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Challenges

  • Rapid company growth required innovative information management strategies
  • Lack of visibility across the server farm was inhibiting the effective use of virtualization
  • Required reporting took many man-hours to produce manually
  • Corporate commitment to cost-control required careful scaling of virtualized resources

VMTurbo Solution

  • Immediate improvements in virtualization visibility are realized through extensive automated reporting
  • VMTurbo helped identify some services and applications that had been assigned to incorrect storage tiers and made recommendations to move them to more effective disk
  • VMTurbo Virtualization Management Suite optimizes application performance and utilization by balancing workload demand across server and storage infrastructure.
  • VMTurbo identifies under-and-over-utilized physical server and storage capacity and provides corrective actions by considering a broad set of metrics and constraints, such as CPU, memory, network I/O, storage I/O, IOPS, latency, CPU ready queues, ballooning, swapping, clusters, VLANs, LUNs, business policies, etc.

Results

✓  VMTurbo collects and monitors data across the virtual infrastructure, analyzes that data and makes recommendations for IT environment improvements

✓  Management is alerted when L-3 Communications’ virtual servers reach 80% utilization so action can be taken to restore them to 50% utilization keeping investments in lock-step with corporate computing requirements

✓  Tight cost-control is maintained by assigning applications appropriately to the lowest available cost storage resources and managing storage expansion closely

Customer feedback

“Disk is key with virtualization. If you don’t have performing disks, then virtualization will fail.  In order to guarantee high performance, some people want high speed disk for everything. While performance is very important, virtualization is supposed to give you a big cost differential, but you need lower cost disk to support that. VMTurbo is helping us balance between cost and performance. Ultimately, we don’t want anyone to notice that we have virtualized their application, except to say it is running better than before.”

David Snow, lead virtualization architect for L-3 Communications


L-3 Communications and VMTurbo

Overview

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L-3 Communications has grown very quickly into the sixth largest defense company in the United States, and is a leader and prime defense contractor in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), secure communications, government services, training and simulation and aircraft modernization and maintenance. The company also is a leading merchant supplier of guidance and navigation products and systems, sensors, scanners, fuzes, data links, propulsion systems, avionics, electro optics, satellite communications, electrical power equipment, encryption products, signal intelligence, antennas and microwave products.

L-3's Lead Virtualization Architect David Snow manages systems for about 4,000 L3 users spread across several states. Split between production and development, Snow estimates that he has about 140 VMs running on 11 physical servers which run everything from SQL-based applications to Microsoft Exchange for the enterprise.

Challenge

Rapid growth can be wonderful, but without careful controls it can be a double-edged sword.  With their involvement in the Defense industry, and having grown by an average of almost a billion dollars in revenue each year for the past five years, L-3 Communications has a great appreciation of this.

For David Snow, that growth also increased the demand upon his team to increase service levels while keeping costs under complete control, which is why he turned to VMTurbo to help increase the visibility of his virtualized environment allowing him to keep the growth of his infrastructure in strict step with the growth of operating requirements.

“The issue when I originally started looking for a solution was that although I could get information on any particular guest or any particular host I had no good mechanism to summarize across the environment. We are very conservative in our approach and we don’t overprovision anything.  In fact we try to stay at only about 80% usage if we can help it.  That’s my trigger to start getting more resources in place.”

Solution

“Where we are now we’ve got so many hosts, so many guests, and so many different areas that the requirement to actually look at that weekly and give back reports would take several hours to do manually,” explains David Snow.  “On top of that we’ve got various subgroups, our DBA’s for instance, some of our developers, we’ve got our exchange admins, that need weekly report on how their resources are faring and how their machines are faring and although we can manually put that together the impact on my managers were a couple of hours a week just to create these reports. And so that’s what the impact was.  I was trying to free up my managers to have time to actually manage the system rather than just doing Excel spreadsheet calculations to create reports for all these different groups every week.”

Snow implemented VMTurbo to solve this challenge and return more time to his management team for more productive pursuits than report generation.  A holistic platform for proactive and automated management of workload and resources in virtualized data centers, the VMTurbo Virtualization Management Suite optimizes application performance and utilization by balancing workload demand across server and storage infrastructure. It identifies under- and over-utilized physical server and storage capacity and provides corrective actions by considering a broad set of metrics and constraints, such as CPU, memory, network I/O, storage I/O, IOPS, latency, CPU ready queues, ballooning, swapping, clusters, VLANs, LUNs, business policies, etc.

On the decision to implement VMTurbo, Snow comments that “it didn’t take a lot of business justification because we already knew we were in a state where our resources are limited, our requirements are growing and so the only way that we can compensate for that is to automate, get tools to automate what a system or process system used to do manually and so by freeing up these couple of hours a week it was really easy to justify the cost of this. And so what I had to do was show that the time this would save us by looking at this plus the amount of information it could give me so we could be proactive in keeping the system going and healthy going into the future.”

VMTurbo contributes to approximately $ 400,000 per year in savings

Snow estimates that L-3 Communications is saving in excess of $400,000 per year thanks to their implementation of virtualization, and that VMTurbo is a major contributor to their ability to do that.

Benefits

  • Virtualization visibility across all applications, not just Exchange or SQL
  • Assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media based on need
  • Careful cost and availability control of resource expansion by accurately measuring capacity utilization
  • Automated report generation returns many man-hours to IT management team
  • Over-and-under-utilized physical server and storage capacity identified and corrected
  • Optimized application performance by balancing workload demand across server and storage infrastructure

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