Virtualization Management Blog

IT Management: Are We Chasing Yesterday’s Problem? - Part 2

This is the 2nd Part in my blog series IT Management: Are We Chasing Yesterday’s Problem? You can read Part 1 here. I’d love to hear your comments along the way.

PART TWO: To troubleshoot or Not to troubleshoot?

In the "old world", the pre-virtualization world, we had no choice. We had to troubleshoot. We spent many cycles pinpointing the root cause of problems and fixing them to assure the application quality of service was maintained (or restored). Troubleshooting is a highly complex and often lengthy process that requires deep domain expertise, but we had no choice. Service couldn't have been restored and performance couldn't have been assured unless the root cause was identified and resolved. Pre-virtualization, we saw 80% of the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) was spent identifying the root cause and 20% was fixing it. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) was the problem to solve. By automating RCA and minimizing the time it took, we could help customers reduce MTTR by 80%. 

Virtualization is a “game-changer”…
It used to be relatively easy, right? This “old world” was static with fewer moving parts. A single application on a single OS on a single server with attached storage. With a few (sometimes more than a few) point tools we were able to get our hands around and manage our environments. Well, virtualization changes everything. No more static boundaries and well defined interactions between the IT silos.

Ask yourself:

• Do I know where my applications are?  Do I know where my virtual machines are?  
• Do I know what resources they are using?  Do I know how they are performing?
• Do they need more or less resources to deliver on their goals?   
• Are there bottlenecks in my environment? And, if so, where are they?

And more importantly:

• Do I really know what I need to do? In the next minute? Hour? Day? Week? Month?
• Do I need to start a new VM? Stop a VM? Move a VM? 
• Do I know where to start or move the VM? 
• Do I need to reconfigure any of its resources? Provide more? Provide less?
• What do I need to do to address the bottlenecks?

It all really drives at the biggest question: How do I prevent resource contention and performance problems from happening in the first place?

Are today’s management tools up to the task at hand?
The good news is that despite this increased complexity, virtualization also provides much more flexibility and fluidity across today’s IT environment. However, today’s management tools do not take full advantage of this to actually improve the way we manage and control it. Instead, they focus on collecting more data across these thousands of knob and levers (metrics), alerting when thresholds are breached, and leaving you with the heavy lifting of troubleshooting, root cause analysis and (most importantly) how to fix it!

So, “No” is the obvious answer to the question I posed at the beginning. Troubleshooting and root cause analysis was the problem of the past – it fundamentally doesn’t work in a virtualized environment. There are just too many permutations to determine causation after the fact – and often times the knee-jerk reaction to deal with a point threshold breech can magnify the problem across the rest of the environment. It’s also not necessary if you actually use virtualization to Control IT in first place. That’s the game changer. More on that in my next blog…

Operations Manager 3.0 – Enabling Application Assurance across Any Virtual Infrastructure

Today we are very excited to have announced the release  of the 3.0 version of our Operations Manager product line. The release is certainly a major undertaking by our development team – and delivers a host of important, new capabilities to our rapidly growing customer base.

This release delivers cloud-scale management for the largest service provider and enterprise virtual infrastructures, expanded heterogeneous hypervisor support, new application performance assurance capabilities, and enhanced capacity planning functionality. The product delivers this all from a single virtual appliance that installs in minutes and provides actionable, and automatable, recommendations to improve performance across the virtual environment immediately. Give it a look.

We will also be hosting a webinar next week on February 7th with Yuri Rabover, our VP of Product Strategy, that will run through a quick recap of the new functionality. Register here  to reserve your spot today.

