Posts filed under 'Virtual System Management'
Carlsbad, Calif. - October 27, 2008 - ToutVirtual, an emerging leader in optimization and performance-management software for virtual computing infrastructures, today announced that its VirtualIQ suite of products now also supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization.
The VirtualIQ suite of products is designed to support virtual server room operations through three stages of virtualization - design, deploy, and deliver stages - helping users make correct decisions for virtualization optimization along the way. The suite of products allows users to compare how various virtualization platforms, such as Hyper-V, perform running different applications and then provides visibility and policy-based control in managing the Hyper-V based environment. VirtualIQ suite of products supports multiple virtualization platforms for an apple-to-apple comparison and provides all essential decision-making data in a single, integrated web console that is simple to install and use.
ToutVirtual is partnering with Microsoft as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). Users of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V can get more information about ToutVirtual VirtualIQ at: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/partner-profile.mspx?id=81
“We are pleased that ToutVirtual is delivering support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V,” said Jim Schwartz, Director for Virtualization Solutions at Microsoft Corp. “ToutVirtual’s VirtualIQ products help our customers running Hyper-V assess and optimize applications for their environments, assisting them in making the right planning decisions.”
“ToutVirtual is excited to strengthen its relationship with Microsoft with the support of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V,” said Vipul Pabari, chief technology officer for ToutVirtual. “Hyper-V users can use our products to compare the performance of applications on multiple virtualization platforms. Whether the user is just getting started in the design phase or further along in deployment or delivering advanced services, VirtualIQ suite of products is simple and cost effective.”
Pricing, Availability and Platforms Supported
More information about the VirtualIQ suite of products is available at:
http://www.toutvirtual.com/downloads/downloads.php
About ToutVirtual
ToutVirtual, Inc. is an emerging leader in virtualization system optimization software to manage and automate virtual computing processes and ease the transition from design to deployment. VirtualIQ, the company’s flagship product suite, allows organizations to obtain a holistic view and control their virtual infrastructure including servers, applications, storage, and clients independently of the underlying virtual computing platform. Unlike other companies whose products are vendor specific, platform specific, or network tier specific, ToutVirtual software operates across multiple platforms and is multi-tier to prolong product life, protect IT investments, and maximize ROI. Additional information about the company and its products is available at http://www.toutvirtual.com
ToutVirtual and VirtualIQ are registered trademarks or trademarks of ToutVirtual, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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microsoft windows server 2008 hyper v, ToutVirtual, Virtual System Management, virtualiq, virtualization optimization
October 27th, 2008
Virtualization, Fine, Well Sort Of? - Chapter 05
Let us consider the following situation…You walk into a conference room, before you are a group of your key clients, lines of businesses, what ever is applicable to your situation, and you ask the following questions:
- What percentage of your technology infrastructure is virtualized?
- Are you happy with the performance of virtualization?
- Do you consider virtualization a higher risk? If so, Why?
- Do you consider virtualization a lower risk? If so, Why?
- What is the true risk of this percentage of virtualization?
- Does the phrase “All Eggs in One Basket” meaning anything to you?
- Is the risk of virtualization worth the threat of virtualization?
What do you think the answers will be? Are you going to be happy with the answers? Are your clients going to be able to answer the questions? If they can not, is it your fault or theirs?
What is the percentage of your technology infrastructure is virtualized? This is a straight-forward question, or is it? Does your firm or infrastructure provider use virtualized storage? Does your solution use hypervisor or application virtualization? Is your network virtualized? VLANs, QoS, etc., What? What the heck is that? Hypervisor and/or application virtualization, which is safer? Many clients have no real understanding that every information technology resource they contract for is virtualized in some way. It may be that what you think are LANs, are VLANs. It may be that what you think is physical infrastructure is, but not completely, what if you network or storage provider has their entire command-center tool set on virtualized instances and they are suffering from the same issues you are? You just don’t know what is virtualized below what you see as infrastructure.
Are you happy with the performance of virtualization? This is also a straight forward question, maybe the only straight-forward question in this entire discussion, or virtualization in general. From a quantitative perspective, providing you have rather extensive analysis methods, you can provide your clients with hard facts, from P2V, V2I, I2I, I2V, I2P, V2P, etc. But from a qualitative perspective the client is going to believe what they believe. Of course, from the client perspective, you get what you pay for, so if you can live with the performance virtualization provides, versus the cost of not using virtualization, this relatively straight forward. Did or does your process for virtualization candidacy force your project managers and design personnel to do proof-of-concept validation of virtualization? Or do you just trust the application vendors?
