October 31st, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Asset Management, IT Admin, Network Monitoring
Improving Incident Management in an SMB
According to ITIL, An IT incident is an event which is not part of standard IT operations which causes or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in, the quality of service. Your objective is to restore an incident to full service as soon as possible.
Your problem in meeting this objective can be broken down into the following three areas.
- Detection time - Don’t know about an incident until a user complains
- Diagnosis time - Lack of current information about your network
- Remediation time - Can’t remotely access a node to restore it to service
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Your solution should include:
Ability to improve detection time by:
- Polling for incidents via synthetic transactions
- Event consolidation and monitoring
- Monitoring performance thresholds
- Monitoring performance trends
Ability to improve diagnosis time by:
- Providing a notification that will inform you of an incident before your user does
- A page that automatically collects and consolidates what has been happing to a certain node or service in terms of events and performance.
- A page that also consolidates current configuration and recent changes to a node in terms of software and hardware.
Ability to improve remediation time
- Anytime, anywhere out of band access via KVM/IP
- “Virtual Media” capability to remotely mount drives to install software and run diagnostic tests
This is a good first step. There is always more you can do but I will save that for a future blog entry.
October 19th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin, Virtualization
SMB Virtualization
The basic value proposition of virtualization is the same for an SMB as it is for a larger enterprise. An SMB is just as likely to deploy virtualization to consolidate servers, improve server utilization, improve disaster recovery, consolidate legacy applications and reduce server provisioning time. The SMB experiences the same type of benefits such as reduced cost of hardware, energy, space requirements and provisioning.
VMware has just released 3 new bundles specifically targeted to the SMB market. According to industry analyst firm the Yankee Group, virtualization deployments among SMBs is expected to double during the next two years. VMware is positioned to capture this growth with their free product VMware Server and now offering three competitively priced bundles.
October 17th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin, Virtualization
Virtualization 2.0
Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 has been published by networkworld.com. These are the technologies that are potentially game changers for companies so it is advised that all IT people examine them. In today’s environment, you don’t want to be behind the innovation curve.
Number one is Green IT. Cost and environmental concerns are driving the public, companies and the government to raise the awareness and urgency for action in this area. The early result has been new designs for chips, software programs to measure and manage power usage, and new technologies such as virtualization. Almost every virtualization story that I have heard or read included a claim to have reduced power usage. It would be great if our innovation in this area resulted in a better environment and much lower oil prices.
Number 5 is Virtualization 2.0. This is a catch all term for the value offered by this technology beyond server consolidation. Think about the simplification of installation and movement. A good example is a university that has a need to build and tear down a laboratory computing environment every semester.
I suggest you read the full article.
October 12th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin, Virtualization
Virtualization of servers saves power and space for M&T Bank
Tom Cronin from M&T Bank presented the following results on their virtualization deployment. I found Tom to be practical, knowledgeable, and interesting with a good sense of humor.
They have deployed 70 production ESX servers (2 & 4 CPU HP servers) with 1,000 guests across two data centers and multiple DMZs.
This produced a 7% reducing in new hw purchases vs. double digit growth in the past years. He now claims to have excess rack space and lowered his power use. The environment thanks M&T Bank for this. Just imagine the benefit to the environment and energy costs if we all could lower our energy use. As a side note, I installed compact fluorescent bulbs in my house this spring and lowered my electric bill by 15%.
His key current pain points are server sprawl and charge back.
He is in the process of pulling together a project to work the following management issues.
- Where physically is the server?
- Virtual center CPU usage is not 100% accurate
- Provide performance data to end users.
October 8th, 2007 by Dennis Ti
Categories: IT Admin, Network Monitoring
Roadmap for Network Monitoring Reports
I had the opportunity last week to “get out of the office” and visit a customer who was very excited about the new open database access capability in CC-NOC 6.0. He downloaded the virtual appliance and, within a day, had started to setup a number of queries through Crystal Reports for reports he planned to write. Let me tell you, it is certainly nice to watch someone be enthusiastic about a new feature your team has developed. My particular role was to draft the documentation including a data schema guide. After all, what good is it to open your database unless you provide customers and partners with all the documentation they need to effectively implement it.
This particular customer had to write monthly reports for the company executives, correlating data points that the executives wanted to see. Much of that data has been available across the various reports in CC-NOC, but he wasn’t about to get the executives to log in to the appliance and leaf through a few pages each month. Now that we’ve opened our database to ODBC requests, he uses Crystal Reports to query and layout the report exactly as his executives want the information. He has turned data into useful information.
Discussing the new database access with this customer was a very good use of my time. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic - do you find yourself (or your team) writing reports regularly? What data are you most interested in? What queries have you come-up with that turns IT data into information?
As always, you can comment directly here on the blog, or visit our forums and leave a post for the rest of the community and the CC-NOC staff to comment on.
