Showing posts with label VMware Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VMware Cloud Computing. Show all posts

Friday, 10 March 2017

The changing face of Capacity Management - Private Clouds (4 of 4)

With a private cloud, a key output of any capacity management process must be information to the internal customers.  In order to get this information, capacity and performance data must be captured and stored.

As an example, let's consider a VMware vSphere implementation that was put in place to replace an organization's Windows and Linux estate.

First of all, this data must be at the right granularity and at the right levels -- as I mentioned earlier, it's not enough to know what's happening inside the virtual machine or even just within the service itself.

Important data includes availability information, utilizations and allocations, service level agreements (how often are they violated) and financial data (costs, charges, and pricing) as well.

On top of data that's specific to that group, it's probably a good idea with a private cloud to include some "macro" level data.  How much overall capacity is there within the private cloud?  What are the overall utilizations?  How much available capacity is there in the entire environment?

Again, it's easy to over-allocate or under-allocate by a small amount for each internal group or application, but it's just as important to show the "overall" view because it is incredibly costly to an organization if the overall environment is over-built (too much money spent on hardware, software, etc.) or under-built (lost business, unhappy customers).

So it stands to reason that any capacity management solution for a private cloud should capture data from a VMware environment at the datacenter, cluster, resource pool, host, and VM level. Provide you with data capture at a very granular level and have the ability to roll up into multiple levels of summaries over time.  

It’s important to be able to incorporate business statistics, financial and costing information in to the database.
Reports and alerts (performance and trending) including these types of data help you to communicate effectively with your internal customers and your organization's management, in terms they understand.

It will come as no surprise that we have expertise in producing and implementing capacity management processes or that athene®, along with our capture packs, provides everything you need to successfully capacity manage your cloud environment.

Visit our website www.metron-athene.com


Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer

Monday, 30 March 2015

VMware vSphere – avoiding an Internal Storm (1 of 10)

Traditionally, within the Distributed Computing world single or multiple applications would be hosted on single physical servers, each with an operating system (typically Windows or UNIX/Linux).  Then Virtualization was reborn into the x86 environment (note to my Mainframe friends that we know Virtualization was first born in the zOS environment) that allowed for multiple "virtual systems" to be hosted on a single physical server by using hypervisor software.  As virtualization software developed further, notably by VMware who are currently the market leader in x86 virtualization technology, we are now able to cluster virtual systems together to create shared pools of resources across the virtual infrastructure.

Why is this important? 

Virtualization underpins Cloud Computing by presenting and controlling computing resources to users (or clients) by these shared pools of resources (Resource Pools).  However, it is not just the ability to provide resources and control usage, Virtualization also provides two key components of Cloud Computing:

·         Autonomic Computing
·         Utility Computing
vSphere incorporates Autonomic Computing by automating the control of functioning computer applications and systems.  Using vMotion and DRS, it can automate the migration of virtual machines to alternate ESX hosts within the same cluster, if a specific ESX host becomes unbalanced due to excessive resource demand on that host.

Utility Computing allows Cloud providers to provision computing resources and infrastructure to customers and charge them for their specific usage or chosen configuration at a flat rate.

In this series I’ll be looking at VMware vSphere, how it underpins Cloud Computing and how you can use it to best advantage. I’ll start by examining the definition of Cloud on Wednesday...

Jamie Baker
Principal Consultant