What is the true risk of the percentage of virtualization? Higher Risk? Lower Risk? We are not talking labs or non-critical environments but core production, the mission critical, the five (5) nines (9) realm of up time. No, not disaster recovery on virtualization, but true production, customer visible, if offline, you lose real money. Do your clients really understand this? Or did you just, ah, sort of, gloss over this point? This is not an argument for or against virtualization, because depending on your respective analysis, design, and implementation, this true risk could or should be less than traditional hardware, no? Transparent migration, i.e. VMotion for VMware, and/or stand-by hosts, or just available capacity on existing hosts? Not to mention network redundancy methods, 3DNS, Big-IP, etc. Storage redundancy infrastructure or methods? Argues the point that virtualization should have lower risk than traditional hardware. However, if you cut corners, or have non-shared storage, did not make the commitment to redundant network and storage fabric implementations? Then the risk of virtualization is higher than traditional hardware for sure, if you do not believe this, keep smoking what your are smoking. It is rather ironic that many clients do not really understand that they have many eggs in one basket on every virtual host server. The virtualization industry knows this, HA, DRS, SRM from VMware, and similar technologies or methods under development by every major virtualization solution provider, just screams this point no? Why was the biggest AH! At VMworld 2007 transparent host redundancy? Microsoft has learned this lesson a bit late, but to be sure Microsoft will never make that specific mistake again, of course I refer to the lack of a transparent virtual instance migration, or VMotion like feature set.
Taking all these questions and associated issues as potential impacts to your environment, is the risk of virtualization worth the thread of virtualization to your financial success? Returning to our conference room, let us up the stakes, what if it is really not a client conference, a board room meeting? Do you want to be the one that has to defend the use of virtualization when something significant goes wrong? Or worse, defend that you short-changed, or rushed to virtualization implementation? It does give pause to you does it not?
Now consider the concept of risk in virtualization, taking into account that hypervisor based operating systems are rather immature compared to traditional operating systems. Are we all just dodging the bullet? Will this risk get us in the end? Real issues for virtualization are and continue to be those of an immature platform, I will not exhaustively itemize these issues, but just think back to the early days of Windows or Linux, and you will recall the things that gave you pain, no? Rush to market code, inexperienced code development, hardware vendors struggling to understand a software operating system that is a moving target, etc., etc., I recall these and more in every operating system ever developed.
The bottom-line in avoiding risk is before your virtualization plan is invoked, why? Because regardless of how good the virtualization platform or your design around said platform is, it is people that designed it. If you have not given your people the time, resources, and had the patience to allow a superior design work to be done, your virtualization infrastructure is a house-of-cards. Once it is implemented, no matter how well it is supported, if the design is bad, the risk you are taking is bad. So I ask again, do your clients know this?
A Proper Virtual World, avoiding virtualization risk, eggs all in one basket, Virtual System Management, virtualization 201, virtualization getting started, virtualization planning, virtualization problems, virtualization risks, virtualizationists
February 12th, 2008
An article by (NetworkWorld) Denise Dubie reports:
“The market is going to see the need for a heterogeneous virtualization management platform that we haven’t seen up until this point,” [Forrester analyst] Staten says. “It will cause a significant shake-up in the management space when start-ups pop up, and bigger players that haven’t been doing a very good job will look to acquire them.”
