In the past, to harness and use significant computing power in your office required lots of space, physical servers, power, cooling, time, server administrators, paper work etc. The bar was pretty high to get a brand new multi-thousand dollar server approved through the CFO. Once approved, you had to wait a significant period of time for server deployment on the data center floor. The cost, the process time, and the process steps were all long and complex. Only applications with the highest ROI and criticality theoretically made it through the gauntlet.

Virtualization has effectively lowered the cost, time and process bar to deploy a server. This is not all bad. In fact, it is the opposite. It means more and more computing power can be effectively deployed by an organization to its competitive advantage. Take the mainframe to open systems change. With the mainframe, only the crème de la crème of applications were deployed. The rest were done, well, manually. Open systems changed that and lowered the bar for application deployment and hence the ability to deploy compute power. We are seeing a similar change today with virtualization. The bar is lower and more compute power can be deployed to solve a company’s problems. That is a good thing. Hence I am not sure sprawl is the right term for these applications.

At some point, however, even in a virtualized world, the value to an organization to deploy an application is less than the cost. In other words, there is no ROI to an application. But how do you find these applications? The answer for the virtualization admin is that you can’t unless it exhibits Zombie like characteristics.

This is where the business leadership needs to be involved to make the hard choices.  Enabling business leadership with the data to understand the true cost of applications is the key step in this process.  The way to accomplish this is to provide meaningful showback of cost data.  Notice I used the word showback and not chargeback, although chargeback is certainly possible.

Showback implemented in a basic model of either allocated costs or utilized costs grouped by application name and owner provides the data IT leadership needs to question which applications should be deployed or not. VKernel provides chargeback and showback modules along with other resources on the Chargeback Resources page that can get you started in this process. Whether you use our tools, build your own, or use someone elses, does not matter. What is key is to get started on the showback process understanding your cost structure.

So VM sprawl is not as cut and dry as it seems. Last week, we saw how Zombie VMs are the epitome of sprawl. This week, we saw how the simple deployment of computing power is not necessarily a bad thing provided there is sufficient business visibility into the environment to make the right deployment decisions.

Bryan Semple 
Chief Marketing Officer
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

First, lets talk about bad sprawl - the no-kidding, serious, bad sprawl. This flavor of sprawl comes from virtual machines that are running and no longer doing useful work. Since VMs are easy to deploy, sometimes it is a little too easy to spin up a VM and never use it. Or perhaps a VM is used for testing, then forgotten. Without the standard procurement process of getting a server, provisioning it in the data center, and formally adding it to an asset management system, it is possible to have many of these running in your environment doing no useful work.

This type of sprawl manifests itself as Zombie VMs. The key here is to identify potential Zombies by looking for VMs running near idle with little to no variation in their load. These are potential Zombies since virtual machines can be doing work while running in a low load state. Automated Zombie detection tools, will require that you manually check the list of Zombie candidates before you take the proverbial chainsaw to end the Zombie’s existence.

vOPS Server Standard helps you find these potential Zombies, test them and then eradicate the Zombies while marking the non-Zombies distinctively so you don't have to continuously retest them.  No one likes to have to go through blood tests frequently just to prove they are not a Zombie.

So sprawl that results in Zombies is clearly bad.  But what about the other type of "sprawl"?  Next posting we discuss how “Sprawl Got a Bad Rap”.

Check out our VM Performance Resources page for more blogs, podcasts and white papers.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

On top of that, a significant number of of VMs are not aligned according to best practice, which can lead to unnecessary reads and writes and increased latency. For more information see my previous blog: Why you should care about disk alignment.

So there is a lot of storage and money to be recovered in reducing the storage footprint of your virtual infrastructure and increasing performance at the same time.

vOPS Storage vOptimizer allows you to:

• Detect VMs with wasted storage
  • Decrease the size of system drives and data drives - Save storage and money
  • Zero fill thin disks and reclaim disk space - Save more storage and money
• Detect VMs with high disk utilization
  • Increase the size of system drives and data drives - Avoid unplanned outages
• Detect VMs with misaligned disks - Increase performance and decrease latency
  • Correct misaligned disks after they are created
• Enter your datastore costs per GB and see how much money you will save
  • Space savings reports and cost reduction reports available. See how much you can save.
  • Very low ROI, you will be amazed!
• Once you have identified your problems, you can create optimization projects to correct them and schedule these projects to be executed outside your production window.
  • Automation of all steps will result in reliable results, eliminating human errors, minimizing downtime and saving significant man-hours over manually completing tasks.
  • Email notifications will keep you updated on when a project is started, finished and when VM is back online.
• Optionally use risk mitigation to automatically create a clone of your VM before optimization.
  • If optimization fails for any reason it will roll back to the clone. This is extremely rare but it´s always a best practice to have a roll-back plan in mind in case of disaster.
• Optimize VMs (Windows and Linux) on both ESX and ESXi.
• Select starting offset (32KB, 64KB, 1MB or custom) depending on your storage vendor.