Major new capabilities in VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.0 include:

1. Cloud-scale management through VMware vCloud Director integration.  vCloud Director enables the consolidation of virtual infrastructure across multiple clusters or virtual datacenters in a multi-tenant environment. VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.0 manages this entire environment through a single management plane that recognizes resource constraints within virtual datacenters, tunes and automates resource allocation to optimize utilization, and ensures application quality of service.
2. Single-instance, multi-hypervisor management by adding Citrix XenServer support and providing IT operators with the unique ability to manage across XenServer, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V from a single virtual appliance.
3. Application-aware service assurance that now discovers and profiles Windows applications across the virtual environment providing visibility to application performance and enabling IT operators to prioritize resource requirements for mission-critical applications – ensuring quality of service as demand fluctuates.
4. Enhanced, intelligent capacity planning which utilizes the product’s deep understanding of workload performance characteristics and the physical environment to conduct performance-based capacity analysis. This provides IT operators with planning scenarios that are driven by future requirements and new hardware upgrades - validating expected performance over time while taking into account workload policies and resource requirements.

While releases are always important for growing software vendors like VMTurbo, this one does not fundamentally change to core value proposition of our award-winning product . Our solution enables IT managers to simplify the administration of complex virtual environments and drive better return on investment across their virtualization deployments. It deploys as an easy to install virtual appliance and delivers actionable, and automatable, recommendations to improve performance across the virtual infrastructure within minutes.

Key product benefits for Operations Manager remain:

• Service assurance across the virtual infrastructure with prioritized performance for mission critical application workloads.
• Operational efficiency through simplified, automated management that reduces manual intervention and prevents problems.
• Improved resource utilization making best use of physical network, server, and storage infrastructures to satisfy workload requirements – today and as the environment expands.
• Unified virtualization management via single-instance, multi-hypervisor management including support for VMware vCloud Director and vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and (now) Citrix XenServer.

IT Management: Are We Chasing Yesterday’s Problem? - Part 1

PART ONE: Alert Suppression is NOT Root Cause Analysis

Performing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in IT is to accurately infer the specific problem that is causing a set of observable symptoms. It is similar to what is called a “medical differential diagnosis” done by a doctor, where the doctor will infer a patient's disease based on the observed symptoms and a battery of tests.  This is an exponential problem because the combination of symptoms that a given disease  may cause is exponential. To conquer this Root Cause Analysis challenge, you must have a proper representation of the causality relation between all possible problems in the environment and the symptoms each of them may cause, and an algorithm that, based on the representation, can infer the problem causing an observable set of symptoms. There are medical journals devoted to this specific exercise for every practice of medicine. And that’s just for a single problem (disease). In the context of IT – and especially of virtualized IT – the Root Cause Analysis challenge is even more complex because the causality relation is continuously changing due to dynamic changes in the environment (e.g, workload motion) and there are often multiple problems occurring at a given time. We are very familiar with the complexities of this challenge – in the mid-1990s at SMARTS (currently owned by EMC) the team here attacked (and solved) this challenge using the Codebook algorithm. We applied it to distributed network infrastructures and you can read all about our approach here .

Almost two decades later a flood of virtualization monitoring tools are popping up claiming to do Root Cause Analysis. This is quite a long stretch from reality. In essence, these products are more accurately categorized as event filtering and/or alarm suppression tools. These tools do a good job of collecting hundreds of different metrics and generating alerts when a metric crosses a threshold…

"Doctor, I have a fever.”

Some tools do more and are able to trend metrics to generate a predictive alert…

"Doctor, I am going to have a fever.”

The more sophisticated tools use a variety of pattern matching methods to be able to predict alerts more specifically…

"Doctor, every morning at 8 AM I will have a fever and you can ignore it."

The emerging sophisticated analytics tools do even more – they monitor and analyze dozens or even hundreds of metrics per virtual machine (VM). When several of the metrics are out of norm, these tools aggregate it into a single message about that VM. For example: instead of alerting that memory utilization is above threshold, CPU utilization is above threshold and IOPS is below a threshold – they alert that the VM has a problem. It is as though you went to the doctor with a fever, stomach pain, headaches and high blood pressure and the doctor tells you that you are sick (um, yeah…).