Read the full article here
heterogeneous, heterogeneous virtualization management, managing more than vmware, Virtual System Management, virtualization management
December 20th, 2007
Know What Virtualization Is, But What Is Next? - Chapter 04
To be honest I have been avoiding this subject. Long distance disaster recovery is one of the weak points in virtualization for a number of technical, and a few financial reasons. For example, some of the technical reasons often sited in reference to long distance recovery solutions:
- Every single instance archival/restore solution available today does not scale well
- Are vendor specific
- Require extensive bandwidth
- Limited vertical scale (imaging issues)
- Scale horizontal (DASD allocation issues)
- Hard to manage, monitor and control
- Inflexible once implemented
For example the financial reasons often sited in reference to long distance recovery:
- Infrastructure that is under utilized/idle
- Require network bandwidth over distance
As with any solution, or should I say situation? The world is changing, and vendors are running after issues, cough, dollar signs, VMworld 2007 was no exception in this regard, the hot topics for the super-sessions, meaning attendance was in the multiple 100s per session, were centered around disaster recovery, site management, and to a lesser degree image scaling. Unfortunately, the concept of total scale is still not quite enterprise level for my taste; for example, every single solution for disaster recovery presented would have issues beyond 250 host servers, or more than 1500 virtual instances, and anything at 10 or more of actual allocated terabytes of DASD per site. Wait, wait, some are saying already, that it is pretty big corporations that are doing that! Well, in point of fact, everyone doing virtualization is looking at more not less virtualization, so realistic scaling for disaster recovery solutions over long distance should be looking to support 1000 or more virtual hosts, and at least 10,000 or more virtual instances across an enterprise, and distances should not be in the 10s or even 100s of miles, but in the 1000s of miles. Yes, 1000s of miles. Think of real disasters! A Disaster recovery site should/could be 1000 miles a way, even on a different tectonic plate if possible, or in other words, how far can a hurricane travel of over land, not far, but the flooding and storm damage is often 100s of miles in land. Archival/restore options per virtual instance just do not scale, thus storage array based methods will dominate the virtualization industry, and this is not a predicative comment, but a fact. All the vendors applicable know this, never mind the fact that we, as clients of virtualization have been yelling about this for the last 2 to 3 years.
But I digress, for long distance recovery, as a concept, to explode in a positive sense, regardless of where it is situated, a few things need to happen beyond the scaling discussion, these include the following:
- Standardized use and implementation of image scaling
- Standardized use of thin-disk methods for DASD allocation
- Standardized use of storage-array level snapping, cloning, etc.
- Convince management that no matter what is done, bandwidth will be required, maybe even a dedicated storage area network, cough, cough
I am not going to explain the bandwidth issue, it is obvious, very long distance disaster recovery models need bandwidth, and of course no one wants to hear that, but it is true. Storage Array networking is needed to implement a number of emerging virtualization technologies, welcome to emerging virtualization life. Moving on… standardized use of anything is good, from a practical perspective, so we eliminate one of our big issues, vendor specific implementations. We want storage array snapshots compatible just like SCSI is compatible today right? Or better if we can get it. We want to have NetApp in one site migrate storage-array snapshots to EMC, for example. Don’t laugh, it will happen, but the storage array vendors don’t like the idea. This cross vendor model also would address migrations to newer platforms and different models of implementation. Image scaling, which is not here yet to any realistic degree, is the idea that DASD that is really read-only in concept, is leveraged. For example, 90 plus percent of the operating system foot-print in a virtual instance is static, so I should be able to use it over and over per instance, and then only the DASD that actually changes per virtual instance is isolated per instance. Dang, does this sound like a container model? It should! Image scaling, combined with thin-disking methods, where the operating system thinks it has 100GB for data, but the actual partitioning on the storage-array is what is needed plus a growth factor offset, and only unique data is DASD growth. For example, if the given instance is only using 20GB, it really only has a 20 plus GB footprint on the storage-array. This reduces the cost factors and allows for better utilization of resources for DASD, which should make the accounting geeks happy. Did I really just say accounting geek?
For those keeping score, about long distance disaster recovery, not the geek name calling, the last issue is monitoring, management, and control. Well, that is the real kicker, without universal standardization of storage-array models across vendors, at least all significant vendors, such a tool or methodology is lacking. Well… Actually… That is changing, but is in the embryonic stage at best. VMware and other virtualization vendors will follow soon, has a new toy, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). It aims to solve this key issue that plagues our topic of discussion, the lack of monitoring, control and management. However, since VMware SRM does not employ thin-disking or image scaling as yet, the opportunity for someone else to snake this market niche away from VMware is obvious, no?
A Proper Virtual World, best practices, containers, disaster recovery, image scaling, it supply management, know what virtulization is but what is next, long distance disaster recovery, scalability, thin disking, Virtual System Management, virtualization 301, virtualization planning, virtualization use case, vmware, vmware site recovery manager, vmware srm
October 10th, 2007
Carlsbad, California - August 30, 2007 - ToutVirtual, an emerging leader in management software for virtual computing infrastructures, today announced it has garnered its place in Network World magazine’s list of “10 Virtualization Companies to Watch”. On the heels of its freeware launches over the past two years, the company has now firmly staked its ground in the virtualization market with its recently launched VirtualIQ Pro product.