To take a look at your environment, download vOPS Storage vOptimizer which is offered as a 30-day or 5 optimization trial. After the trial, the product will continue to operate as vOptimizer Free, our free tool that allows you to continue detect and report.

How much wasted space do you have? I am guessing 50% or more!

For more storage performance blogs, white papers and podcasts, check out our Storage Performance Resources page.

On Friday, Ben Scheerer, former Quest employee now working for VMware tweeted:

This led me to a VMware Communities posting by someone trialing both vCOPS and VKernel’s vOPS. The net of the post is that the poster was having trouble with the use case of identifying a VM having a problem and then determining the root cause of the issue. As this user writes in the VMware Communities:

“Real example, I had a VM with major ready time issues on a heavily oversubscribed host. VKernel tells me this immediately, but vcops sorts of dances around the issue and never really gives me the smoking gun”

This surprised us, as we had figured on the surface, that vCOPS would excel at this use case of 5 min error detections. But the more we thought through the analytics vCOPS uses, the more we realized, this was not the case. Detecting immediate virtual machine problems appears in this case to be an issue for a system built entirely upon self-learning analytics (more detail in this podcast on the specific and limited cases where self-learning analytics are effective to detect VM performance issues).

Self-learning analytics are cool, but they have significant limitations from a practical standpoint of helping VM admins solve basic problems. At VKernel, we are not ideological about what type of analytics we use. In fact, through five years of organic product growth heavily influenced by customer feedback, we have introduced a variety of analytic types into the product. Ultimately, this multi-prong approach works to quickly get VM admins the answers they need without dancing around the problem.

In the future, we will be adding even more analytical methods as we identify use cases that require different detection and resolution techniques from what already exist inside the product. So, as a VM admin trying to solve issues in your environment, you can do the vCOPS Tango, or simply get the answers with vOPS. Either way, don’t take our word for it (or VMware’s.) Instead determine which use cases matter the most for your environment, download vOPS (30 day free trial) and vCOPS, and see which one can solve your issues most effectively.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

So how useful are these tools? Are we really ready to do the vSphere to Hyper-V Shuffle?

I reached out to some bloggers for their input. Much like the Dutch blogger mafia owns vSphere blogs, it looks like the Swedish bloggers are looking to corner the market on vSphere to Hyper-V information. Niklas Åkerlund of vNiklas Virtualization blog provided some great information:

“I would say that absolutely you can move workloads between different hypervisors! We have helped customers move from VMW to Hyper-V ( Not too many yet, but I think it will change with SC2012 and WIN8)”

On Niklas’ blog there is a System Center VMM 2012 video on how to move a VMware VM to Hyper-V via SCVMM 2012. Niklas also pointed out some high level issues to watch in the conversion:

• Make sure you remove the VMware tools
• Size limits with Hyper-V v2 - 4 vCPU and 64 GB ram limits
• Scope of supported operating systems
• Network and storage support and configuration differences

That last bullet point I am sure contains many more details that need to be drilled into to understand the likelihood of success in a conversion. Microsoft has some documents that are good resources on technet.

What do I make of all this? With Hyper-V scheduled to be just another part of Windows Server, the demand for moving VMs from vSphere to Hyper-V will increase as well as greenfield Hyper-V deployments. Whether the market is ready for mass deployment of free tools to do this work remains to be seen. But clearly others think this is the case now. Either way, this is more evidence of the growing hypervisor agnostic world.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

P.S. Hyper-V and converting from vSphere will be a hot topic at the upcoming The Experts Conference, in San Diego.
P.P.S. Check out additional information about Hyper-V on VK's Hyper-V Performance Resources page.

VM performance issues often occur when resource utilization in VMs, hosts or datastores grows to a point where no more resources are available. However, by the time this growth becomes sufficiently noticeable to a VM administrator, it may be difficult or impossible to stop a VM performance issue, especially if purchasing more hardware is the only way to avoid a problem. As a result, to effectively maintain performance in an environment, it becomes critical to detect when an issue may occur as early as possible to try to head it off. Understanding how much time exists before an issue will occur is also a crucial piece of data needed to avoid taking unnecessary drastic actions to free up capacity from other areas of the environment.

Existing analytic methods lack the sensitivity to detect growth acceleration in resource usage:

• Threshold-based alarms will only alert VM administrators when resource use has grown to a warning level. Once those levels are reached, it may be too late to solve an emerging VM performance problem.
• Self-learning analytics may not identify accelerated resource growth as “abnormal”. This classification is highly dependent on the mathematics employed and the past performance observed in the environment.

