1 cloud computing/virtualization 2.0 is all about manageability key considerations for a cloud...

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Cloud Computing/Virtualization 2.0 is all about Manageability

Key considerations for a Cloud Computing Ready Monitoring Solution

Bala VaidhinathanChief [email protected]

© 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved

Agenda

• Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing

• Management challenges with Cloud Computing

• Key considerations for monitoring Cloud Environments

• How to ?

• Summary


Virtualization 1.0

• Focus on getting the functionality right, proving the benefits

Energy and space savings, ease of provisioning, HA

• Predominantly used in staging and development environments

• Over-provisioning to ensure acceptable performance

• Single-vendor (VMware) dominated

• New service opportunities developed – e.g., VDI


Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing

• Choice of virtualization technologies VMware® ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris xVM

• The hypervisor is now a commodity

• Virtual environments prevalent in production Critical applications, business services

• Key challenges - Provider:• Need to deliver on the promise of high availability, reliability, performance Shrinking budgets result in emphasis on right-sizing! Performance depends on several layers of software Troubleshooting, diagnosing problems now key


Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing

• Saas, Paas or Iaas• What is right for you?

• Key challenges - Consumer: Lack of visibility. Management tools not mature enough to handle this explosion in technology. Service levels


Finger-Pointing

End User

Client Admin

LAN Admin

Firewall admin

Server admin VMware admin

Domain admin

ERP Admin Sys admin ApplicationAdmin

Database Admin

Hey, this is not

working

Siloed organizations result in the “It’s not me!” syndrome

Talk to the Other guys

The serveris working OK

EverythingIs OK

No othercomplaints

VMs are lightly loaded We don’t

see anythingwrong

All lights Are green

Not ourproblem

Looks fine

Not mine either

Challenges in monitoring Cloud Computing

• Infrastructure decoupled from Applications Infrastructure failure should no longer affect my apps?

Are we there yet?

• Higher complexity because of resource sharing across VMs Guests share CPU, memory, disk, network resources A single malfunctioning application in a guest can impact

performance to all other VMs• Performance degradation due to incorrect provisioning

Insufficient memory, CPU allocated for the VM’s workload

For a technology that makes delivery and scaling of computing easier,

Cloud computing presents a ton of challenges in monitoring and management.


Key Considerations for Monitoring Cloud Environments


Cloud Ready Monitoring

End-to-end view – across virtual and physical infrastructures Physical and virtual infrastructures will co-exist Private, hybrid and Public Clouds can co-exist

Common dashboard for heterogeneous cloud technologies Non-cloud, Private and Public clouds have different designs and behaviour

patterns. However they all serve your IT and you should have the ability to look at all of

them using a consistent dashboard.

Virtualization-aware physical server monitoring Are the servers sized correctly? Where is the bottleneck – CPU? Memory? SAN? Network? VMware ESX, Citrix Xen, Solaris LDOMs, Microsoft Hyper-V,

Solaris xVM, AIX LPAR



VM auto-discovery, availability and configuration tracking, physical resource usage

Which VMs are on an ESX server? Which ones are powered on? What CPU/memory resources are they taking up? Which VM is generating max. network traffic? Which VM is accessing the disk/SAN the most? Is Live Migration working? How many migrations are happening and how long did a migration take?

On demand monitoring Ability to deploy monitoring probes on demand. Ability to integrate your probes into your cloud computing units. Understand the dynamic nature of auto-created VMs.



Inside view of a VM with clear problem demarcation

“Outside view” indicates which VMs are consuming physical resources and the portion of resources consumed

Limited information for problem diagnosis • Why is a VM taking up more resources?• Malfunctioning application? Which one?• Excessive workload?• VM not sized properly?

Inside view of a VM critical for problem diagnosis• What % of the resources available to a VM are used by each

application?• Is it the physical server? Application? VM? Network?



Scalability Ease of installation and configuration

Automatically establish performance baselines When there is a problem, administrators want to know what’s changed Need proactive baselines & trends, so alerting can be proactive Minimize the time and effort spent configuring the monitoring

Tracking Service Levels Ability to provide different models of Service Levels Dynamic Service Levels Equally important for Providers and Consumers


Automated root-cause diagnosis

Slide 13 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved

Disk reads

Media StreamingDatabase Queries

Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses

Multi-tier infrastructures are difficult to manage.

Adding dynamic Computing units to the mix makes the problem even harder!!!


FIREWALL WEB SERVER

USER

Suppose the database server is 50% slower than normal

APP SERVER DB SERVER

LoginRegister

Bro

wse


Automated root-cause diagnosis at business service levels Differentiate cause from the effects


Support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI)

Not feasible to deploy an agent per OS / VM

Higher deployment overhead, time-consuming

Higher licensing cost, higher resource consumption

Different requirements for monitoring application server and virtual desktops


Virtual Application Environments Virtual Desktop Environments

Few VMs (<10) per ESX server 30-40 VMs per ESX server

VMs mostly powered on all the time VMs powered on/off dynamically

Monitoring mostly from the VM perspective – which VMs are on, what resources are they using

Monitoring from the user perspective (who is logged in, what resources are they using, who are the top users, etc.)

In-depth application monitoring required (Citrix, Oracle, etc.)

Monitor user activity, access patterns



Virtualization 1.0 Virtualization 2.0/Cloud

Monitoring physical servers: hypervisor, service console Auto discovery of VMs and tracking of up/down status Outside view of the VMs: What physical resources is each VM taking up?

