Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The cost of the tremendous freedom and flexibility that server virtualization has brought is complexity, resource waste and increased admin time to manage sprawling VMs. Virtualization can also result in increased CapEx costs as VMs sit idle, using storage, CPU and memory, instead of being decommissioned.

Virtualization has forced us to trade lower-functioning simplicity for higher-functioning complexity. What’s needed are new tools to run this more complex environment and reign in costs and management.

Recently, Storage Switzerland was briefed by Akorri on their BalancePoint product. This agent-less software dynamically models and analyzes across physical and virtual elements (servers, VMs, storage) to bring the intelligence needed to get your arms around your environment.

BalancePoint maps the physical and virtual resources associated with each application and shows you how everything’s connected - and what the interdependencies are. They call this “cross-domain analysis”. It monitors the performance of each element in the system, showing you where the bottlenecks and hotspots are and identifies which VMs are using the bulk of the resources, and potentially impacting other VMs.

BalancePoint uses a process called “application fingerprinting’, which is a dynamic characterization of each workload, how it’s performing and what its resource needs are across the domain. These data are used to identify problems but also to baseline the requirements of each workload so they can be appropriately provisioned, and resources optimized. These profiles can be used to develop accurate templates for future VM provisioning.

There are a number of planning and analysis reports and automated reporting tools for functions like Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration, chargeback and capacity planning. The agent-less software is easy to install and remotely collects data from all infrastructure elements. BalancePoint is complementary to VMware vSphere, fully supporting vSphere 4.0 as a virtualization platform. It’s run as a virtual appliance in a vSphere VM and plugs into vCenter Server. Support is planned for Microsoft Hyper-V and all other major hypervisor technologies.

BalancePoint supports all major OSs and storage systems from 3Par, Dell EqualLogic, EMC, HP, Hitachi, IBM and NetApp. Data center applications supported include email, file servers, OLAP-OLTP, Oracle, RDMS - Streaming Media, MS SQL.

Storage Switzerland’s Take

Server virtualization is a game changing technology, not an incremental improvement.

We’ve abstracted the entire server environment into a file. This kind of paradigm shift can bring with it complexity and a tremendous opportunity for administrative confusion. How do you best manage something as ‘unreal’ as a virtual server? You need the right tools. Trying to manage a virtual server environment with tools from the physical world is like trying to fight a 21st century war with 20th century weapons.

Solutions like Akorri’s BalancePoint were designed for ‘this war’ and understand that you need visibility to manage a virtual infrastructure. It gives you a ‘cross-domain’ visual perspective of your topology, provides sophisticated analytics and metrics and automated reports to help you optimize your environment. The agent-less format makes it easy to implement and expand as the infrastructure grows.

Tools like BalancePoint lets you virtualize with confidence. With these types of tools you can reduce troubleshooting time, reclaim unused assets and manage the cost of the freedom that virtualization provides.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst