best practices for vblock monitoring with fusionstorm and nimsoft

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Manage Complexity with Confidence

Best Practices for Vblock Monitoringwith Fusion Storm and Nimsoft

Stephen SmithSr. Mgr., Product MarketingNimsoft

Vince ConroyCTOFusionStorm


Agenda

› The Challenge: Managing Vblock Converged Infrastructure› Fusion Storm – Best Practices and Tips for Managing

Vblock› Nimsoft for Monitoring Vblock› Q & A


The Challenge: Managing Vblock Converged Infrastructure

» Vblock: Private-cloud oriented solutions built on VMware, EMC, and Cisco technology

» Require a new kind of performance and availability solution

» What happens when something goes wrong in the “black box”?

» Need to be able to triage for root cause analysis, prevent service level problems and outages- Is it the Virtual environment?

Physical servers? Network or Fabric? Storage? Application?


Vince ConroyFusion Storm CTO

IT Consulting Technology Solutions Cloud/Managed Services5

Best Practices for Monitoring Vblock


Full Lifecycle IT Services

IT Consulting

Consulting Services to optimize, secure and enable

business growth

• Data Center• Security

• Business Software

Technology Solutions

Products and Professional Services to solve business and technology challenges

• Data Center Infrastructure• Networking

• Communications

Cloud / Managed Services

24/7 lifecycle services to right-source and support the reliable delivery of IT

• Cloud/Dedicated Hosting• Managed Services• PointCare Support


The Journey towards “IT as a Service”…

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3

Stages of Adoption and Maturity

15%

30%

70%

85%

“Tier-2” Production Systems“Tier-2” Production Systems

Business ContinuityBusiness Continuity

“Tier-1” Production Systems“Tier-1” Production Systems

Application Development, Testing and “Sandbox”Application Development, Testing and “Sandbox”

Desktop/ApplicationDesktop/Application

AutomationAutomation


Rich APIs

Security

ResourceManagement

NetworkCompute

Virtualization Storage

Solution Packages

VCE Vblock Infrastructure Packages

What is it:The combined best-of-breed technologies from Cisco and EMC, together with VMware – pre-integrated, tested, and validated to redefine the foundation of datacenter virtualized infrastructure.

How it works:Rather than buying and assembling individual components, now acquire validated Vblock Infrastructure Packages direct or from partners with a seamless services and support experience.

Benefits:• Accelerating the journey to pervasive virtualization and

private cloud computing while lowering risk and operating expenses • Customer assets (operating systems, applications, and

data) are on-boarded as solution packages


FusionStorm Services for Vblock

Business needs assessment

Sizing for application and workload requirements

Product fulfillment

Project management

Deployment services

Configuration services

Application integration

Knowledge transfer

Vblock hosting in our data centers

24/7 comprehensive managed services

Dedicated or shared-Vblock models


FusionStorm Cloud Consulting Services

Planconsulting services

• Business Assessment• Infrastructure Assessment• Cloud Strategy Development• Architecture & Design• Application Rationalization• Security Consulting• “Right-Sourcing”

Builddeployment services

• Proof of Concept• Procurement• Project Management• Hardware Integration• Application Integration• Data Migration• Knowledge Transfer

Operatemanaged services

• IT Xpress Cloud Hosting• MS Xpress Managed Services• Cloud Automation• 24x7 Support• Operational Consulting • Application Services• Business Process Monitoring

On-Premise Private Clouds

FusionStorm IT Xpress Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

< Cloud Delivery Models >


MS Xpress Managed Services for Vblock Monitoring

Remediation

Change Administration• Network• Storage• Virtual/Physical servers

vCloud Director Management

OS Management

Database Administration


Monitoring Challenges for MSPs/CSPs

Monitoring for a broad range of IT systems including networking, severs, storage systems, operating systems, hypervisors, database s, applications and more – for Vblock, all of these

Deliver consistent levels of availability and performance alerting/reporting

Deliver industry-leading SLAs with flexible SLA reporting

“Single pane of glass” for Service Desk technicians and engineers

Be able to handle dynamically changing environments, especially cloud

Provide transparency to customers via a comprehensive Web Portal

Integrated ITSM via Nimsoft Service Desk

We selected Nimsoft Monitor + Service Desk for the above reasons


How we use Nimsoft Monitor w/Vblock

• Nimsoft Application , Web and End-to-End probes, custom scripting (many apps supported)Applications

• Nimsoft database probes for Oracle, SQL Server, mySQL, othersDatabase

• Nimsoft OS probes for Windows, Linux, UnixOS

• Nimsoft VMware probeHypervisor

• Nimsoft probe for Cisco UCSServer HW

• Nimsoft probe for EMC VNX/VMAXStorage

• Nimsoft Cisco network probesNetwork


Nimsoft Monitor for Vblock


Monitoring/ITSM Best Practices

Default monitoring metrics come from a template for repeatability

We use a hypervisor-level “VMware” probe on all vSphere clusters, but…

…. we also use the OS-level probes for Linux and Windows on the guest VMs for additional flexibility and deeper monitoring at the VM level

What matters most is monitoring at the application level because that’s really all that customers see and care about

End-user SLAs should include application-level performance/response time whenever possible


We create custom scripts or probes for special needs/applications – we have yet to find any situation that we can’t monitor with Nimsoft

We use Nimsoft reporting to manage all infrastructure resources across multiple data centers globally (Nimsoft Unified Reporter)

We interface Nimsoft Monitoring with several other systems (including our new Nimsoft Service Desk ticketing system)

Monitoring/ITSM Best Practices


Nimsoft for Vblock

Stephen Smith

Sr. Mgr. Product Marketing


Nimsoft for Vblock

›Nimsoft completes the solution for Vblock with:

» Discovery» Proactive Monitoring» Service Level Monitoring» Event correlation and analysis

›Unified Monitoring» Scalable, secure, extensible» Multi-tenant» Secure Remote Monitoring» SaaS or On Premise» Intuitive Web 2.0 visualization» Usage metering

Simple pricing model! Single price for entire Vblock


With Nimsoft for Vblock

› Triage problems across the entire Vblock environment

› Operational Optimization

» Migration: Monitor inside & outside the Vblock

» Prevent outages from happening - Proactive Monitoring

» Quickly identify problems - Root cause analysis

» Eliminate the need to manually configure monitoring

» Prevent under-use and over-commitment of resources

» Single Portal for Unified Monitoring

› Customer Service» Secure support for multiple customers

» Highlight the cost of an internal solution vs. a public cloud


Nimsoft: Manage complexity with confidence

Cloud-ready.Agent-optional; easily deployed

on-premises or in the Cloud.

Unified. Ubiquitous.Monitor and Service Desk.

Now available anywhere.

Social.Access crowd-sourced

knowledge and best practices.

Multi-tenant.Scale easily to provide every

client a personalized view.

Easy. Extensible.Simple point & click configuration.

Command line & APIs available.

Usage-based.Self-service; meter and charge

for resources consumed.

IT Managementas a service


Nimsoft for Vblock: Learn More

» Nimsoft:» [email protected]» FusionStorm:

[email protected]

» Learn more: www.nimsoft.com - EMA white paper- Datasheet, slideshow, more

› Gartner Data Center & IT» November 28 - 29, 2011» London, UK

› Gartner Data Center» December 4 - 8, 2011,» Las Vegas, NV

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.nimsoft.com/

best practices for vblock monitoring with fusionstorm and nimsoft

Technology

fusionstorm services

comprehensive managed

services business assessment

cisco technology

business continuity15

support business growth

managingvblock nimsoft

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