The data gathered by monitoring should be continuously analyzed so that anomalies which violate operational policies and impact workload performance can be identified, in order to notify operations staff. VMTurbo:
- Detects resource problems and bottlenecks, including CPU and Memory congestions, co-scheduling congestion, IO and network bottlenecks, over- and under-utilization, etc.; and
- Provides impact analysis of affected entities
And based on this, VMTurbo identifies ACTIONS required to AVOID the bottlenecks and continue delivering the required service levels.
This is part of VMTurbo's closed-loop operations management process, illustrated in the following graphic:
You can check out brief demonstrations of these:
"Groups" are a way for you to monitor and manage customized portions of your infrastructure, selecting groups to focus on those specific resources. For example, you might want to look at all VMs in a particular department; explore only specific servers across several clusters; or a cloud service provider may want to create a group to monitor just the VMs of a specific customer.
VMTurbo products ship with some groups already defined, and with Group Configuration feature, you can also create your own groups using two grouping methods:
- By criteria — You create dynamic groups that are defined by specific search criteria. You can group services according to naming conventions (all VM names that start with “ny”), resource characteristics (all physical machines with four CPUs), or by variable metrics (all VMs with more than 80% utilization). These groups are dynamic because the appliance updates the group as conditions changes. For example, the VMs at 80% utilization can change continually — the group will update with those changes.
- By manual selection — You create static groups by selecting the specific group members.
Let's take a look!
In large and complex environments running mission-critical apps, it is key to focus on specific areas (e.g. customers, groups, mission-critical apps, etc.), and configure views such that all relevant diagnostic and resolution information is there (and easy to use!). It is with this in mind that VMTurbo features the ability to customize the Monitor views, and business dashboards.
The ability to customize Monitor views enables everyone in the IT organization to see just what they need to see. Because VMTurbo is deployed in environments large and small, used by teams across the entire IT organization, and provides visibility across the entire IT stack (apps, VMs, servers, storage, etc.) there is a lot you could look at :)
Of course, if you're a System Administrator focusing on several clusters, you may want to zero in on just the clusters of interest and not the other two hundred servers and 2,000 VMs. By the same token, if you're responsible for the entire data center, you may want a bird's eye summary view of, "do I have problems NOW??" Let's take a look how we do that with VMTurbo.
Customizing the Monitor Views
Business Dashboards
A placement policy is a restriction you may choose for VMTurbo to take into consideration when deciding how best to optimize your environment. VMTurbo makes it easy to create your own placement policies to control workload placement. Let's take a look:
Multi-tenancy support is the ability to configure VMTurbo to support multiple "tenants." (A tenant is a user, or group of users.)
Each tenant can be given a restricted view of the environment. Once logged in, the user is not aware of any other objects in the environment than those he/she has permission to see.
This feature is particularly useful in:
- A service-provider environment to support end-customer views;
- In an enterprise to support departmental/function views.
Here's a quick walk-through of multi-tenancy in VMTurbo:
In contrast with other VM capacity planning tools that project based solely on CPU and memory, the VMTurbo Planner considers all major resources in its analysis, including CPU, Memory, I/O, Network, and Storage. The Planner produces detailed actionable execution plans and capacity management actions. And where other tools base the analysis on extrapolating current trends, the Planner can explore a rich set of "what if" scenarios.
The Planner is part of an integrated suite, built on a common architecture, with seamless integration of the tools, data, analytics, and user interface, leveraging VMTurbo's Economic Scheduling Engine. The suite eliminates the need to learn multiple products with multiple interfaces. Furthermore, the Planner leverages the same database as the rest of the suite, so there is no redundant data collection, and capacity planning can take into account historic data such as peaks.
This tutorial illustrates how you can answer three common questions:
- "What is the optimal workload allocation for the current environment?"
- "What would the application resource demands be for an added load?"
- "What will the application resource demands be at a future date?"
(You can either watch the full video below, or each individual segment.)
To watch in full screen mode, please click the 
icon.
Full tutorial:
Tutorial [1/4]: Getting Started
Tutorial [2/4]: "What is the optimal workload allocation for the current environment?"
Tutorial [3/4]: "What would the application resource demands be for an added load?"
Tutorial [4/4]: "What will the application resource demands be at a future date?"
When considering growth of the virtualized infrastructure and workloads, one frequent question is, "What will the application resource demands be at a future date?"
VMTurbo's Planner answers this question, leveraging all of VMTurbo's real-time and historical infrastructure metrics:
A common question in both optimizing today's environment, as well as planning for the future is, "What is the optimal workload allocation for the current environment?"
VMTurbo Planner, using the same underlying engine and database as the rest of the VMTurbo suite, can answer this question:
A common question when planning for the future is, "What infrastructure resources are required for additional applications I am planning to virtualize?"
VMTurbo Planner answers this question:
With the introduction of application performance management, VMTurbo enables managing quality of service (QoS) by tying enterprise applications with the underlying virtual infrastructure. By adding visibility into which enterprise applications are consuming virtualized infrastructure resources, VMTurbo's Economic Scheduling Engine can derive resource allocation and workload placement decisions from application QoS and business requirements.
Applications are automatically discovered by the VMTurbo appliance and can be prioritized by infrastructure operations teams based on business goals. Individual application resource consumption and business priorities can drive rightsizing, suspension and other actions to maintain the balance between QoS and efficiency.
Let's take a look!
To watch in full screen mode, please click the
icon.