IT Needs a Big Toolbox to Properly Deploy, Monitor, and Manage a Virtualized Environment Tame

COVER STORY Tools IT needs a big toolbox to properly deploy, monitor, and manage a virtualized environment Tame Everybody loves a circus, but not when it’s running wild in your data center. As IT shops embrace virtualization, they may find themselves in a three-ring management nightmare.The major virtualization vendors all offer a suite of tools to help control their own environments, but they lack robust cross-hypervisor support and completely ignore the physical devices you still need to manage. At the same time, IT is deploying multiple types of hypervisors. Yes, VMware is still king, cited as the primary platform by 65% of re- spondents in our latest InformationWeek Analytics survey on virtualization management.Microsoft grabbed 19%,followed by Citrix/Xen at 4%. The big surprise centers around current and planned hypervisors running per site.Sixty-four percent of organizations are either already running multiple engines or plan to do so as part of their expansion. Microsoft is most frequently cited as the second hypervisor in use by VMware shops, but we also see usage and plans for Citrix, Oracle, and Red Hat. In addition, several companies reminded us they have exten- sive virtualized environments running Linux on their mainframes. And 10 February 2010 networkcomputing.com Copyright 2010 United Business Media LLC. Important Note: This PDF is provided solely as a reader service. It is not intended for reproduction or public distribution. For article reprints, e-prints and permissions please contact: Wright’s Reprints, 1-877-652-5295 / [email protected] By Michael Healey you still have to keep your legacy network running.In fact,interoperability with existing systems is the No. 1 concern cited in our survey. The fact is,if you can’t tame these beasts,they’re going to eat you alive. Fortunately, the marketplace is full of offerings to help you crack the whip on backup,provisioning,security,availability,and management of your virtualized environment. This article ana- lyzes the tools that support multiple hypervisors and also have the functionality to manage physical devices.We highlight a variety of vendors whose products cover everything from monitoring and logging to desktop profiles to full systems management. All of them support at least three of these options:VMware, Citrix, Mi- crosoft, Red Hat/KVM, mainframes and physical servers. This means perennial favorites such as Veeam and Embotics won’t make the list,nor will any of the hypervisor vendors themselves. Third parties that extend their product depth February 2010 11 COVER STORY to support different platforms show a compelling technical depth and are the wave of the future. Legacy Management Solutions Symantec/Altiris, CA, IBM/Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard, BMC and Microsoft have offered a suite of products to manage your network since long be- fore virtualization took off.These products have always covered the full range of life cycle options, from initial server and storage provisioning to software updates and change management to system retirement.This group was surpris- ingly caught off guard by the virtualization wave, with most only fully extending their product lines last year. But they’re catching on quickly,expanding their support for VMware first, but also Microsoft. IBM leads for hypervisor agnosticism with its Systems Director suite. It not only supports x86-based VMware,Citrix,KVM,and Microsoft virtualization, but also IBM’s midrange Pow- Download Tools To Tame Virtualization erVM and mainframe z/VM with their VMControl prod- Get deeper analysis of uct. However, the big catch is that Systems Director virtualization management in only provides this functionality for IBM hardware in- our full report at: cluding x86 servers and IBM storage.It’s a tough trade- informationweek.com/analytics/ virtualmanagement off; you can get your choice of virtualization software, What you’ll find: but no choice for hardware. > Essential details on tools from Mainframe veterans CA and BMC have begun expand- 26 management vendors ing their cross-platform management tools,but haven’t > Capabilities and pricing on gotten to this same level of integration yet.BMC’s offer- both standalone products and suites ing is part of its Business Service Management Suite.Its > Coverage of key management Atrium CMDB supports discovery of multiple devices, areas, including optimization including support for VMware, Solaris, Hyper-V, and and security Z/VM, but the management tools themselves are > A road map to build your virtualization management toolkit VMware-centric with no support for XenServer. Main- frame management is currently a separate set of prod- 12 February 2010 networkcomputing.com COVER STORY ucts with no announced plans for virtualization integration. CA’s Spec- trum supports a full range of x86 devices but hasn’t integrated any of its legacy mainframe management products yet. The only traditional player that hasn’t added full support for VMware yet is Microsoft.Big shocker there.However,you