Thursday, October 30, 2014
Right-Sizing and Recertification (Part 2) - Business Approval and vRealize Operations Manager
Like mentioned in my previous post; virtualization helped datacenters provide rapid deployment, increased business continuity, and provided a tremendous amount of capital savings with the reduction of hardware. However, with the substantial benefits and ease of deployment came virtualization sprawl and resource proliferation. Right-sizing is the process of reclaiming under-utilized resource components, such as compute and memory resources. In conjunction, there should be a process in place to validate that a guest virtual machine is still required by the business, this is typically considered a recertification.
A regular right-sizing lifecycle on a quarterly or semi-annual basis can ensure maximum performance of your workloads and efficient use of your underlying hardware. But, in order to make certain you don’t impact the business, you are going to want a structured process to understand the application workload.
Business Approval Process
Resource Reclamation
Right-sizing of virtual machines, should be done on a routine basis; such as monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually. This is done to ensure application owners and business partners have an opportunity to control virtual machine costs and help make the underlying infrastructure to run efficiently.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Right-Sizing and Recertification (Part 1) - Resource Consumption and Effeciency
In the past 35 years, IT organizations have evolved from a narrowly focused data processing elements to a function that supports, and in many cases, drives, nearly every area of a company. But with this increase in technology dependency, the number of applications and therefore servers, supported by IT increased dramatically, placing strains on datacenter floor space, power, and operational support. Over the past 15 years, virtualization has helped businesses make the most out of their technology investments, became a disruptive technology in datacenter consolidation, and relieved pressure on IT operations.
However, without IT governance in place to measure the efficiency of the hosting resources, IT organizations are now faced with virtual machine sprawl and resource waste. At one of my accounts, they have seen an 81% growth rate in virtual servers over the past five years. Adding nearly 2,000 virtual machines in the past two years. That places a tremendous amount of stress on IT operations staff and the infrastructure resources.
It is very important to properly size your virtual machines from a vCPU and memory perspective to get the most out of your virtualization infrastructure, while keeping application users happy with the performance. We also need to ensure there is a life-cycle management process for the virtual machine. This is done by having a mature right-sizing and recertification process in place, and using tools like vCenter Operations Manager to understand the guest workload.
However, without IT governance in place to measure the efficiency of the hosting resources, IT organizations are now faced with virtual machine sprawl and resource waste. At one of my accounts, they have seen an 81% growth rate in virtual servers over the past five years. Adding nearly 2,000 virtual machines in the past two years. That places a tremendous amount of stress on IT operations staff and the infrastructure resources.
It is very important to properly size your virtual machines from a vCPU and memory perspective to get the most out of your virtualization infrastructure, while keeping application users happy with the performance. We also need to ensure there is a life-cycle management process for the virtual machine. This is done by having a mature right-sizing and recertification process in place, and using tools like vCenter Operations Manager to understand the guest workload.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
VMware CloudVolumes
VMware CloudVolumes is a great addition to the EUC portfolio, it is a mechanism to provide application abstraction; which helps ease the burden of application life-cycle management, delivers applications quickly, and creates portability of an end user's entitled applications. The acquisition of CloudVolumes was announced just before VMworld US 2014.
Let's look at the traditional method for application integration into a Windows operating system. The applications, settings, user's profile, and in many cases user data are tightly coupled with the OS; and the overall user experience. Unfortunately, this practice makes it so that the applications can only be associated with a single system. With the CloudVolumes application model, it decouples the applications from the Windows operating system and places them into AppStacks. From a conceptual point of view, it isn't much different than the abstraction of the operating system from the underlying hardware, which we are familiar with in traditional hypervisor technology. It also uses an entirely different container for persisting user changes between sessions.
You can combine your core applications into a single AppStack, making it easy to deploy to users by using Active Directory object assignments. Applications are delivered through VMDK virtual disks. CloudVolumes can dynamically attach the virtual disks to a VDI or RDSH desktop, even when users are logged into their entitled virtual workstation. You can make these updates immediately, or on next login or reboot.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
VCP550D – What’s New with vSphere 5.5 Study Guide
Overall vSphere 5.5 Enhancements
·
Platform
- Virtual Machine Compatibility ESXi 5.5 (vHW 10)
- Expanded vGPU and GP-GPU Support
- Hot-Plug SSD PCIe Devices
- Support for Reliable Memory
- New Single Sign On
- OSX support for vSphere Web Client
- vSphere App HA
·
Storage
- Support 62TB VMDK
- 16GB E2E Support
- MSCS supportability enhancements
- Storage vMotion and SDRS compatibility
- VAAI UNMAP and VMFS Heap enhancements
·
Network
- Enhancements to LACP feature
- Enhanced SR-IOV
- Traffic Filtering
- QoS Tagging
- Host Level Packet Capture
- 40 Gig Support
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