Trend 2 - Physical to virtual environments

The second trend in capacity management is physical to virtual environments.

Companies are continuing to migrate from Physical to Virtual (P2V) – virtual environments are much more complex such as VMware, AIX, LPAR’s so it has become much more difficult to manage, monitor and understand what capacity means in these environments. Certainly the level of detail that we are looking at and where we’re focusing our attention is different in a virtual environment. We’re going to look at hosts, we’re going to look at virtual machines that run on those hosts but what we might be most concerned with is that we have adequate capacity to cope with what is going on today. Typically, applications and services are sharing those resources so our focus may be whether we have enough capacity to handle today, the next 3 months, the next 6 months – we need to be looking at things from a higher level as well as a lower level.

Cost of unexpected errors during migration can be crippling – migrations from a physical to virtual environment need to be well planned. The need for good planning is essential, if you don’t have enough capacity going in to production the effect could be felt by many different applications and services which are running in that environment, whereas years ago if you made a mistake the error would affect one application or service only. It is very rare that a virtual environment isn’t managing different services for different areas in the organization.

The key is to understand your complete IT infrastructure during a migration so it’s key to monitor your critical application performance in that physical environment. Are you already monitoring it? Are you capturing resource utilization numbers with a tool like athene®? Are you looking at existing production transactions with a tool like SharePath?

It’s very important that you do that, understanding the end user experience is crucial. It’s meaningless to me if you tell me that the CPU is 90% utilized as I really wouldn’t know without any context whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Only with understanding the end user experience can we put context in to those resource utilization and capacity and performance numbers. Verifying the performance in the new virtual environment is absolutely critical, we don’t want to go from a 5 second response time in your physical environment to providing an 8 second response time in your virtual environment, no-one would be happy with that.

You want to make sure that you are meeting your Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) now, you want to plan that you meet your SLA’s in the new infrastructure and you need to go back and verify and compare the performance that you are getting in the new environment with what you have had in the physical environment in the past.

It doesn’t matter where your users are you need to know what kind of experience they are getting.

Rich Fronheiser

VP, Strategic Marketing