and Intel Resources from Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and Intel Integrated Virtualization Done Right: Why you need to get started now Learn more about our FREE, fully-licensed XenServer HP Select Edition Software HP Integrated Citrix XenServer for HP ProLiant Servers About Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and Intel Hewlett-Packard focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world's largest IT companies. Citrix Systems, Inc. is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructureintel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. www.hp.com www.citrix.com www.intel.com Sponsored by: Page 10 of 10