The new accelerated growth algorithms in vOPS Server Standard 4.7 are meant to provide the earliest possible detection of an emerging issue. This capability buys VM administrators time to resolve or provide for this increased resource usage before the growth becomes a performance problem.  The algorithms also calculate the time frame for when an issue may noticeably affect application performance. This is done by tracking the resource usage growth of VM performance metrics and continuously forecasting metric levels at the existing growth rate. If this growth rate increases, the accelerated growth algorithms can trigger alarms to immediately warn of an abnormality and will importantly forecast when the resource will run out.

To get alarming capabilities based off of accelerated growth algorithms enabled in your environment, download a 30 day free trial of vOPS Server Standard 4.7 from the VKernel website.

Some of the internationally known speakers at TEC 2012 include:

• Brian Madden, Virtualization Expert at Tech Target as keynote presenter
• Mattias Sundling, Virtualization Track Facilitator/vExpert/Evangelist at Quest
• Stephen Baron, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
• Christopher Kusek, vExpert/Technology Evangelist at EMC
• Dung K. Hoang, Principal Engineer at HP
• Hans Vredevoort, MVP/Consultant at Inovativ
• Rob Nottoli, System Architect at Microsoft.
• Greg Shields, MVP/vExpert/Senior Partner at Concentrated Technology

Check out the TEC website to see the full lineup.

TEC is for the experts by the experts and, as such, the sessions are highly technical (300-400 level) and include both presentations and demonstrations led by some of the world’s top technologists. Don’t miss your chance to learn from the best. TEC also provides really good networking opportunities! Meet the speakers, experts, product managers from Quest and Microsoft.

For more information about TEC and to signup, visit TEC website. We offer special discount for user groups and bloggers. Please contact stella.lowe@quest.com for further inquiries.

The search capabilities now available in vOPS Server Explorer are based on technology from VKernel's SearchMyVM, a utility named by KendrickColeman.com as one of the Top 10 Free vSphere Tool and Utility for 2011. As Kendrick Coleman asked in his Top 10 Free tools list review of SearchMyVM, "Haven't you always wanted to let other people do their own searches so you aren't being bothered with generating reports all day?”

VM administrators that install vOPS Server Explorer will be able to find VMs and other objects in their virtual environments in seconds. Additional configuration information such as whether VMware tools are installed is available alongside the results of searches. For more complex queries, users can select multiple criteria in an easy-to-use GUI interface and save these searches. Lastly, other teams can get at this data with the ability to export environment searches in XML, PDF or CSV format.

Download this new free utility is available on the VKernel website.

Gartner states, “By 2015, at least 75% of Hyper-V VMs will be installed in enterprises with fewer than 1,000 employees” in the “VMware vs. Microsoft: Competition for the Cloud Infrastructure” presentation done by Thomas Bittman at the 2011 Gartner Datacenter conference in Dec 2011.

They are saying of all the Hyper-V VMs, 75% of them will be in SMB with <1000 employees. This does not mean that 75% (or 85%) of SMBs will use Hyper-V.

So now the question - does this fact throw down even matter? Does anyone believe Microsoft will not dominate the low end of the SMB market and gradually crawl their way up the market?

Bernd Herzog writing for the Virtualization Practice had an interesting post on the future of VMware entitled: "VMware - The Next Microsoft, or the Next Oracle?" In this posting, Bernd compares the product, pricing, and go to market behavior for these two industry giants. Bernd argues you have to pick a path since you can't serve two masters. He goes on to conclude:

"...that VMware will leave itself open to being eaten from below by Microsoft Hyper-V (especially in Windows only SMB/SME accounts)"

Strong words indeed. For 2012, we predicted this would be the year of Hypervisor Heterogenity with multiple hypervisors existing in many accounts.  What SolarWinds and Bernd appear to be saying is that there will be more stratification, the co-existence at least in the SMB space.

All this reminds me of the database wars of the 1990s. IT shops in the 90's identified themselves as either Oracle or Informix or Sybase shops. Accounts would make standardization decisions for all their database needs. Today, I don't think IT organizations look at themselves this way as most have a mix of Oracle databases and Microsoft SQL Server.  Interestingly, Microsoft's dominance through their slow and steady attack on the database market looks very similar to what is about to occur with hypervisors.

So who is right in this food fight? SolarWinds or VMware? I don't know who has the right facts. But I do know that the Microsoft Hyper-V wave seems to be starting. The amount of attention being paid to a product that is not even shipping is impressive. Organizations should be alert to avoid VMware vendor lock in unless they truly understand all the costs involved with being a single vendor shop. Just ask all those Oracle customers out there.