Alert suppression (alarm filtering, suppression and aggregation) has value, but it is NOT Root Cause Analysis. In effect, all it does is to reduce the amount of information you have to deal with and react to given issues in your virtual environment. It does not really get us any closer to HOW we should best operate our virtualized environments. We can do better! We have to do better! And the real question we need to answer is: to troubleshoot or not to troubleshoot?

I’ll address that in my next blog– stay tuned…

[Video] Capacity Planning Done Right

Capacity planning is a simple concept that is pretty much the same everywhere, right? Well, we don’t think so. We believe that an activity as important as capacity planning must provide an accurate projection of the expected resource demand levels for each workload (as in, it absolutely has to be ‘performance-based’). Additionally, that same planning activity should tell us exactly how (where) to allocate that workload (VMs to physical hosts) and those recommendations should take into account a wide array of parameters that are often overlooked by ‘capacity based’ algorithms.

These capacity-based solutions generally gloss over important scenarios in virtualized environments where performance degradation has occurred previously – for instance, bottlenecks due to CPU wait state or storage latency. Understanding the performance footprint, and it’s historical variations, is absolutely critical to get capacity planning right – and the underpinnings of an Intelligent Capacity Planner. If you are interested in learning more about how capacity planning can help your organization and what you should look for in a capacity planner, check out the short video below.

[Press Release] VMTurbo Wins SearchServerVirtualization.com's Product of the Year Awards for 2011

VMTurbo Cloud Operations Manager honored in Virtualization Management category for annual industry awards recognizing exceptional products

Waltham, MA - January 13, 2012 - VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced that its Cloud Operations Manager has won the Bronze Award in SearchServerVirtualization.com’s 2011 Products of the Year awards. The Cloud Operations Manager was honored in the Virtualization Management category for exhibiting innovation, performance, functionality, value, manageability and ease of integration.

Announced this week, 2011 award winners were selected by the editors of TechTarget’s Data Center and Virtualization Media Group. The award recognizes companies that stand apart from the pack and provide exceptional benefits for IT shops of all sizes.

“VMTurbo deserves recognition for Cloud Operations Manager’s innovation, ease of implementation and excellent value. Their product deploys as a virtual appliance and offers completely real-time data, which assists in capacity planning and dynamic workload orchestration. It also supports multiple hypervisors and multiple tenets,” according to SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Products of the Year judges.

The VMTurbo platform first launched in August 2010 and since that time more than 4,000 cloud service providers and enterprises worldwide– including British Telecom, Omnicare and L-3 Communications – have deployed the platform to gain greater control, prevent performance issues and optimize utilization across their virtual infrastructure.

"We are honored that our product was recognized by SearchServerVirtualization.com as one of 2011's most exceptional products," said Derek Slayton, vice president of marketing at VMTurbo. "This award and our tremendous customer traction in 2011 is testament to the innovativeness of our platform. We look forward to continuing to enable our customers to be more successful in their existing virtualized environments and confident in adopting cloud infrastructure as we head into 2012." 

For more information about the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Product of the Year Awards and to view the complete list of winners click here.

[Press Release] VMTurbo Experiences Record Growth in 2011 as More Enterprises Deploy Intelligent Workload Management

Company expands customer base, launches new global partner program and strengthens executive team to address expanding market for intelligent workload management in cloud and virtualized environments

Waltham, MA - January 11, 2012 - VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced significant growth driven by a highly successful end of year. Record fourth-quarter results in revenue, transactions, and new customers enabled VMTurbo to more than triple company revenue and customers in the second half of 2011. VMTurbo also announced a new Global Partner Program and strengthened its management team with incoming CFO, Mo Garad, and VP of marketing, Derek Slayton. 

The VMTurbo platform first launched in August 2010 and since that time more than 4,000 cloud service providers and enterprises worldwide– including British Telecom, Omnicare and L-3 Communications – have deployed the platform to gain greater control, prevent performance issues and optimize utilization across their virtual infrastructure. Driven by an experienced development team, the product matured rapidly in the second half of 2011 to meet the demanding needs of the market.

