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In the world of virtualization management, less is more!

In the last two decades IT management is in a race to nowhere. A race to discover more, collect more and present more. More reports, more graphs, more views. If there is an IT asset out there, there is a tool to discover it. If there is a metric that can be collected, there is a tool to monitor and graph it. If there is a knob to turn, there is a tool to control it. How many management tools do you have in your environment? Which one do you use when? How many different reports/views are you looking at each day? How much time do you spend investigating these reports? Are you in control? Do you sleep better?

IT environments are complex. Managing these environments can be challenging. Many different moving parts with very complex interactions make it very difficult to effectively track, monitor and control the environments. For years, trying to address the broad range of pain points, we kept throwing more and more management tools into the environment. Every pain point we answered with a different tool. Introducing a new technology or product to the environment led to the deployment of yet another management tool. Very quickly we ended up utilizing hundreds of different management tools/products. Instead of addressing the management challenges, we increased the TCO and created an operational and administrative nightmare. In fact, many enterprises have embarked on multimillion dollar projects to reduce the the number of management tools in use from several hundred to an end state of (hopefully) a few hundred.

The IT landscape is transforming. Virtualization, SaaS and cloud lead to increasingly more dynamic, complex, heterogeneous and large IT environments. In the same time, the constraints within which IT needs to operate are becoming more and more stringent. On one end, business constraints and regulation require strong alignment of IT with the business to meet aggressive business and service goals while keeping OPEX and CAPEX under control. On the other end, environmental constraints of energy, space, etc. limit the flexibility and the free ride we used to have.

We are no longer looking at static siloed IT environments where the boundaries between the technology layers and products were well defined and understood. Virtualization brings these walls down. No longer are we managing one application on one known dedicated physical machine and attached storage, but rather a complex dynamic boundary-less compute capacity available for our applications on-demand. Can we scale to these types of environments with the existing brittle intelligence tools and approaches?

In spite of the savings and increased business agility available through the use of virtualization, virtualization management is on the same “old” trajectory as the management of the more established layers of the infrastructure stack.  There are more and more point tools:

• Chasing and collecting more and more data
• Chasing too much knowledge about the intricacies and relationships between the components (In dynamic virtualized  environments these relationships are continuously changing. Chasing an accurate up-to-date picture of the environment at all time is hard and close to impossible.)
• Chasing overly detailed information (Lack of abstraction leads to lack of scalable management solutions)

Virtualization management is relatively a young space, but we already see too many different non-integrated tools. In a recent article, “Managing Performance and Capacity in Virtualized Server and Desktop Environments” (registration required), covering only performance monitoring tools, analyst Bernd Herzog mentions twenty-four different monitoring tools in six different categories: resource and availability management, infrastructure performance management, application performance management, transaction performance management, end user experience management and virtual desktop management. The implication is that to gain visibility and try to assure the application service, one needs to buy six separate point tools. But do you really achieve application service assurance by buying those tools? When a problem occurred somewhere in the environment, which tool would you look at to find out where the problem is?

The trajectory leads to management that is too complex, not scalable, and provides limited value towards the end goal of a self-managed environment.  Instead of reducing the management complexity and the operational costs the current trends only contribute to the increasing management nightmare.

We must stop the trend. “Less is More!” We must look for management solutions that utilize novel approaches to get us on the road to self-managed orchestrated environments. Reversing the current trends of chasing too much information and trying to discover, represent and rely on continuously changing topological relationships. This is the only way we will be able to scale and meet the challenges of the new dynamically changing environments.

Category: Management

Posted on October 19, 2009 | Permalink | View Comments