Finally, I will close with this tweet from industry blogger Jason Boche that caught my eye on our social monitoring screen (yes Jason, we track your every tweet).

The fact that Jason was in Hyper-V was not lost on others.

My guess is Jason was doing just fine and this is just the beginning for Hyper-V.

Be sure to duck when the food starts flying.

For more Hyper-V capacity and performance management resources such as white papers, case studies, tools and blogs, check out our Hyper-V Performance Resources page.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Rockin' Quest Software Company

1. How Much Capacity Do You Have?

To keep this simple, we're going to focus on VM memory capacity, particularly because it's the #1 constraining resource for most environments. However, if you're feeling ambitious, you're welcome to total your CPU, storage, etc.  Also, if you're like most people, you'll want to figure this out on a per-cluster-basis. Why? First, if you're running DRS, the need to evaluate capacity on a host basis becomes negligible. Second, if you have High Availability (HA) enabled on the cluster, calculating at the cluster level allows you to most effectively factor this in.

Running example: I have four hosts in a cluster, each with 64 GB of RAM. Total = 256 GB of memory. HA is enabled and configured with a single host failure tolerance.

2. Calculating Usable Capacity

Wise administrators try not to fill their hosts, clusters, or datastores to 100% utilization. So, how much capacity should we consider "usable"? It depends.

If you have HA enabled, the usable (reserved) capacity depends on the number of hosts as well as the desired host failure tolerance. In my running example, the cluster is configured to support a single host failure. That would mean only 192GB (75%) of the cluster capacity is actually usable - i.e. total capacity minus one host.

Running example: 256 GB (total) - 64 GB (failover host) = 192 GB (usable capacity).

Now that we've determine how much capacity is required to accommodate HA, I'm still not done. If I used 192 GB of memory across the cluster and unplugged one of my servers, the three remaining hosts would be at 100% utilization - not good. A host will begin ballooning memory at 94% utilization. If the ballooning doesn't end up being sufficient, the host will begin hypervisor swapping (much worse than OS swapping) at 96% utilization.

To retain performance levels in the event of a host failure, factor in additional, small reservation. By default, VKernel shoots for an additional 15% buffer. This allows for some wiggle room without leaving too much unused hardware on the table.

Running example: 192 GB (usable capacity) * .85 (15% buffer) = 163.2 GB (safe usable capacity)

3. Subtract What is Already Being Utilized

Out of the 163 GB (rounded) that I can safely use, I already have several VMs running. After briefly opening my vSphere Client and checking a performance graph for my cluster, I discovered that I'm already using 117 GB. This leaves me with 46 GB for new virtual machines.

Running example: 163 GB (safe usable capacity) - 117 GB (used capacity) = 46 GB (available capacity)

4. Calculate Your Average Virtual Machine Size

This is really easy if you already have the Capacity Manager module in vOPS Server Standard running; it'll calculate this for you. However, if you only have your vSphere Client to work with, divide the  amount of used capacity by the number of VMs that you have powered on. In this environment, I'm running 41 virtual machines.

Running example: 117 GB (used capacity) / 41 (powered-on VMs) = 2.85 GB (average VM size)

5. Calculate Additional VMs and Compare

We now have all the numbers we need to finish this little adventure. The last step is to divide the amount "safe usable capacity" by the "average VM size" and see what you get. Now, keep in mind that this is only a rough calculation, but it should be in the same ballpark as what you see in vOPS Server Standard.

Running example: 46 GB (safe usable capacity) / 2.85 GB (average VM size) = 16 (additional VM capacity)

Hopefully, you've found this useful. For additional capacity management information, check out our Capacity Planning Resources page. 

Feel free to post your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

Jonathan Klick
Senior Systems Engineer
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

But 2012 is the year of hypervisor heterogeneity. Some will say this happened in 2011 and they could be right also. What is important is that IT leadership needs to think long and hard about whether their data centers will remain on a single type of hypervisor over the next three years or whether Hyper V, KVM, Oracle or a host of others will eventually land in their datacenters either by choice or by creeping in the side door. This pressure will come from ISVs, pricing pressure from Microsoft and others, and hybrid cloud providers who support one technology over the other.

Don't think there is pressure to run multiple hypervisors?  Here is a run down of interesting articles from just the last few weeks on the topic:

• Eric Siebert wrote a great piece in SearchServerVirtualization called: "Top 10 hypervisors: Choosing the best hypervisor technology"
• David Marshall reported in InfoWorld that two of our competitors finally expanded support to Hyper-V. While it was notable how late their Hyper-V support was, I found it more interesting that here was more evidence of a multiple hypervisor world
• Talkin' Cloud had an interesting article about Italian telecom service provider CDLAN that uses RHEV/RHEL to power their cloud services 

and my favorite:

• Hyper-V or VMware?  Debate on ZDNet

So what does this mean?

