Virtualization Adds A New Layer Of Complexity To APM

Lessons From The Field

John Coleman, manager of technology services at WellSpan Health, deployed a virtual infrastructure early in 2007. WellSpan is running Exchange, Web servers, application servers, file servers, and SQL databases -- all in a virtual environment in production. Although WellSpan is using VMware exclusively, Coleman elected to use CA's Advanced Systems Management (ASM) because it can manage any virtualization environment, and because ASM integrated into the company's physical infrastructure management systems, CA handles physical infrastructure management.

If the overall performance of the virtualized server begins to degrade, VMotion is used to move the guest host to a different physical server to balance the load. While this can be done automatically, WellSpan opts to send an alert to CA ASM and then decides whether to move the system.

WellSpan does not use physical-to-virtual conversion tools for migration, but instead moves systems to a virtual environment when it's time to refresh the hardware. This allows the production systems to run in parallel if desired and ensures a smooth migration. CA's ASM products are used to monitor the physical layer and the guest operating system. ASM utilizes VMware's VirtualCenter and connects via the API to pull data into the application. This limits the need to install addition agents and management overhead on the machines.

VIRTUAL APM TOOL TYPES

Packet capture analyzers:
Discover and map application flows and analyze service levels and overall latency

Enterprise managers:
Manage app performance in mixed virtual server environments

Physical-to-virtual planning tools:
Analyze existing apps and physical-to-virtual migration plans

Application performance monitors:
Keep tabs on virtual apps, even when they change hosts or get renamed

Migration tools:
Ease app migration between physical machines and across the network

One of the areas often overlooked is the importance of using SAN and shared storage in the overall application infrastructure. If there are issues with controllers on storage arrays, capacity, or performance, these problems can cripple the environment and aren't easily fixed. Like many organizations, WellSpan believes that a single-pane-of-glass management is critical from an operations perspective, and ASM is providing that single visibility into the physical and virtual infrastructure. Coleman believes that "virtualization requires the right staff, the right training, the right planning, and the right management. Without all of those aspects, virtualization will create a bigger mess than just staying with the physical environment," he says. We couldn't agree more.

Peco Karayanev, Web systems engineer at National Instruments, is using Opnet Technologies' Panorama agents to manage National Instruments' environment of several dozen virtual machines. Like many organizations, NI is working with virtualization in the development environment only, for its Java-based applications.

There is still hesitancy to move to production, says Karayanev. The drive to start reclaiming data center space was a big driver as well as the speed to provision new environments. One of the big challenges NI faces is correctly sizing the physical environment for the appropriate load as well as processes to deal with the virtual machines. Panorama is helping NI figure that out.

Michael Biddick is CTO of Windward IT Solutions, a firm that helps organizations improve operational efficiency. He is also a contributing editor for InformationWeek. Write to him at [email protected].