August 21, Five Myths of Virtualization Management Rick Ruskin, VP Sales eG Innovations, Inc. IT Expo Booth 749

Slide 2 August 21, 2015 Myth: Virtualization makes monitoring easier because there are fewer servers to monitor. Truth: Virtualization makes monitoring more complex.  Same number of operating systems and applications to manage as in a physical world.  New virtualization components and functions need to be managed: Hypervisor, Service Console, Hardware, Datastores, LUNs, vSwitches, vNetworks, Resource pools, Clusters, DRS, vMotion, Thin provisioning, Resource reservation, … Myth 1

Slide 3 August 21, 2015 Myth: Virtualization offers ways to reserve resources. I can just reserve resources for my VMs and they will not interfere with each other. Truth: Resource reservation is not always possible nor efficient.  Not every resource can be reserved statically. CPU and memory can. Disk and Network can’t.  Static reservation of resources precludes resource sharing. Results in operational inefficiencies. Disk reads Media Streaming Database Queries Myth 2

Myth 3 Slide 4 August 21, 2015 Myth: Virtualization technology allows VMs to be provisioned rapidly on-demand. The virtualization team’s job is managing VMs and they can operate independent of the enterprise IT ops team. Truth: Virtualization monitoring has to be integrated into the business service management framework.  Virtualization is a critical component of an IT infrastructure.  A problem in the virtual infrastructure can impact applications running on it and hence, affect the business services.

Myth 4 Slide 5 August 21, 2015 Myth: Virtualization platforms offer a lot of metrics. These metrics reveal all I need to know to monitor my VM infrastructure. Truth: An “inside view” of a VM is necessary to understand what is happening inside a VM.  Virtualization platform metrics indicate the % of physical resources of each VM takes.  They do not reveal why a VM is taking excessive resources.

Slide 6 August 21, 2015 Myth: Virtual desktops are just VMs. So the same tools used for monitoring virtual servers can be used for monitoring virtual desktops. Truth: VDI monitoring is not the same as VM monitoring.  The workload of a virtual desktop depends on the user who is logged in to that desktop. Therefore VDI monitoring should be based on USER ACTIVITY - not VM activity.  The virtualization platform is only one of the tiers in a VDI. Therefore monitoring of every layer of every tier, including connection brokers, terminal servers, profile servers, license servers, etc., is required.  Processing overhead can make running a full-blown monitoring agent on each virtual desktop impractical. Therefore an “agentless” method to get the “inside” view of each desktop is needed. Myth 5

The Truths of Virtualization Management  Virtualization makes monitoring more complex.  VMs can and will interfere with each other if the infrastructure is not carefully planned and monitored. 3.Virtualization must be monitored in the context of the business services it supports in order to be effective. 4.Management tools included with virtualization platforms fail to look inside the VMs to understand why resources are being used. 5.VDI monitoring is more complex than VM monitoring and has different requirements as compared to VM monitoring.