Key product milestones include:

• July 2011: The VMTurbo suite aligned around simplified offerings: a free Community Edition providing monitoring and reporting, an Enterprise Operations Manager for control and problem prevention, and a Cloud Operations Manager to meet the needs of multi-tenant cloud environments.
• August 2011: VMTurbo announced support for Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V, furthering its platform-agnostic approach to virtualization and allowing customers to manage VMware and Microsoft environments from a single control pane.
• October 2011: VMTurbo added application performance management capabilities providing visibility to application-level dependencies, transactions and resource consumption to better ensure application availability and quality of service (QoS).

New Global Partner Program

Introduced in early 2011, VMTurbo's Global Partner Program is rapidly expanding and has been improved to foster value-selling relationships with key system integrator, service provider and reseller partners. The program now provides deal registration, technical training and sales support, co-marketing funding and professional service engagement opportunities to participating value-added resellers. Recently added partners include MTI Technology and IPData Systems. To learn more about the program, visit VMTurbo Partner Program Overview.

“VMTurbo plans to approach the new year with the same sense of urgency that allowed us to accelerate market adoption and company growth in the second half of 2011,” said Lou Shipley, VMTurbo president and CEO. “The VMTurbo management platform uniquely delivers the abstraction, analysis, and automation capabilities required by cloud service providers and enterprise IT managers. In 2012, we will continue to enhance our cross-hypervisor solution enabling our customers to improve the ROI for their virtual infrastructure.”

[Press Release] VMTurbo Expands Management Team with New CFO and VP of Marketing

Innovator in intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments hires industry experts Mo Garad (CFO) and Derek Slayton (VP of Marketing) to further accelerate company growth

Waltham, MA - January 11, 2012 - VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for virtualized environments, today announced Mo Garad as chief financial officer (CFO) and Derek Slayton as vice president of marketing. These new additions to the management team come on the heels of a record Q3 and Q4 2011. To date, more than 4,000 cloud service providers and enterprises worldwide have deployed the VMTurbo platform.

"As customers adopt virtualization more broadly and for more critical workloads, they require better control and performance assurance across their infrastructure. This has driven record growth for VMTurbo and our intelligent workload management solutions,” said Lou Shipley, VMTurbo president and CEO. “Mo and Derek are both experts in their fields and make great additions to our company as we continue to address the management complexities that arise in virtualized environments.”

Garad brings over 15 years of financial management and business strategy experience to VMTurbo where as CFO he is responsible for finance and operations. Previously, Garad was CFO of dynaTrace, an application performance management software company acquired by Compuware for $265 million in July 2011, where he was the first U.S. employee and helped grow the business from less than a million dollars in revenue to a run rate of $32 million in four years. Garad also held executive roles at Bain Capital Ventures and VERITAS Software, which he joined after the acquisition of Precise Software. At Precise, Garad served as VP of strategic planning/M&A and VP of finance. He was part of the management team involved in the IPO of the company in June 2000 and its acquisition by VERITAS for over $650 million in June 2003.

"VMTurbo is solving a significant need in the virtualization management market and experiencing record growth," stated Garad. "My experience with companies encountering this same acceleration driven by rapid product adoption is an ideal fit as VMTurbo scales to meet demand. I look forward to working with this talented management team to grow our customer base and market success."

With over 15 years of experience in the software industry, Slayton leads corporate, product and channel marketing at VMTurbo. Prior to joining, he was the senior director of product marketing and management at Citrix Systems where he drove the product direction, positioning and go-to-market strategies for the XenServer virtualization platform and cloud management solutions. Slayton joined Citrix through the acquisition of Reflectent Software where he was the head of marketing. Previously, Slayton managed Enterasys Networks' worldwide channel marketing efforts as director of global channel and field marketing. While at Enterasys he helped the company shift from a direct sales organization to a channel model, and oversaw North American field operations and marketing, helping the company grow revenue to $600 million. Slayton joined Enterasys from OrderTrust where he was responsible for the ProductSource offering.

"VMTurbo is ideally positioned to become a leader in this rapidly expanding market," said Slayton. "Our growing base of customers are enthusiastic supporters of the product and our technology is truly innovative in providing a better way to manage cloud and virtualized environments. I have been involved with virtualization and management solutions for nearly a decade and am excited to join the team and help raise our profile in the industry.”

VMTurbo Blog: How do you ensure workload performance?

The Virtualization Practice recently authored an interesting article entitled The Winners and Losers in Virtualization Management 2011, selecting VMTurbo as a winner in Operations Management. As usual, Bernd Harzog offers a well-informed piece that breaks down not only where we are today, but where the industry needs to focus to truly take control of your virtual infrastructure and optimize workload performance moving forward. For us, it’s really about ensuring that the resources required by your applications in general, and your mission-critical ones in particular, are always available – rather than waiting for thresholds to be crossed. To do this you must have a management solution that does 3 things well:

1. Has real time insight into the performance of the applications and the underlying infrastructure.
2. Is continuously aware of dynamic changes across the environment in order to prevent problems before they occur.
3. Possesses the ability to intelligently tune (in the form of tangible actions) the configuration across the environment to optimize workload performance and system utilization.

Take a moment to read the full award list here.

Here’s the excerpt we feel really hits the nail on the head (but hey, we’re slightly biased):

"VMTurbo – for being the only vendor that is delivering automated workload service assurance today on the vSphere platform. In other words, VMTurbo is delivering today, what is promised in VMware’s future strategy."

Controling Cost & QoS After Deploying vCloud™ Director – VMTurbo Early Access Program

VMware’s vCloud™ concept introduces yet another layer of abstraction in the virtualized data center to simplify the provisioning of services, with the notion of vApps, Provider and Organizational Virtual Data Centers, which can be mapped across underlying physical resources. These layers of abstraction introduce new challenges for operations, engineering and capacity planners in terms of how to size physical and logical capacity and allocate workloads, in order to assure the QOS of virtualized applications and maximize infrastructure efficiency.

To address these challenges VMTurbo has extended the data model, analytic and automation policies in its Economic Scheduling. These new capabilities will become generally available in January 2012.

In the meantime, if you are deploying or have deployed vCloud™Director and would like to join our Early Access Program so you can trial our latest version and learn more about the benefits this can deliver, please sign up here.

[Press Release] Cloud Automation Leader VMTurbo Secures $10 Million Funding

Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners lead B round  

Waltham, MA, November 29, 2011 - VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software in virtualized environments, today announced that it has closed a $10 million B-round of funding, financed by returning investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. VMTurbo will use the funding to expand product development, customer support, sales and marketing.

VMTurbo is the only virtualization management solution to combine real-time operational performance metrics with unique analytics to drive a broad set of workload management actions that assure both application performance and most efficient use of virtualized and cloud environments.

"VMTurbo is emerging as the leader in automating the management of virtualized cloud infrastructures,” said Peter Bell, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners. “Both service providers and enterprises are embracing VMTurbo's platform to realize the compelling ROI that cloud computing can provide.”

“Customers are finding that VMTurbo's unique solution is the only holistic means of managing all resources in virtualized environments," said Ben Nye, Managing Director at Bain Capital. "These businesses depend on their Applications, and their applications depend on VMTurbo.”

Named by Gartner to its “Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2011” report, VMTurbo has gained significant, worldwide market traction since it was founded in 2009.  VMTurbo is enabling cloud service providers and enterprises – including British Telecom, Omnicare and L-3 Communications – to maximize the ROI of their virtualized infrastructure.

“Bain Capital Investments and Highland Capital Partners have been great partners.  We are pleased that they are investing in VMTurbo’s next growth wave,” said VMTurbo president and CEO Lou Shipley.

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