Detecting VM bottlenecks - CPU ready time, throttled time, balloonmemory, disk latencies

Support for multiple, cloud architectures Inside view of VMs to understand how applications are consuming the resources of the VM

Dynamic / Configurable service levels.

Automatic baselining of performance and understanding norms Correlation between VM and physical server performance to understand bottlenecks

Automated root-cause diagnosis by correlating business service, network, application, VM and physical server performance

Monitoring of the virtualization ecosystem - virtual desktops, connection brokers, datastores, terminal servers, etc.

Dynamic and real-time deployment of monitoring models. Different stake holder views for different parties in the eco-system


Lets take a closer look...

Monitor physical and virtual servers, networks, applications from a single console(Req #1)

Integrated Dashboard


Dashboard customized for each administrator – “personalized views” (Req #7)

Root-cause of a problem is shown as ‘Critical’, effects of problems are shown as ‘Major’, and proactive alerts are shown as ‘Minor’ (Req #6)


Topology of Virtual Environment

The topology of the VM infrastructure reveals the VMs and applications that co-exist on a physical server currently (accounting for Live Migration).

Virtual Desktop Monitoring

View of all Virtual Desktops on a VMware ESX Server


Clicking on an icon drills down to the “inside” view of that virtual desktop. (Req #4).

View of all virtual resources used by a VM

Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM


Clicking on a magnifying glass “diagnosis” button lets us drill down deeper into the information supporting a particular metric.

Problem is low virtual disk space.

Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM

List of the top 10 memory consuming processes of a VM Guest



Auto-Baselining of Metrics

Time-varying alert threshold based on historical data

Reduces system configuration time and produces more accurate alerting (Req #5)


Layer Model for Root-Cause Diagnosis

The component layer model allows clear problem demarcation: Is it the Network? Physical server? VM? Application?

But wait: the SQL server is running on a VM, and there appears to be a critical problem in the VM infrastructure.

Clicking on this link displays a virtual infrastructure topology diagram for this VM.


Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example

There is a major alert condition at the OS layer.

Disk write times are over 11 seconds even though there is little disk activity!

The problem is with disk activity of Disk0.

Layer model for the MS SQL Server



VM infrastructure topology diagram (accounts for Live Migration)

The SQL Server VM is hosted on an ESX Server, and something in the ESX Server itself is impacting the SQL Server VM.

Clicking on this icon brings up the layer model for the ESX server.



Something is wrong with CPU usage of the ESX console.

The ESX console is taking up close to 50% of the server’s physical CPU. This is very unusual !

Layer model for the VMware ESX Server

The problem is at the OS layer.

Clicking on the diagnosis button lets us find out why.



List of the top 10 CPU processes running on the ESX service console

A Samba backup job is using almost 95% of the ESX console’s virtual CPU !

This is the root-cause of the web response time issues !



All of the alert conditions are also summarized in one screen:

An Alarm Console.

The root-cause of the problem

The effects of the problem

Simply clicking on this diagnosis button shows the root-cause of the problem: the Samba issue shown in the previous slide.

Color coding clearly distinguishes the root-cause from the effects.

Custom Service Levels – Graphical view

Custom Service Levels – Metric view

Flexible Web Reporting

Executive & operations reports

Network, system, application Reports

Enables triage across disparate infrastructure components

Real-time or historicalanalysis

Trend analysis, capacity planning


Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready


Virtualization 2.0 Ready Requirement What you need to look for

Ability to handle a mix of physical and virtual infrastructures

Monitoring for multiple OS types, variety of applications and support for physical and virtual machines

Support for heterogeneous Cloud computing models

Support for Private and Public clouds

Support for VMware VI3, Citrix XenServer, Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), and MS Virtual server

Visibility into physical server and virtual machine configuration and performance

“Outside” view of performance of each VM

Monitoring of the virtualization platform – the hypervisor, VM kernel, console

Inside view of VMs with problem identification A monitoring solution that can provide an “outside” and an “inside” view of the virtual environment using a single agent. Critical for root-cause diagnosis – to know which application inside the VM is faulty.

Baseline metrics automatically Uses past performance to automatically determine the norms of every metric

Proactively alerts when these thresholds are violated

Automatic correlation for pinpointing the root-cause of a problem

Correlation across VMs and physical machines

Correlation across protocol layers to identify problematic layers

Correlate between applications responsible for business service delivery

Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready

Virtualization 2.0 Ready Requirement What you need to look for

Scalability of the monitoring solution Highly scalable, 100% web-based architecture

Agent-based and agentless monitoring flexibility

Integration with virtualization platform monitors like VirtualCenter

Support for virtualized desktop environments Monitor of user activity, application mix, access patterns

Reports revealing the overall effectiveness of your virtual desktop environments – most frequent users, login/logout times for audit, applications accessed by users, top resource consumers

Personalized role-based views for different stakeholders

Roles to restrict access to users based on their roles

Personalized views for each user limiting their view to the portions of the infrastructure that they are responsible for.

Dynamic and Configurable Service Levels Ability to provide customizable service views depending on the situation

Ability to dynamically allocate service view based on patterns observed

For more information

Web: www.eginnovations.com


http://www.eginnovations.com/

1 cloud computing/virtualization 2.0 is all about manageability key considerations for a cloud...

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