Turbo Talk

Our CEO Shmuel Kliger will be a panelist at CloudConnect (March 15-18 in Santa Clara) where he’ll be participating in a discussion on Cloud Economics and new pricing models, moderated by Cloud Economics guru and AT&T VP Joe Weinman.

Here’s the description of the panel from the CloudConnect site:

Cloud ROI just entered a new phase with the introduction of spot pricing.  But wait; there’s more!  This panel of leaders will address cloud pricing and market system evolution and what it will mean for ROI.  Buyer’s councils, intercloud economics, new cloud resource allocation systems that use bidding and auctions to determine resources to invoke will all be part of this emerging cloudscape.

If you’re planning on attending, stop by and say hello.

Shmuel would love to chat with you, especially if you are a long suffering Jets or Mets fan!

In October 2009, Gartner estimated that only 16% of workloads worldwide are running in virtual machines, although tremendous growth is expected in the coming years.  Not surprisingly and roughly in line with Gartner’s estimates, most customers tend to be about 20% or 30% virtualized, with ambitious plans for growth in the coming year.

However, some organizations are outliers.  They have virtualized the majority of their IT environment and are seeing benefits above and beyond the typical server consolidation and disaster recovery use cases.

I like to call these folks the uber-virtualized, and in this post I’ll discuss some of the best practices we’ve learned from them!

1)  Pay attention to your storage environment, because there is a good chance it’s where the bottleneck lives!

The fear of storage bottlenecks keeps the uber-virtualized up at night.  When you’ve virtualized most of your IT environment, that is going to cause additional stress on your SAN because of all the virtual disks you’re storing there.  Rather than throwing storage capacity at the problem (at additional cost), much time and effort goes into poring over storage array and VirtualCenter data, trying to find optimization opportunities.

There are certainly some monitoring tools on the market which can aid in this process by gathering numerous bits of utilization and performance data from hosts and storage arrays.  However, these tools (just as VirtualCenter) leave the administrator to make the final decision about how to rebalance the environment and mitigate the risk of storage bottlenecks.  Fortunately, the uber-virtualized have been working with VMware technology for many years, and are often able to make the right decision based on their experience.

VMware has also recognized that storage challenges can really hurt virtualized IT deployments, and have responded by developing new technology like IO DRS.  This is a good first step, although the VMware administrator will need to have the experience to recognize the proper thresholds to configure to trigger a migration.  With 10 or even 100 VMs, this is fairly simple to do.  However, with hundreds or thousands of VMs in an environment that’s tightly managed (50%+ utilization), deeper analysis needs to be done looking at all resources together (CPU, memory, and I/O) before making workload balancing decisions.  Otherwise you’re risking performance problems and downtime.

2) Are you (CPU) Ready?

CPU Ready is one of the key parameters that the most experienced VMware administrators examine when they see a performance problem.  In fact, it is often the first thing they’ll check when debugging.  Learn to love this statistic and what it means, because it can help you identify virtual machines that may be oversized and that cause your environment to perform poorly.

(By the way, here is a nice Powershell script that will grab CPU Ready stats for all of your VMs!)

3) Automate lightly, young Padawan.

One thing that surprised me in talking to the uber-virtualized is that some are skeptical about the use of automation like DRS in their environments.   I thought everyone would be running DRS in fully automated mode, and have their feet up on the couch at home while drinking a beer since their environment was managing itself   But there were some organizations that felt that DRS didn’t give them everything they needed (particularly in the IO department).  It will be interesting to see how IO DRS, once released, will address some of these concerns.

Are you one of the uber-virtualized?  Care to share any of your secrets, tips, or tricks?  Please feel free to leave them in the comments, your fellow VMware administrators and architects will appreciate it!

This post is the first in a series of posts about identifying and solving VMware related performance problems.  In this post, we’ll briefly describe a couple of common VMware CPU performance problems and their solutions.  These are problems and solutions we’ve heard repeatedly from customers and end users.

Please let us know if you have your own problems, solutions, and best practices to add.

After spending most of the last 6 years working in the virtualization space as a vendor (now VMTurbo and previously VMware), it’s funny to see how much things change as well as how much they stay the same.

One thing that has definitely not changed is that it is still very hard to move from what I like to call the ‘1st wave’ of virtualization (test & dev systems or low criticality production systems) to the ‘next wave’ (e.g. business critical production systems, heavily utilized databases).

On that note, I wanted to share a few practical tips that I’ve picked up along the way that have helped customers and partners keep the virtualization momentum going – and can help keep your virtualization momentum going in 2010!

1.  Use a disaster recovery or business continuity project to spur additional virtualization and consolidation.

Most companies have challenges around meeting disaster recovery and business continuity goals.  DR in the physical server world is tedious, error-prone, and in my experience mostly ineffective.  If there is a DR initiative at your company, it is a good bet that some of the problems you are trying to solve could be addressed by virtualizing those systems which  don’t have DR capability today or that have been problematic to recover using traditional physical server techniques.  Another tactic that I really like and have seen a few times is using your test and dev environment for DR.  Most virtual server environments I see still have plenty of capacity with which to handle a burst in the event a DR scenario occurred, so having a hybrid test/dev/DR environment is a great way to leverage an investment you’ve already made.

2.  Use a hardware refresh as an opportunity to virtualize.

Most IT shops refresh their server hardware every few years.  Why not use the refresh as an opportunity to remove hardware from your datacenter while adding flexibility to your operation?  Some of these systems may represent some of the more challenging applications to virtualize, and you may receive some resistance from application owners who are new to virtualization, but the CAPEX (and potentially OPEX) savings will be hard to ignore.

3.  Educate your peers.

Many companies do ‘lunch and learns’ or other informal gatherings where the virtualization team leads will discuss how server virtualization works.  These gatherings are a great way to get your network, storage, and applications guys up to speed with your specific initiatives and virtualization technology, and get them talking and asking questions.  This education and relationship building will pay dividends when you start to move more critical applications into virtual machines and need to work closely with other groups within IT on capacity planning and troubleshooting.  Just ask the network guys, they’ve been getting blamed for years for problems that aren’t theirs!  Fortunately for them (and sadly for the virtualization administrator), the new whipping boy is the virtualization environment, and educating your peers can help mitigate this challenge.

4.   Connect with others in your city or industry who have successfully made it to the ‘next wave’ and gather best practices.

Certainly the web and social networking give us a great way to connect with virtualization experts, but there is still no substitute for face-to-face discussions or phone calls where you can ask questions directly to someone who has done it before.  If you know of another company in your industry or city who have already made it to the next wave of virtualization, and have learned the lessons (good and bad) along the way, reach out to them and see if they’d be open to a discussion.  I’d also recommend including when possible any key peers or managers in these calls and meetings.  This way, they have the opportunity to ask questions as well as internalize the information.

5. Measure and then publicize your success.

Don’t be afraid to let people in your organization know that you’ve saved money, increased responsiveness of IT to the business, and built a strategic, virtualized platform!  Keep an eye on your ‘before’ and ‘after’ metrics, and share them with management as well as folks on the business side.  Your results help build the confidence within your organization that you have a good handle on building and operating a virtualized environment, and are fully capable of onboarding additional applications and business units.

What did I miss?  Are there other techniques that have worked for you?  Please share them in the comments.

Granted, we  have another day or so until 2010, but I thought it was still a good time to list the  most popular VMTurbo blog posts in 2009.

Here we go…

1. Bridging the Virtualization Management Gaps by our CEO Shmuel Kliger
2. Where is the virtual I/O bottleneck?
3. Can theory shed light on workload consolidation?

Thanks to everyone who has supported us in 2009 and our best wishes to you and your families in 2010!

It’s that time of year again!  Our friends at Aprigo surveyed various IT management experts (including our CEO, Shmuel Kliger) to come up with a set of 2010 IT Management Predictions.  Take a look (below) and feel free to share a prediction of your own.  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Over the last few days, there have been a couple of interesting developments and posts from the cloud community that have me thinking about the economic ramifications of cloud computing.

Amazon just announced spot pricing for EC2 instances:  Amazon users can now name their price for an EC2 instance and if capacity is available at that price, the instance will be purchased.  Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) discusses this in more detail on his blog.