IT departments should consider the impact of purchasing their management stack from their hypervisor vendor.  While highly profitable to the hypervisor vendor,  this type of purchasing locks in companies to a single hypervisor vendor or risks the creation of multiple management stacks for each hypervisor over time.

Vendor lock-in by your systems management vendor is not a viable strategy given the advances competing technology have made over the years and market pressure IT shops will face to adopt multiple hypervisors.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

• The storage area network (SAN)
• The guest OS inside a virtual machine
• Physical servers that have not been virtualized
• Application level monitoring for Active Directory, SQL Server and Exchange

If you are considering VKernel/Quest for your virtualization management needs, it will be difficult to find another vendor with the breadth of offerings vOPS now provides. This unified offering bolsters Quest Software’s position as the leading independent virtualization management company.

Now included as part of the vOperations Suite are products from VKernel’s parent company, Quest Software. These products include:

• Quest vFoglight
• Quest vFoglight Storage
• Quest vOptimizer

Customers can now purchase:

vOPS Server

• Standard $549/socket which is the former vOperations Suite Product
• Enterprise $799/socket which is a combination of the former vOperations Suite + vFoglight

vOPS Storage

• vOptimizer $ 299/socket
• Monitor $499/socket which is the former vFoglight Storage product

Virtualization administrators have long searched for a data center management system to gain visibility across the many layers that make up a virtualized environment: from storage array to guest OS. Previous attempts to gain this holistic visibility have either required multiple vendors, or have involved complex large-scale management platforms that are time consuming and not cost efficient.

Now, when virtualization admins approach us at trade shows with the desire for some in depth storage visibility, we have an answer.

Now, when virtualization admins approach us with the desire to see what is driving performance for their virtualized SQL server application, we have an answer.

Want to monitor the physical server also? No problem.

Want to download and get started? Here is the link.

The combination of Quest + VKernel will provide a formidable product offering backed by the sales, marketing, support and engineering resources of Quest. We are excited about the new offerings and how they can positively impact virtualization administrators.

Give it a try and download vOPS today.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

• Which VMware blog(s) should you be following on the interwebz? vSphere-land reports the top blogs based on virtualization community voting.
• vBenchmark, a free "fling" from the VMware labs, is a new tool with which to play. The download page is sprouting lots of comment activity, so jump on the bandwagon! Also, drop by Yellow Bricks to see what Duncan had to say about it.
• The Windows Server 8 beta is now available - and Hyper-V 3.0 with it! If you haven't already seen how the new Hyper-V is measuring up against vSphere 5.0, check this out.
• eWeek talks about the recently release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 and how it's creating yet another force to be reckoned with in the hypervisor market.

Enjoy and have a great week!

Jonathan Klick
Senior Systems Engineer
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

In Brad's experience, disk performance seems to have traditionally been measured in how many acronyms you could list as present in a solution. In filling the need for better metrics on storage performance, IOPS has become a commonplace term in determining shared storage capabilities. In this white paper, Brad discusses the benefits and pitfalls of focusing on IOPS, and how storage I/O is an often over-simplified topic. He provides a deep dive into:

• Shared storage fundamentals
• Links in the chain of storage
• IOPS as a measurement of disk I/O
• Making the most of IOPS

Download the free white paper here and when you're done share your thoughts and comments with us. We'd like to hear them.

Enjoy!

Lauren Bonaca
Online Marketing Manager
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

A video of the presentation can be seen here:

The white paper "Setting Prices for Private Clouds" the presentation was based on can be downloaded here.

Some observations and updates from the talk. The audience was composed of vendors but also some IT professionals running hard core private clouds. In general, the five reasons for pricing private clouds we discussed were:

1. Budgeting
2. Reduce waste and over allocation
3. Drive IT to operate as a business
4. Enable open market competition 

Walking through these reasons, there was general agreement from the audience that waste reduction is a critical component of this process, if not the most important. Pricing out private cloud services was also important for getting funding to reinvest and grow the cloud environment.

Walking through the pricing triangle of cost, competitors, and value yielded a lively discussion. From a cost standpoint:

• One IT administrator reported that public cloud providers where unable to provide a competitive bid for their 85,000 seat email environment
• A second IT administrator reported that for test and development, their $1M price tag was easily beaten in both time to stage and cost ($3,000) offered by a public provider

There appeared to be general agreement that from a cost standpoint, test and development worked for public clouds. When we discussed competitive pricing and value, one administrator was quick to point out that the public cloud providers are not his “competition”. Rather, he sees IT as the broker for services.

