InfoVista gives enterprise IT departments the tools they need to fully benefit from virtualization initiatives and manage the server environment, addressing the challenges in every stage of the lifecycle: readiness assessment, planning and design, implementation, and ongoing workload optimization and support.

While the promise of virtualization is clear, it is only as good as the performance management behind it. Virtualization requires IT administration to deal with near real-time changes in the infrastructure driven by application demands and the fluidity of the platform. Today's enterprises are accustomed to managing a more static "physical" infrastructure, and the dynamic nature of virtualization technology is perceived as a cause of uncertainty. To capitalize on the benefits and move from pilot to production, enterprises need end-to-end visibility and the ability to seamlessly manage the physical and virtual infrastructure.

"Virtualization is clearly an area where IT departments are putting time and resources," said Debra Curtis, research vice president at Gartner. "In the long term, what Gartner refers to as the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) will enable greater infrastructure sharing across business processes in the virtual enterprise, and thus add greater flexibility and lower the cost of IT service delivery. Before you can dynamically adjust virtualized IT resources based on business priorities and service-level agreements, you must have instrumentation, performance monitoring and end-to-end IT service management, which are all prerequisites for success with RTI."

Service-centric performance management enables users to cost-effectively meet application service level objectives in an environment where an increasing number of business-critical applications are competing for shared resources. Essential capabilities such as performance management, automation, capacity planning, predictive analysis and change management address that challenge and give enterprise IT users the confidence and information needed to manage the virtual infrastructure. Service-centric performance management addresses problem areas inherent at each stage of the virtualization lifecycle.

Readiness Assessment: The key objective of this stage is to assess if the server infrastructure is ripe for virtualization and if benefits can be fully realized. This involves analyzing the existing infrastructure, reviewing the overall health of IT assets, identifying which applications and servers are candidates for virtualization and developing the roadmap that outlines the transition from a physical to virtual infrastructure. A key consideration is server capacity utilization and performance, looking at both the current snapshot as well as the historical trend. In addition, application demands on the servers must be evaluated.

A service-centric performance management solution analyzes existing systems infrastructure using real-time and historical performance reporting; identifies candidate servers ready for virtualization; and uses predictive capabilities to assess the risks of moving to a virtual environment.

Planning and Design: This stage involves architecting a scalable solution and then creating a detailed implementation plan, the key objective being to align business demand to IT strategy. This involves choosing an optimal virtual machine configuration to transform a physical server to a virtual platform, sizing the hardware resource required to host selected virtual machines and clustering the hosts into a host farm. It is critical to ensure that infrastructure and service quality performance as perceived by end-users is not negatively affected by virtualization.

A service-centric performance management solution helps achieve design challenges such as physical to virtual transition, impact analysis, baselining and trending in order to align the virtualization strategy with business objectives.

Implementation: During the implementation stage, IT must employ monitoring capabilities to ensure both application and server performance are not negatively impacted as a result of virtualization. Any design deficiency, performance issue or hardware problem detected must be quickly resolved. A service-centric performance management solution implements automated discovery, dynamic report provisioning and offers before-and-after analysis.

Ongoing Workload Optimization and Support: Service-centric workload consolidation and optimization is an integral part of ongoing support to fully realize virtualization benefits and maximize ROI. The key objectives of this stage include cost-effective delivery of agreed service quality levels, and the ability to ensure high availability and accelerate problem resolution. A service-centric performance management solution provides real-time and historical performance data that can help IT administrators objectively make the right optimization decisions, keeping the workload in mind. It also enables pre-emptive troubleshooting and fast problem resolution.

"Virtualization is a complex and multi-tiered initiative that can yield great results if the necessary tools are in place to ensure service level objectives are met while costs are optimized," said Manuel Stopnicki, chief technology officer at InfoVista. "By taking these important steps to virtualize the server environment now, enterprises are paving the way for broader virtualization initiatives, better service quality management and application performance management, linking the entire infrastructure and achieving higher infrastructure ROI."

Posted by David Marshall on June 24, 2006 11:18 AM