With a lack of coffee,
Dennis Ti
October 3rd, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin, Virtualization
Virtualization Roadmap
There are many players in the virtualization field and each produces multiple product releases a year. Keeping track of the product releases they produce is a full time job. Virtualization.info does a pretty good job of it. They maintain a Virtualization Roadmap of the releases planned by the top vendors - including Microsoft, Citrix, XenSource, VMware, and Virtual Iron.
October 1st, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin
IT Salary Survey
The Network World Salary Survey for 2007 has been published. This is a good way to gain some insight to the IT market in terms of salary, bonuses, and raises. It also provides salary tools, tends, and the hottest IT job skills. I tested the salary calculator with the following inputs.
- LAN, WAN or Network Administrator
- Works 50 hours a week
- 6-10 years of IT experience
- Managing 20-99 servers (count each virtual guess machine as one server)
- No direct reports
- Bachelor’s degree
- Company with 100M-500M in revenue
- Working in New York
- Finance industry
The result:
a base salary of $76,814 and a total compensation with bonus of $88,661.
Let us know how accurate you think the calculator is?
September 27th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Development & Testing, Asset Management, IT Admin, Virtualization, Network Monitoring
VMware Infrastructure Software Development Kit (SDK)
We have posted a number of articles that highlight virtualization’s high value proposition. Very few things in life provide such gain with no pain. As pointed out in our Georgia-Pacific article, one of virtualization’s main pain is in the area of IT operations management. Our particular area of expertise and interest is in IT Asset Management and Network Monitoring. We are excited about the opportunity to discover, track, and monitor those virtual machines as they are created and zipped around from host to host at lightning speed. The rapid creation and movement of systems presents new challenges for IT operations management systems. Correctly leveraging and implementing the right set of management APIs can make the job much easier.
Fortunately, we have one of the best operations system interface engineers in the industry. Rakesk Bisaria has designed and implemented many mission critical systems which inter-operate to provide seamless flow-through operations. He has submitted the following article for me to post.
By Rakesh Bisaria;
VMware Infrastructure - consists of a suite of products and features that allow creation of Data Center Operations Applications. Some of the building blocks are:
VMwareCenter – VMwareCenter is the central management application that automates and optimizes the management of VMware IT infrastructure.
VMware Hosts - Servers (ESX Server. VMware Server) that host Virtual Machines (VM).
VMware High Availability (HA) – High Availability or fail-over capability for Virtual Machines that eliminates the need for a dedicated standby server and allows a VM to be available across the virtualized IT infrastructure.
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) – Dynamic load balancing and resource distribution by moving Virtual Machines (VMotion) to realize optimal performance across the virtualized environment.
VMware VMotion – Automatic move of VM from one physical server to another with no impact on the end users.
VI SDK Features & Services
The VI SDK supports the following Host Management and Virtualized Environment Management functions:
Host Management Operations - Following are some host management operations supported by the SDK VI API:
- Reboot or Shutdown a host
- Connect or disconnect a host from VirtualCenter
- Create or remove datastore from a host
- Configure the networking and storage systems attached to a host
Virtualized Environment Management Operations - Following are some Virtualized Environment management operations supported by the SDK VI API:
- Virtual Machine Creation and Deletion
- Virtual Machine Provisioning
- Virtual Machine Inventory
- Virtual Machine Migration (VMotion)
- Virtual Machine Performance Data
- Distributed Resource Schedule (DRS) Services
- High Availability Services
VMware SDK Development Environment – Following are the VM SDK Development Environment components:
· VMware SDK provided WSDL file
· Web Service Development Environment: Examples: Apache Axis, Microsoft Visual Studio .Net and .Net Framework
Over the next few weeks I will publish additional thoughts on this topic. In the mean time please provide your thoughts and comments.
September 22nd, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: IT Admin, Virtualization
Server Virtualization Project Spend Data
Server virtualization is a catalyst for technology refresh. It is estimated by VMware(r) that every $1 spent on VMware products generates the following additional spending:
- Server Equipment - $2-4
- Storage - $3-5
- VAR SI services - $2-3
- Infrastructure Management - $1-5
- Infrastructure Availability - $1-5
Share your server virtualization project spend ratios.
September 20th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Asset Management, IT Admin, Virtualization
Georgia-Pacific’s Virtualization Expirience
Brad Wagner from Georgia-Pacific presented about their VMware(r) virtualization program. The following are the highlights:
Original business case was approved based upon server consolidation at a 5 to 1 ratio.
Results:
- Containment(rapid upgrade & deployment) has proven to be a valuable benefit not listed in the original business case
- Actual consolidation is at a 10 to 1 ratio. 100 ESX hosts supporting over 1000 guest machines
- G-P adds 100 new OSs a year - 80% are deployed as virtual machines. 20% require new hw. Long term goal is to implement 100% of wintel requests as virtual machines.
- Cap spending has dropped
- Provisioning time has been reduced dramatically
The main constraint is managing the rapidly growing environment. The following are some of the pain points mentioned by Brad(not in any particular order).
- Trouble shooting application performance
- Storage consumption planning
- Asset management
- Manage charge back
- Process automation
- Performance monitoring
- Change management
- Patch and update
Please share your virtualization deployment experience.