From a value standpoint, the top value issues internal IT provided over public clouds were:

• Customization
• Reliability
• Support for home grow applications
• Security
• Compliance
• Performance and latency 

The reliability comment surprised me. We spent some time discussing it and the general experience was that internal IT is still more reliable than public cloud providers.

We embarked on a lively discussion as to whether IT’s customers appreciated these value points. The results were mixed. But the lack of this appreciation for IT’s value added services was core to internal customers seeking out public cloud providers.

The most controversial part of the presentation was the recommendation on whether to reveal actual prices of cloud services to internal IT customers. My premise, that unless the goal of pricing IT services was to compete with external providers, avoiding the direct comparison was the best route. In other words, price cloud services as a loss leader since the value to the corporation of a customer using internal systems is higher than the value to end IT customer.

Cloud Connect was an enjoyable experience. To the audience, thank you for participating and providing new ideas on this topic.

Bryan Semple

CMO

VKernel

A Quest Software Company

The most costly part of our virtual infrastructures - storage - seems to be a popular theme this week. Here's what you should know:

Storage DRS (SDRS)

As more of us make plans to move over to vSphere 5, Frank Denneman explores the coexistence of SDRS and auto-tiering. Frank's partner in crime, Duncan Epping, shows us how to allow SDRS to spread VMs with multiple VMDKs across multiple datastores.

Server-Based Storage Tiering

As growing amounts of virtual servers and desktops continue to increase SAN and network workloads, EMC strives to improve storage performance by releasing VFcache, a server-based SSD solution. Chad Sakac shares his excitement and provides some details about VFcache. Others ask, "Is server-based storage tiering right for you?"

Cloud Storage

While I fish around for storage deals, Amazon defies Thailand and decreases its cloud storage prices by 12%. Red Hat piggybacks off the Amazon announcement and releases its Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon AWS. Google feels its cloud isn't big enough and prepares to launch it's own cloud storage solution. However, I'd be very surprised - and impressed - if they were able to replace the little Dropbox icon in my notification tray.

Happy Monday!

Jonathan Klick
Senior Systems Engineer
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

Let's start with Super Marketing .....

I came across a great VMware marketing campaign called VMware RealWorld. The campaign highlights the problems virtualization admins go through just to get through their days. The videos are funny and very poignant in their practical focus. No flash animations of clouds or narrators saying things like, “IT has to do more with less.” The videos present a practical look at issues administrators face.

You may not find yourself under your desk hiding from end users, but I think the videos make a great point.

The same day I came across this marketing campaign, I bumped into a white paper for vCenter Operations called “Super Metrics” for the Enterprise version. While the ad campaign and videos are practical, this white paper highlights the complexity that awaits a virtualization admin attempting to deploy vCenter Operations. vCOPS is derived from the original Integrien acquisition. Integrien is a great, theoretical product for boiling down the ocean of metrics for an organization in an attempt to link, say, the weather in Iowa driving up commodity prices, that increases server demand for brokerage firms that trade commodities, thereby causing high CPU utilization. By presenting this correlation between weather and CPU utilization, Integrien prevents the VM admin from running around thinking there is a problem, when in fact this is normal CPU behavior caused by extreme weather in Iowa.

But with any general purpose platform, there are tradeoffs. In this case, the trade off is in usability. The white paper about Super Metrics shows this in spades. A relatively simple question such as, “What is the average CPU usage of a group of virtual machines and what is normal for them?” requires a multi-page white paper to describe how to set up and operate vCenter Operations. Perhaps a tinkerer's dream, this type of complexity is a nightmare for a manager trying to get answers and build a productive team. Overly complex analytics that require lots of labor to manage and design are counterproductive to the purpose of these products in the first place. vCenter Operations relies almost exclusively on self-learning analytics. Powerful, but costly to use in terms of learning and set up.

VKernel’s virtualization management products use a mix of technologies to help virtual admins get answers fast. Eric Jackson, VP of Product Management did an excellent podcast last week on self-learning analytics which is worth a listen for anyone who considers self-learning analytics as the only way to solve the virtualization management problem.

Super Marketing vs. Super Metrics vs. Super Bowl

Let's try and forget that last one...

Bryan Semple

CMO

VKernel

A Quest Software Company

P.S. If you want to understand behavior of any group of virtual machines using VKernel's vOperations Suite, you don't need Super Metrics or Super Human powers.  Simply download and install vOPS Performance Analyzer, then create a Business View (a few clicks) and add any VM you want to analyze as a group to this Business View (a few clicks). Not only will you get average CPU usage of the group, but also a lot of other interesting metrics that will help you manage your virtual environment.

Busy news week last week for virtualization and capacity management.

VMware End of Life's CapacityIQ

VMware end of lifed CapacityIQ pushing all customers onto the vCenter Operations platform. While it was never clear to us how many of these customers existed, at least one, below is not happy.