can use Veeam’s Nworks management pack plug-in to get some basic functionality in System Center Operations Manager. VMware acknowledges it won’t add support for other hypervisors soon. “We won’t be able to create the full set of tools for every environment out there,”says Erik Wrobel,director of product management for VMware. Citrix splits the difference. It offers Essentials for Hyper-V, which can provision virtual machines and supports site-to-site disaster recovery for Hyper-V workloads.Tom Bailey,director of product management for Citrix, was mum about long-term support for VMware but says,“It’s inning two in a nine-inning game.” New End-To-End Options While the traditional vendors mulled their expansion plans for virtual- Traditional Vendors For Virtualization Management Vendor Physical Devices VMware Citrix Microsoft Hyper-V Others BMC Planned Midrange,mainframe CA Limited Midrange,mainframe Citrix Additional HP-centric HP products Microsoft Limited High availability,DR,and Symantec/Altiris Limited Limited storage mgt.w/ Veritas IBM midrange and Tivoli/IBM Limited mainframe integration VMware 14 February 2010 networkcomputing.com COVER STORY Upstart Virtualization Management Vendors Vendor Physical Devices VMware Citrix Microsoft Hyper-V Other Software Platforms Dynamic Ops Planned Fortisphere Platespin Orchestrate Vizioncore vControl Planned Sun ization management, a group of upstarts emerged to fill the void. Dy- namicOps,Vizioncore,Fortisphere and Platespin (which Novell acquired) all support multiple hypervisors,and DymanicOps is adding support for physical devices. All three take the same approach, defining workflows and policies first,then integrating into the different platforms as needed. Multivendor support was a critical buying criteria for Tenzing, a hosting provider that uses Platespin to manage its virtualization environment.“We saw Platespin more as a base to build our own system on top of,” noted Kelly Beardmore, CTO of Tenzing. As a hosting provider, Ten- zing doesn’t necessarily have a choice of what hypervisors to use. “We have our preference, but clients often dictate the environment,” he says. Tenzing used Platspin’s APIs to build out a new model for in- ventory and management from scratch.“There’s no plug-and-play single pane of glass,”says Beadmore.“We took a huge step back and went to a full SOA model, building out from the Platespin base.Every technology choice was made based on its interconnectivity.” The process took over a year to complete, but Beardmore feels it was worth it.It’s not using any of the original tools they had used prior to the initiative.They simply wouldn’t run in the new model.“It took us longer,” he says,“but going forward we can do new things now we never could have done.For example,I can pull out my monitoring systems and bring in a new component as needed. With 600 active clients running on every major hypervisor, we needed this flexibility for the long term.” Many of the aforementioned vendors have options within their suites 16 February 2010 networkcomputing.com for capacity planning or performance optimization.However,there are a few solutions that provide automation and optimization features worth investigating. VKernel, which started in 2007, is best known among VMware jocks for Capacity Analyzer,which helps you stay on top of your VMware server performance.The latest version,announced in December 2009,adds support for Hyper-V. Akorri’s BalancePoint supports VMware as well as physical servers and a host of storage devices. Support for Microsoft and Citrix is planned for this year.Toutvirtual’s VirtualIQ Pro works with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft,and Oracle today and combines graphical representations of the environment with correlation statistics based on what you’re looking at. Rethink Your Monitoring It’s a mistake to assume you can use your existing monitoring tools in a virtualized environment. Not only do you need to add core monitoring components for your hypervisors, but you must modify your monitoring parameters and thresholds for newly virtualized servers. Remember, a virtualized server doesn’t use CPU cycles in the traditional sense, nor can you use the same threshold for available memory and disk space. Legacy monitoring vendors such as Solarwinds and Ipswitch (maker of WhatsUp Gold) have kept up by updating their core monitoring systems and templates to support virtual servers and desktops. Newer players such as EGInnovations made early inroads with virtualization teams by offering VMware monitoring in 2007 and Citrix Xen support in 2008.It also monitors physical devices and databases. Most monitoring systems are based on a combination of status monitoring (up/down), SNMP alerts, or WMI data. We suggest you consider vendors that use Netflow or other data flow monitoring for greater de- tail. For example, Xangati uses Netflow data from network devices for a monitoring application that provides DVR-like recording capabilities of traffic flow to show data links between physical and virtual devices.

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