Continue Reading August 30th, 2007
Virtualization, Fine, Well Sort Of? - Chapter 03
Virtual machine performance is one of those topics that is both art and science. My grandmother the English Professor is yelling at me already… not is but are both art and science. But I am making a point, virtual instance performance has a statistical mathematical aspect, but numbers alone, do not always provide the expected results, you have know the context and judge its significance, that is the art aspect, this is absolutely critical when you are trying to predict performance before you act. I can not tell you the number of times I have looked at virtual instances, and I just knew why one was not performing well, and the only option that made sense was to move it to another host. Only to find that once I moved the given virtual instance to another host, things got worse, or following my gut, moved a different instance, and things got better unexpectedly, in a way that mathematics just could not illustrate based on the performance metrics under my nose. Sometimes the math does not make sense, sometimes the math along is not enough?
There are several different ways to define the context of performance, I am going to try, and I do mean try, to establish a framework for analysis, not just a bunch of rules, since in this case any rule defined here, someone, somewhere, will disprove it in their situation, their specific situation. Also, for the sake of discussion the terms Virtual Instance and Container are interchangeable unless otherwise noted. So performance relationships within a virtualization context are:
- Intra Virtual Instance Performance
- Peer-to-Peer or Inter Virtual Instance Performance
- Host to Instance Performance
- Host to Host Performance
- Host to Cluster Performance
Intra Virtual Instance Performance - This is what you could call the false performance of a virtual instance, for example, Windows OS fans will recognize PerfMon (Windows Performance Monitor), and it does a good or great job, depending on your opinion of monitoring in Windows, it tends to be more actuate when monitoring external to its target, on traditional hardware, but opinions vary. However, any tool which relies on its own context can get completely mislead when monitoring from- or in- a virtual instance. Virtual instances do not run in real-time, did everyone get that? They do not run in real-time, but they think they do! Thus, I can not count the times operational teams or developers have watched PerfMon and seen it show outrageous poor performance, and yet the virtual host denotes the individual virtual instance is not suffering at all, it poor code, or poor application design that is the issue. In short, do rely on intra virtual instance performance in empirical terms ever. Intra performance should be a qualitative analysis not a quantitative analysis. Is the end-user experience good-enough? This is qualitative analysis.
Peer-to-Peer or Inter Virtual Instance Performance - This is the foundation of what quantitative performance is possible for virtual instances. This is performance that is reported by the virtual host, this performance is real-time; balanced by context of the host. The virtualization industry has struggled with this model from a predictive modeling perspective, our kind and wonderful management, those nurturing souls, are demanding a predictive model for virtual instance introduction to the existing environment or host, but this takes extensive brain-power, such that no single virtualization platform publisher has yet cracked this nut, more like they keep scratching the surface of the nut only. Automated models integrated into Dynamic Resource Sharing (DRS) or even features which indirectly use performance trending like High Availability (HA), that attempt to load balance or distribute instances across several hosts for best performance and stability, all use historical data. Historical data is worthless if you change the context, the very act of adding a virtual instance to an existing group of instances, changes all the variables of the equation, in fact, because there is no linear or logarithmic relationship between virtual instances, it is all a house of cards. If you think you can accurately predict the impact of adding a new virtual instance to an existing pool of instances, patent it, write a book, make millions, I wish you the best. You will have solved one of the true problems in virtualization today. Every physical-to-virtual tool publisher out there will hire you in a microsecond, because they see this problem as the search for the Holy Grail, their technology is just begging for actuate predictive modeling.
Host to Instance Performance - This context is quantitative on the host side, but qualitative at the virtual instance side, since intra performance as noted above is applicable. Since virtual hosts attempt to provide the every highest degree of resources possible to all virtual instances, this really is a question of overhead. Container models should always have an edge over hypervisor models in this context. The weaker the host hardware, the more significant the impact the host processing overhead has on the virtual instances. This is where things like disk (DASD) performance, network latency, memory latency, and backplane or bus sub-system performance are critical. For example, if you have 4 dual-core CPUs, but you purchased a cheap main-board with a slow front-side bus, or worse yet, very slow cheap memory, have you put very fast squirrels, on rather slow wheels?