Hey CapacityIQ customers - download vOperations Suite Capacity Manager - try it out for 30 days. Knowing what we do about CapacityIQ,  this will more than meet your capacity planning needs -- and we are not end of lifing the product.

VMworld EMEA in Barcelona

The dates for VMworld EMEA are now out and finalized.  Hello Barcelona.

"Microsoft SC 2012 to Support Multi-Hypervisor Private Cloud for a Flat Fee"

Interesting headline in ReadWriteWeb describing how MSFT will be selling System Center 2012 for a flat fee and supporting multiple hypervisors, just not Hyper-V. Worth a read.

Voting Now Open for Top Virtualization Blogs

With over 180 blogs to chose from, vote EARLY, but not OFTEN for the virtualization blog and podcast of your choice.

Hyper-V vs. vSphere 5

Another interesting article in the genre, this time from UP2V.  This follows some Hyper-V and vSphere 5 comparison data that our own Jonathan Klick did last year.

Government to Save Billions with Virtualization

That's right, billions.  I'm actually surprised it is not more given the size of the Federal Government.  Read this interesting article from InfoWeek Government.

Scale Up vs. Scale Out

The decision to scale up or out has been one that we have looked at in the past. Without looking at this from a financial perspective,  it has never been clear to me how this decision gets made with certainty. Scaling up has its costs and benefits.  Higher memory densities cost more than low memory densities. The fastest CPUs cost more than the slower CPUs.  But scaling out increases the number of network connections required, data center space, etc.

The chart below summarizes the analysis from 6 months ago showing that scale out made the most sense.

SearchServerVirtualization has another take on this in a recent article claiming that the decision has already been made for scale out in the form of blade architectures.  While I am not certain I agree with the conclusion, this is nonetheless a good read on the subject.

Have a great week!

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel 
A Quest Software Company 

At the VKernel table, we met hundreds of IT enthusiasts as we demonstrated performance and capacity planning capabilities within the vOperations Suite. A few themes we heard from the folks we met were:

• VM admins are looking for visibility into storage when managing their virtual environments
• Virtual environments are getting larger and heterogeneous, and IT organizations are overspending on hardware as to not deal with performance issues - leading to wasted resources
• Chargeback is still a dream, while showback being embraced as a reality

Aligned with these virtualization management realities, the user group attendees were excited about vOPS’s:

• Scalability yet ease of use
• Performance issue remediation and automation
• Insight into storage, particularly I/O
• VM rightsizing automation for over-allocated resources
• Waste cleanup for snapshot, abandoned VMDKs, and zombie VMs
• Robust reporting capabilities, including operational and management dashboards

The VKernel crew really enjoyed speaking with everyone and we hope to hear from you soon. We’d also like to send a huge thank you and job well done to the New England VMUG team for organizing a memorable, educational and fun event for everyone.

Go Pats!

Lauren Bonaca
Online Marketing Manager
VKernel

• Hyper-V grows at 62%
• Virtualization management in 2012: All about multi-hypervisor
• Enterprises Strive Toward Multi-Vendor Virtual Environments

Whether you believe the multi-hypervisor datacenter is here or coming, these are some interesting articles that at least support the inevitability of the heterogeneous hypervisor data center.

But as a commenter on a recent Linked In conversation pointed out:

"Hyper-V 3.0 should be on the roadmap for a 2014 deployment/upgrade. Windows 8 RTM most likely won't be available till the end of 2012. If you need immediate deployments there are other ways but Hyper-V 3.0 just isn't it. However Hyper-V 3.0 is going to change VDI and Private Clouds. I can't wait for it."

Waiting until end of 2012 for RTM on Windows 8 makes Hyper-V 3 for all its goodness, is a ways away. Filling this gap of progress is RHEV 3.0. In beta since last year, Red Hat is hosting their first ever virtual RHEV event next week. As a Red Hat partner, we will be participating. More than participating, we will be going GA on our heterogeneous version of vOPS that supports RHEV, Hyper-V and VMware environments.

So the march to heterogeneous data centers continues.  Join us at the RHEV event next week

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

VKernel vOperations Suite

According to the article and IDC, Hyper-V grew last year at 62%. Also in the article, Gartner states Hyper-V market share will be 27% of the market, up from 11% two years.

Those are some significant changes.

This data makes sense especially in light of the technical advances in Hyper-V over the past few years. Our Senior Systems Engineer, Jonathan Klick, created a compelling chart showing some interesting characteristics between vSphere 5 and Hyper-V 3:

You can read his entire blog post here.

