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 extensive virtualized environments running Linux on their mainframes. And

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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

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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-

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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

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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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“We found the traditional status and utilization monitors weren’t enough for our virtual environment,”says Paul Holt,Director of Network Services at Memorial Health Systems,and a Xangati customer.“It can be particularly hectic when severe performance problems at random times throughout the day involve back and forth finger pointing to the re- sources I manage.”Both Solarwinds and Ipswitch offer data-flow monitoring options. Another option for organizations that need to monitor a virtual environment is Factfinder from Bluestripe.The company focuses on application monitoring and benchmarking for physical,virtual,and cloud appli- cations.

Auditing, Security And Logs No virtualization ringmaster would be worthy of his tophat with- out at least one security option for a virtualized data center. There are many point products that focus on the different auditing, security and log components of your virtualized environment.Tripwire stands out for its depth in physical auditing and security tools as well as its support for Microsoft and VMware hosts.The company’s core product provides a robust change auditing and configuration assessment platform. Most VMware engineers know Tripwire because of its popular opscheck and configcheck tools. Configcheck quickly compares your VMware (ESX 3.0 and 3.5) configuration to VMware’s security guidelines. Opscheck reviews your infrastructure and alerts you if your VMotion configuration is functional. Reflex Systems is a startup that offers virtualization management and security. It doesn’t support physical servers but added support for Cisco’s Nexus switches last year. There’s one thing virtualization will definitely give you; more data to log and review. One tool you can add regardless of your platform selec- tion is Splunk. Founded in 2004, the company focuses on indexing and

18 February 2010 networkcomputing.com Multiple VM Platforms The Norm To what extent do you plan to run these server virtualization hosting platforms in production through December 2011? Extensive use Limited use No use searching all the different IT logs, VMware (Server,ESX,vSphere) 64% alerts,snmp traps,config files,mes- 19% sage queues, and reams of other 17% junk IT has to sort through. Microsoft (Hyper-V on Windows 2008) 16% A host of other log and event 40% management players are also on 44% the market, including LogLogic, Other Microsoft (Virtual Server 200x) 6% LogRhythm and ArcSight, to name 27% a few. If you’re building a short list 67% to bring a vendor in house, make Citrix XenSever 6% sure that support for logs gener- 25% ated by virtual sources—and virtu- 69% alization management tools—is on Oracle 5% your list of requirements. 16% 79% Desktop Profile Management Mainframe-based x86 virtualization 3% Several vendors provide key tools 10% to jumpstart a virtual desktop proj- 87% Red Hat ect. In particular, Liquidware Labs, 3% AppSense, and RESSoftware offer 20% 77% automated desktop configuration Novell SUSE or Xen and user profile portability.This type 2% of functionality is a godsend for user 11% 87% management. The three all work Parallels or Virtuozzo around the same basic concept,sep- 1% arating the user workspace and pro- 10% 89% file from the desktop OS and deliver- Virtual Iron ing it based on a standard set of 1% policies and guidelines. 5% 94% In addition,all three offer multihy- Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2009 Virtualization Management Survey pervisor support. Liquidware is fo- of 391 business technology professionals cused on VDI transitions,while App-

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Sense includes support for traditional Windows Terminal Server sessions.

Lab/Demo Setup The lab is one spot where you can expect hypervisor creep.The core IT team may insist on VMware for the production systems,but develop- ment, testing, or training environments and tight budgets may push you to Citrix or others. If so,we suggest VMLogix LabManager.The company was founded in 2004 and makes the only lab management software that supports on- demand creation of software testing, training, demo, or other types of multiuser labs on VMware,Citrix,or Microsoft platforms. Adding multihypervisor and physical device support to your virtualization toolbox is smart because it avoids locking your company to a single hypervisor platform, ties you to a more technically adept partner, and hedges your virtualization bets.For the industry,it keeps competitive pres- sure on the virtualization vendors and encourages a level of interoperability. There’s little debate about virtualization’s acceptance as a core el- ement of a server architecture. Long-term, virtualization will make its way into other environments as well. A set of tools that covers multiple vendors ensures you’ll be prepared to meet any challenge that arisesin a heterogeneous world. In fact, the Top-Ranked Management Functions right set of tools can be Rank the difference between a Interoperability with existing enterprise management tools 1 Application performance monitoring 2 tame data center and a Virtual security management 3 three-ring circus that de- Automated physical-to-virtual server conversion tools 4 vours you. Life-cycle management tools for VMs 5 Storage management and SAN visibility 6 Regulatory,compliance,and audit capabilities 7 Michael Healey is president of Yeo- Cross-vendor capability/heterogeneous VM management 8 man Technology Group, a technol- Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2009 Virtualization Management Survey ogy consulting and analyst firm. of 391 business technology professionals Write to him [email protected].

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