Hedging Your Options for the Cloud:  In this GigaOM post, Joe Weinman of AT&T discusses a variety of economic and business models for cloud computing.

Taking pricing models used in other industries (e.g. airlines, hotels, manufacturing, internet advertising) and applying them to the management of clouds makes sense – especially as compute power and application capacity becomes commoditized.  However, there is still much work to be done to achieve the same level of pricing and service granularity in the application world.

For instance, a unit of cloud CPU power or cloud storage is somewhat fungible, and it is fairly clear what you’re purchasing for your money.  On the other hand, trying to appropriately value, sell, or trade a unit of specific application capacity running within an enterprise is not.

For these new pricing models to have the most impact and business value to end users of IT, they’ll need to be viable in the cloud as well within the four walls of the enterprise.

Related articles by Zemanta

• New From Amazon: Spot Pricing on Cloud Computing (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Amazon Slashes the Price of Reserved Instances (techcrunchit.com)

A good presentation on the future of the datacenter by Richard Scannell, founder of the IT services firm Glasshouse.  Food for thought!

I recently read a blog post by venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, where he coined the term “blog stars.”

Inspired by that post, I wanted to share a few “blog stars” from the virtualization space.  These stars are folks whose blogs I read and who provide detailed and practical tips and tricks for virtualization administrators and architects.

• Carlo Costanzo – I worked with Carlo while I was at VMware and he was (and still is) working with IPM, a VMware and Citrix consulting services company.  Carlo is extremely technical and very sharp with the ecosystem of virtual desktop technologies, and he shares many of his insights via his VMwareInfo blog and on Twitter.

• Luc Dekens – Luc is a Powershell and VMware scripting guru based in Europe.  If you are trying to automate your virtual infrastructure, you owe it to yourself to visit his blog and pick up some of his many scripting tips.

• Cody Bunch – Cody writes the ProfessionalVMware blog, and covers a broad range of practical VMware system administration topics.  Recently, he’s been posting quite a bit about storage configuration and best practices.  You can also find him on Twitter.

• Scott Lowe – Scott’s blog is a wealth of information for virtualization administrators and architects, as well as for those interested in the virtualization industry and market sector.  Recently he’s been busy configuring some new Cisco Nexus gear and obtaining his VCDX certification.  How does he find time to blog?

• Steve Kaplan – Steve (or the ROIdude, as he calls himself on Twitter) blogs at ‘By The Bell‘ from the perspective of an experienced VMware reseller and partner.  He’s also co-written a book about Deploying the VMware Infrastructure.  If you want to dive into the business case for a virtualization solution, Steve is your man.

• Steve Chambers – This Steve is ex-VMware, and now on the Cisco UCS professional services team.  Besides having a great sense of humor (and sharing it with us on Twitter), he is passionate about optimizing and improving how his clients leverage virtualization in their IT organizations.  Check out his blog if you’re serious about creating a world class virtualized IT operation.

Who are your virtualization blog stars?  Please share your favorites in the comments section of this post.

Robert Grossman recently blogged about the need for the definition of a common deployment unit of cloud computing technology.   As he rightfully points out in his article, there are numerous layers of technology, all of which could lay claim to being the home of the unit of record.

Although the definition of the “right” deployment unit of measure is an important one, I’d also say that the unit of performance or efficacy (pertaining to virtualized IT and cloud computing environments) is also important.

Here are some examples of virtualization efficacy metrics that keep coming up in our discussions with virtualization/cloud admins and architects:

- OPEX reduction
- CAPEX avoidance
- Consolidation ratios
- # of servers migrated from physical to virtual
- datacenter rack/floor space reclaimed

These metrics resonate with CIOs, IT managers focused on server virtualization, and server administrators, and in many cases their job performance is measured relative to these metrics.  What we’re finding is that because these metrics do not translate well to other silos of the IT stack, virtualization projects (particularly ones that occur after the initial consolidation project) can get delayed or stopped because its hard for the other siloes to see “WIFM“, with metrics that matter to them.

What are the metrics that matter to you?  And what metrics do you use to sell the benefits of virtualization and cloud to the other silos of your IT organization?  We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.