Host to Host Performance - This is where the industry is starting to make some waves, which really do positively impact the performance of virtual instances. Automation of this type of analysis is gaining preference, taking some of the guess work out of situation, making host to host performance analysis more deterministic. This is possible because such automation is very simple given sufficient trending data, being a variant of the classic sales-man or shortest-route/shortest-time statistical modeling methods. If you think of resources per host as limited resource in time or distance in relation to virtual instances, then you can use trending data to optimize what instances are floating on what hosts. In fact, if you think about it in simple terms, what do you do when you have a misbehaving virtual instance? You often move it to another host, where you believe it will either perform better, or have less impact on the other instances that may exist on the host you are migrating towards.
Host to Cluster Performance - This context is host to host performance, but the actual analysis is done across groups of hosts as logical entity. The analysis is very similar to host to host performance evaluation.
Of course proper virtual instance performance analysis is dependent on context, consider the PerfMon example above, it looks like good data, if we where not talking about virtual instances, it would in all likelihood be accepted as valid data. However, it is not acceptable data in a virtual instance.
There have been a number of scientists in the 20th century that have commented on this same issue of context as applicable to observation and measurement, in various ways, lets see… Albert Einstein - Theory of General Relativity, where Einstein states that the observer defines the context of what is going on, for example, if you watching an object fall, and you are not falling, you see something falling. However, if you are also falling at the some rate and direction as the object, and you do not realize you are falling, you may simply see the object sitting next to you. Of course, the most descriptive theory that is applicable to virtual instances and monitoring their performance, is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and confusion of the Observer Effect, where in, the actual act of observing, or in our case measuring performance, impacts the performance being measured. Heisenberg understood the Observer Effect, but his uncertainty principle was really describing measurement uncertainty, for example, some uncertainty always exists in every measurement, this always happens when inaccurate measuring methods are used, or when something unknown is impacting the measurement process. For those that read this blog often, you may be reminded by something I have said in the past… Know What You Don’t Know… the very question implies that you have to acknowledge context for any analysis that is done. In part II, I will discuss the more mechanical side of ensuring virtual instance performance, now that we have got the nasty context topic out of the way.
A Proper Virtual World, drs, dynamic resource sharing, ha, high availability, host to cluster performance, host to host performance, host to instance performance, inter virtual instance performance, intra virtual instance performance, peer to peer virtual instance performance, performance management, virtual instance, Virtual System Management, virtualization 301, vmware
August 29th, 2007
Many of you are thinking, I hope, that you know what short distance disaster recovery is. The concept should be familiar, even if the term short distance disaster recovery is not. A few typical scenarios would be:
Continue Reading August 8th, 2007
Know what you don’t know. Any experienced computer technology expert knows this simple rule, if they don’t fire them now, seriously. While you are at it, if the company CPAs do not know this as well, fire them too, I will explain later why. This know-what-you-don’t-know concept is the basic principle of the scientific method. In other words, if you don’t know what questions to ask in solving a problem, you have no possible hope to finding a viable solution. How does this prove applicable to virtualization?
Continue Reading August 1st, 2007
There are a few new buzz words in virtualization! One of the seemingly vague terms, is Containers. The use of the word in context to virtualization is recent, but not the concept in computing, in fact one of the first desktop platforms to use this concept in limited form was Apple Computer, in its Macintosh OS 7.x, where individual applications could be isolated to a logical memory space.
Continue Reading July 17th, 2007
Virtualization is a simple concept to define, steal from Peter what he owns but does not use, and give to Paul. Or another way to look at it, virtualization is a form of computing communism! Take resources that are not used, and use them. Ok, so this is simplistic? Well, actually no. To explain my point, we need to go back to the early days of computer design and engineering, and the initial generation of software code development, which states: computing, regardless of the technology or the terminology, have two key resources, which are time and space. One key rule of computing is that you use time to save space, or you use space to save time, but you can not do both at once. Now why did I explain this in reference to virtualization? Because in virtualization the assumption is, that you have additional time and/or space that you are not using effectively, that there is always some time, or some space in a computer system that is not used effectively all the time, at least some if not all the time.
Continue Reading July 12th, 2007
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