The market share numbers are interesting in that they reflect a diversification of hypervisors. What they don't reflect is diversification of hypervisors within an organization. We are clearly starting to run into these organizations, and believe they are growing.  Application affinity, open source dedication, cost, tiering strategies, acquisitions, all drive organizations to adopt multiple hypervisor technologies.  So whether you are operating as a monolithic hypervisor company, or you run multiple hypervisors, or are using one of the emerging vendors, it looks as though you are in good company. Greater hypervisor diversity in the market is a good thing and will continue to accelerate.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

PS - Download a 30 day trial of VKernel's Award Winning capacity management application and see how it manages both vSphere 5 and Hyper-V environments. 

For data centers that wish to pursue increased automation, the enhancements in vOPS 4.5 introduces new capabilities, and importantly, robust controls for these automation features to provide data centers with "trusted automation". I.e, the software will implement changes with guidance from administrators based on specific needs for that environment. vOPS™ 4.5 specifically includes:

• New Automation Features - vOPS' VM management automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned VM images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements.
• Automation Controls - vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finely control some automation processes. For example, VMs can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect.

Addtionally, vOPS 4.5 introduces:

• Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
• Storage DRS and storage cluster support available with VMware vSphere 5
• Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available with vSphere 5
• Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
• Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
• Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
• Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected

These features can be seen in action in the video below:

Trying out this "trusted automation" is quick and easy with a 30 day free trial of vOPS 4.5, which takes about 20 minutes to install and works immediately afterwards. Stay tuned for more discussions on how these new capabilities can help data centers save time and money.

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager

2011 Prediction #1: VM stall makes its appearance in 2011 #FAIL

In 2011, we saw exactly the opposite. "Cheap" virtual machine access provided opportunities for organizations to increase their server counts with new applications.  Previously, it was challenging to deploy a new application.IT had to procure hardware, provision the server, and deploy the application. There were hurdles both in terms of business process, but also cost. Applications had to pass a high bar to get deployed.

What we continue to see in the virtualized world is that this deployment bar is much much lower, for better or worse. I continue to be surprised talking to customers about the size of their environments in terms of virtual servers relative to the companies size or revenue or even intensity of data processing needs.

For mission critical applications, we saw VMware do some great stuff with vSphere 5, RHEV 3 is in beta, and Hyper-V closed some major gaps specific to application scalability.

2011 Prediction 2: Hyper-V Appears #SUCCESS

2011 marked the appearance of real Hyper-V customers, running real applications,in production. The market share statistics published by the analyst firms always painted a picture that Hyper-V was prevalent in years past.But try as we could to locate customers prior to 2011, we could not locate many. This year, that changed.

2011 Prediction 3: Private Cloud Adoption is Slow #SUCCESS

Similar to the Hyper-V prediction, there was certainly lots of noise this year about private clouds. And yes, some IT organizations are building or planning to build private clouds. Other organizations have built virtualized environments with near self service provisioning capabilities and just have not called them "private clouds." But get a room full of virtualization admins together and ask "How many of you are running a private cloud" and the hands will be few. Ask a room of virtualization admins "Who is running vCloud Director?", and even fewer hands will go up. No doubt this private cloud trend will pick up, but in 2011, the hype did not match the on-the-ground-reality.

2011 Prediction 4: VMware Master of World Domination Strategy Hits Some Snags #NEUTRAL

Last year I predicted VMware would have execution issues delivering all they had promised on their vision. That part has generally been true. We finally saw at VMworld Copenhagen an announcement around the delivery date of the Capacity IQ/Integrien integration (now Q12012). It is difficult to determine exactly how integrated all these products will be since they are not yet released. But, it has taken over a year to integrate these applications.

VMware once again gets an A in compelling strategy vision and hence my #NEUTRAL rating. They have defined the requirements for virtualization management once again. The time for point solutions is over.

2011 Prediction 5: CPTN Holdings, the Secretive Microsoft Holding Company, Will Be Uncovered as the Top Burger King Franchiser in America. #NEUTRAL

Last year, Novell sold certain technology assets to CPTN holdings. I am still looking for evidence of the Burger King connection, but there are signs out there if you open your eyes.

That is the 2011 wrap up. Next December I will comment on 2012 predictions.

Happy Holidays

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

The most attended sessions from what we saw at the Dutch VMUG were:

1. Eric Sloof and Mattias Sundling's Mythbusters goes virtual
2. Gabrie van Zanten's vSphere Healthcheck
3. .... and Cutting through the VM Management Language Barrier at the VKernel Booth with VMGuru.nl's Edwin Weijdema, some clips included below...

In other highlights, the Monster VM also came to visit: 

Stay tuned for some blogger interviews from the event to come out shortly. Kudos to the Dutch VMUG team for organizing a memorable event chock full of insightful sessions.

Gauw tot ziens Dutch VMUG!

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager