The Changing Face of Capacity Management - Private Clouds (2 of 4)

Looking at the present and future of Capacity Management, it's clear that managing cloud environments is incredibly important as more organizations decide to move much of their computing to the cloud.

The first type of cloud I want to cover is the private cloud.  

In many cases, a private cloud implementation involves organizations using virtualization and other technologies in-house that public cloud providers use when delivering their services.  In a traditional cloud implementation, services are delivered via the Internet.  In a private cloud, services may be delivered internally by other means.

For example, an organization could decide that it wants to change how it manages its Windows and Linux estate.  The company at this point decides to make an investment in VMware and turn all the existing physical servers into virtual machines to be managed centrally by a VMware administration team and using a lot of the automation VMware builds into vSphere.

Sounds good, right?

Well, one of the arguments for cloud computing is that clouds relieve the organization from day-to-day management and computing becomes much more of a utility (turn on the switch and it just works).  In private clouds that are implemented in-house, none of this is true.  Companies have to buy, build, and manage the environments and also deal with the complexity of having many applications running simultaneously in a virtual environment.

Still, companies feel that this is a good investment and, in many cases, so do I. However, it's just as crucial, probably more so, that the environment be properly planned and managed.  In a typical application that runs on a server if the server runs into capacity and performance problems, only one application or service is affected.  In a private cloud, a shortage of capacity could affect all of the applications and services running within that cloud.

As of right now, most companies who are implementing virtualization technologies internally (and are taking advantage of technologies that allow for the rapid and seamless deployment and reallocation of resources) are setting up their own private clouds.

 
On Wednesday  I'll deal with some of the things that need to be considered when looking at a private clouds.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

The changing face of Capacity Management - Private Clouds (5of 5)

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 private cloud environment.

If you’d like more info call us or visit our website www.metron-athene.com

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer