top 7 vmware management challenges in...
TRANSCRIPT
Top 7 VMware Management
Challenges in 2012
Eric Siebert: vExpert, Author, Blogger
Twitter: @ericsiebert
Blog: http://vsphere-land.com
Administrative points on this webinar
Questions ● Can use the virtual Q&A panel.
● This webinar is recorded and available for replay after a few days.
● At the end of the webinar, we can raise virtual hand for dialog
questions.
● Stick around until the end of the webinar!
− Winners will receive a choice of books!
Overview of Veeam
About Veeam
Veeam Software develops innovative products
for virtual infrastructure management
and data protection.
Reduce costs, mitigate risk, and fully realize the promise
of virtualization with Veeam.
Agenda
Topic overview ● Identify 7 common management challenges with VMware
environments.
● Provide detail on what the management challenges are and why they
occur.
● Provide tips on dealing with management challenges.
● Show you how Veeam can help you overcome your management
challenges.
Questions and answers
Drawing and wrap-up
Overview
Virtualization provides many benefits that are well
publicized.
But it also introduces many challenges as well that
aren’t as well known.
Virtualization effects everything in the data center.
When you virtualize your servers you have to virtualize
your management as well.
A virtual environment is like a city, manage it properly
and it will prosper and flourish.
If you don’t manage your virtual environment properly it
will overwhelm you and become a slum.
The 7 VMware Management Challenge Areas
VM Sprawl
Storage Management
Business View
Change Management
Monitoring & Reporting
Capacity Planning
Big Picture View
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
If you’re involved with virtualization you have probably
heard the term VM sprawl at some point.
VM sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of virtual
machines, it’s a very real problem that can occur in any
virtual environment.
If not dealt with it can end up costing you wasted
money, time & resources.
VM sprawl is not always obvious
and doesn’t occur over night.
Not a technical problem, can’t fix
with settings or patches.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
Star Trek fans can relate to this from the popular
“Trouble with Tribbles” episode where the tribbles
reproduce so quickly that they threaten to overwhelm
the host ships food supplies.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
VM sprawl is similar as VM’s are often created without
any regard for the resources that they consume and the
possibility of overwhelming a host server’s resources.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
When you virtualize mindsets change because you no
longer have to buy new hardware to create servers.
Creating VMs is way too easy!
Requests for new VMs typically meet little resistance.
Un-checked growth of virtual machines is not the only
cause of VM sprawl.
Over-allocation of resources to VMs
defeats the purpose of virtualization.
VMs need to be right-sized to
avoid wasting resources.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
VMs are not free!
Many consider VMs as “free” servers since they do not have a physical presence and creating them is easy.
In non-virtualized environment if a new server is needed you typically have to go through a process: ● Requirements, PO, Approval, Order, Wait, Assemble, Connect
The whole process from start to finish can take weeks and cost many thousands of dollars.
VMs do have a resource cost, while not as obvious as writing a check it is still very real.
Virtual environments are expensive and have a limited set of resources.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
Use the same justifications and processes that you
would use when new physical servers are requested.
VM sprawl has no clearly defined symptoms.
If you look at the size of your virtual environment at two
different points in time it becomes much more apparent.
To eliminate VM sprawl look for
over-sized, stale or zombie VMs.
Zombie VMs are powered-on
VMs that have been forgotten
about and no one uses anymore.
Challenge 1 – VM Sprawl
vCenter Server lacks reporting capabilities.
Veeam provides reporting, monitoring and chargeback
that can help you with much of this!
Ways to prevent VM Sprawl ● Limit access for creating VMs, don’t be afraid to say no!
● Be stingy when assigning resources to a new VM.
● Actively monitor VM resource usage, workloads can change over time.
● Document the who, what, why and when of a new VM.
● Implement a chargeback application so you can help the business
understand the cost of virtual machines.
● Use resource pools to segregate a host’s resources.
● Implement a formal process for requesting new VMs that requires
justification & approvals.
Challenge 2 – Storage Management
Storage is the most critical and valuable resource in
virtualization, it’s also the most costly.
Storage can make or break your virtual environment.
Ensuring good performance and sufficient capacity is
very important.
Managing storage resources is a constant challenge.
Snapshots and thin disks represent a double threat.
Over-committed datastores and snapshots must be
constantly monitored.
Running low on disk space on
datastores can be a very bad thing.
Challenge 2 – Storage Management
Storage is the slowest VM resource.
Storage I/O bottlenecks can choke the life out of your
VMs.
Storage is a complicated resource, many things can
impact performance. ● Disk alignment
● Multi-pathing
● Improper settings
● Improper architecture & design
● Excessive I/O
● Too many snapshots
Challenge 2 – Storage Management
Having a good storage reporting and monitoring solution
can make storage management much easier.
Getting information out of vCenter Server can be
difficult.
Veeam Monitor provides full storage monitoring
capabilities, including disk space, disk issues and
datastore monitoring.
Veeam Reporter can help you keep an eye on over-
provisioned datastores and provide trend analysis as
well as optimize VM placement.
Challenge 3 – Business View
Virtualization causes our hosts to become melting pots
of virtual machines.
VM density on a host has rapidly increased with
advances in CPU, memory, disk & network resources.
Even smaller hosts can hold dozens of VMs.
VMs with different functions, departments and business
units often get lumped together.
Not efficient or cost-effective to
physically segregate VMs on hosts.
Organization is needed to more
effectively manage VMs.
Challenge 3 – Business View
Organizing VMs is very useful for chargeback, reporting,
monitoring and to control VM sprawl.
Allows you to manage your virtual infrastructure based
on business needs and priorities.
Commons ways to categorize servers: ● Server role (i.e. database, email, web, etc.)
● Service level agreements (SLA )
● Operating system (Linux Distros, Windows)
● Department (sales, IT, marketing)
● Company or Business Unit
● Geographical location
Challenge 3 – Business View
VM folders can be used to organize VMs, maintaining them can be a pain in the rear.
VM folders are one dimensional.
Can also use custom attributes or Notes field to add info to VMs, also a pain to maintain.
Veeam Business View is free and provides an automated, flexible and dynamic way to group your virtualization objects within different categories.
Business View allows single/mass manual attribute editing, or automatically based on pre-defined rules.
Challenge 4 – Change Management
Managing changes that occur in the data center is a
necessary and critical task.
With virtualization change management becomes even
more critical.
VMs all share common
infrastructure and resources.
Seemingly innocent and minor
changes can have big impacts
in a virtual environment.
Changes can have ripple
effects across many hosts.
Challenge 4 – Change Management
Change management is especially critical for
troubleshooting.
The first question asked when problems seemingly
occur out of nowhere is: what changed?
Virtual environments are complicated,
there are many moving parts, hunting for
the cause of a problem can be very
time-consuming.
Problems usually have big impacts,
time isn’t a luxury you can afford in
virtual environments.
Challenge 4 – Change Management
Too many cooks in the kitchen can make figuring out
who changed what even more of a challenge.
Veeam Reporter captures the "who, what, where, when
and how" of every change.
Reporter can improve change workflows and investigate
problematic changes.
Reporter provides instant visibility
of changes that have occurred.
Allows you to easily isolate the root
cause of performance slowdowns
and availability issues.
Challenge 5 - Monitoring & Reporting
Virtual environments are like small
children, they require constant
monitoring and attention.
If you don’t monitor them you could
end up with a mess on your hands.
Performance monitoring with virtualization is much more
complicated than with traditional servers.
With virtualization there is more to monitor and
interpreting the results can be difficult.
Guest OS is no longer seeing the physical hardware of
the host so monitoring there is no longer effective.
Challenge 5 - Monitoring & Reporting
Virtual hardware is emulated by the hypervisor, the
guest OS doesn’t know the big picture.
Monitoring needs to be done at the virtualization layer,
there are many statistics unique to virtual environments.
vCenter Server can provide performance statistics but
doesn’t help you interpret them.
vCenter Server doesn’t extend to far into the guest OS
layer & does not provide a complete monitoring solution.
Veeam Monitor provides visibility all the way down to the
individual VM and the applications running inside it.
Challenge 5 - Monitoring & Reporting
Hundreds of performance stats available in vSphere,
there are a few key ones that you should know. ● CPU Ready - the amount of time in milliseconds that is spent waiting
for a CPU to become available.
● MEM Swapped - the amount of memory that is being swapped to/from
a VMs virtual disk swap file by the VMkernel.
● Disk GAVG - the average amount of time in milliseconds (latency) that
it takes to process a SCSI command issued by the guest OS. This is
the sum of latency in the VMkernel (KAVG) and latency in the storage
device (DAVG).
● DISK Commands - disk (SCSI) commands show the number of I/O
operations per second (IOPS) that are occurring.
● NET Usage - the combined transmit and receive rates measured in
KBps.
Challenge 5 - Monitoring & Reporting
You can’t afford to be reactive when it comes to
performance, you must be proactive to prevent big
problems from occurring.
Monitoring should be done constantly, otherwise how do
you know if you have a problem today or if it’s been
there all along.
Monitoring & reporting work together to provide
maximum visibility into your virtual environment.
Your virtual environment might be trying
to tell you something, if you’re not
listening you won’t hear it.
Challenge 6 - Capacity Planning
Traditional physical server environments are easy to
plan capacity for, just buy more servers when needed.
A virtual environment is like a city, lots of shared
infrastructure working together as a whole unit.
Planning capacity for virtual environments is much more
difficult.
In a virtual environment you
need to leverage historical
growth and trend statistics
as a whole to accurately plan
capacity.
Challenge 6 - Capacity Planning
Capacity Planning is more than just predicting future
resource needs.
It’s also about right-sizing and optimizing your current
resources.
Virtualization is all about efficiency, wasted resources
reduce your ROI and decrease efficiency.
If you have too much stuff in
your house, don’t buy a bigger
house, get rid of what
you don’t need anymore.
Challenge 6 - Capacity Planning
There is more to calculating capacity than totally up
resource usage numbers.
Spare capacity must also be factored in for host failures.
Veeam Reporter tracks your virtual environment’s
configuration and its past and current utilization.
Reporter can be your crystal ball to perform “what-if”
analyses to evaluate the impact of
adding or removing hosts and VMs.
Reporter provides recommendations,
justification and confidence you need
to go to management for funding.
Challenge 7 – Big Picture View
Managing silos in the data center can be challenging.
Having multiple tools to manage multiple systems
results in multiple headaches.
Layers in the computing stack are often managed
separately.
Having as few panes of glass as possible to look
through makes management easier.
Most data centers that use VMware for virtualization
also use Microsoft for OS and apps.
Many VMware admins are also Microsoft admins and
vice versa
Challenge 7 – Big Picture View
VMware management tools are designed to only
manage the virtualization layer.
Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is often
used to manage Microsoft servers.
More data centers are starting to
use a mix of vendor hypervisors.
Why not extend SCOM & SCVMM
to manage VMware as well.
Single management pane of glass
brings silos together & allows
easier management & monitoring.
Challenge 7 – Big Picture View
Veeam nworks Management Pack fully integrates with
Microsoft System Center providing a unified view of your
physical servers, virtual servers and applications.
nworks MP enables you to use
SCOM as your one console
to rule them all.
nworks MP collects data
agentlessly from the vSphere API.
Enables all System Center functionality for all VMware
components, including vCenter Server, clusters, hosts,
virtual machines, storage and hardware.
Challenge 7 – Big Picture View
Provides end-to-end visibility from the physical server, to
the hypervisor, to the virtual machines and the
applications and services running there.
nworks SPI also available for HP Operations Manager.
Summary
Virtual environments have unique challenges and issues
that must be dealt with using the proper tools.
If you are going to invest in virtualization, you should
invest in the proper management tools as well.
Veeam provides the tools needed to overcome the
challenges you face that will help ensure that your
virtual environment stays healthy and problem free.
Watch for the upcoming companion white paper that will
cover this topic in more detail.
Questions and Answers
Winners receive a choice of the following books
Thank you for attending!
Resources: ● Twitter @Veeam
● Facebook: VeeamSoftware
● Blog: http://www.veeam.com/blog