Sensory overload – the joy of capacity management in a virtual world (4 of 5)

‘It’s all too much!’ the IT man screams.  

Certainly our world is getting more and more complicated with virtualization. On the server side we have web servers, database servers, application servers, identity servers and more.  We have UNIX, Linux, Windows, and more, J2EE, .NET and so on.  A given application or service touches multiple storage systems, network devices, LANs, WANs and VLANs and might be spread across a mix of public and private Clouds. Terminal and host seems like a distant memory for the older among us.

Virtualized workloads might be, indeed should be ,variable across time.  P2V probably meant you looked at workload profiles to ensure that virtual machines on a given host had applications that did not have peak processing times that coincided.

All of this variety needs to be managed from a capacity perspective.  As ever, we are not managing a fixed entity, indeed entities are much less fixed than in our past.  Workloads can be dynamically switched across hosts for performance gains, new hosts are quickly and easily configured and workloads moved around to ensure optimum location.  The business keeps changing, old services replaced with new, merger and acquisition, organic business growth or shrinkage.  Mobile computing and portable devices add new management challenges and make our users and access points even harder to pin down.

To cope with all this diversity and change, a capacity manager needs to be both more specific and more general.  Being specific means trying to at least have a view on all critical transactions.  To know which are critical you need to know about them all, so measuring everything automatically from end to end is vital.  Old fashioned 80/20 rules still apply – 80% of the work is probably accounted for by 20% of the transactions, so identifying those 20% is critical.

Greater generality perhaps comes from your tool selection.  Most organizations have come to the virtualized world with a selection of point tools for different environments and then added further point tools on top for their virtual worlds.  Deep dive performance analysis will still require quality point tools in many or all areas.  Reporting and spotting trends that affect capacity decisions will be much easier however with a solution included that integrates all the other data sources.  Resourcing decisions are moving back into the user domain again with Cloud options.  Having a reporting solution that covers every aspect of your environment from a capacity perspective is a significant way in which you can help the users make their resourcing decisions. It also gives you the means of providing good advice and guidance as input to their decision making.

Remember in 2012 the key for capacity managers will be to provide value, not just optimize costs.  This value can and will need to be across the entirety of the complex environment in which virtual applications exist.  Put together the right combination of end to end perspective, deep dive and ‘across the board’ integrated reporting to ensure you can provide the most value for your business.

We’ll finish on Monday by considering the importance of having the right capacity process in place to underpin your 2012 and onwards capacity management activities.

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer