Overview
Indiana University is a major multi-campus public research institution, grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, and a world leader in professional, medical, and technological education.
Digital textbooks, virtual software delivery, and flexible learning environments support IU's mobile community and place the university at the cutting edge of IT for higher education. As part of this culture of innovation, Indiana University manages the nation's leading research networks, heads research initiatives supported by the National Science Foundation, partners with other universities on open source software development, and provides leadership in cybersecurity. These distinctions have earned IU a place in Computerworld's 100 Best Places to Work in IT 2010 and 2011.
Challenge
In 2003, Indiana University made a strategic decision to find an x86 virtualization solution. Robert Reynolds, now the lead virtualization architect, was part of the University’s mainframe server administration group responsible for exploring new technologies that could help them transition to a distributed environment.
Robert found VMWare ESX 1.5. Because the product was so new, and there were no management tools available yet, the IU team had to write their own scripts to be able to manage the virtualized environment. It wasn’t long before their VMWare implementation was adopted across the university, and the virtualized environment began to grow. Today, IU manages an environment that hosts nearly 2,000 virtual machines on over 80 Dell servers to support approximately 500 users.
“When you have a distributed model with virtualization,” explains Reynolds, “the monitoring tool has to be able to collect all the information. There are a lot of tools out there, but most are very pricey and very monolithic. VMTurbo is affordable and agile.”
“With limited staff it was challenging to manage the environment as it became so large,” he explains. “We were really surprised at the immaturity of many of the offerings, and we had to be sensitive to costs.” They struggled with their first monitoring candidate which became overwhelmed by the more than 800 LUNs in their Storage Area Network. Also, users complained that the product was slow and the reporting didn’t give much detail.
Solution
Reynolds first encountered VMTurbo on one of the many blogs he tracks.
“What impressed me about VMTurbo right away and is something we appreciate in a vendor was that they didn’t cripple their free software offering.” Reynolds saw that VMTurbo had what they were looking for where their first candidate did not. “To be able to drill through and find bottlenecks quickly is very important to us. We manage virtualization and storage. There are others who manage the applications, the network, and so forth. Being able to bring that together is a big plus!”
The decision was made to abandon the earlier pilot and implement VMTurbo to monitor and manage the Indiana University virtualized environment. “One of the main reasons we left our original choice for VMTurbo is because of the way they treated us. They made every small thing seem important and we were very impressed with the attention to detail. We hope that as they continue to grow, three to five years from now, the company environment won't change and they'll still be as focused on customer relationships."
Reynolds reports that “The first immediate thing that we took advantage of was the free portion, the monitoring. We liked the fact that we could look at one heat map and get an overall sense of how our environment is doing.”
“The other feature we use a lot is the profile reports. Someone will call and say that a particular VM is experiencing issues. It’s not down, you can connect to it, but something isn’t quite right. We can do the profile reports and get a sense of the history of that VM and learn what the recommendations are that VMTurbo is suggesting: needs more CPU; needs more memory; is getting CPU Ready problems; might require that we look at some more general things.”
“We’ve also used the planning to prevent problems in the first place. We had an incident several weeks ago with one of our end users managing operating systems. A group wanted to upgrade to the next level, so they needed to deploy 20 VMs in their cluster and wanted to know what that would do to our environment. In the past we’d have depended upon our intuition and experience to determine if that was good or not. With VMTurbo we could create a “What if” scenario in the planner which is aware of that cluster and its history, and determine what the impact of adding 20 new VMs would be.”
“The last thing we’ve taken advantage of is the workload balancing characteristics where we can have VMTurbo balance each cluster in a way that VMWare itself can’t. VMWare is a resource balancer where VMTurbo can really balance performance. We push our hardware, so this helps us get more out of each cluster.”
Partly Cloudy
“They call me Partly Cloudy,” explains Robert Reynolds, “because cloud computing is becoming my ‘other hat’.”
For Reynolds, cloud computing adds another level of sophistication but, given their highly developed virtualization environment, it only makes sense to go that next step. Indiana University recently spent $32.7 Million on a new Tier 3 data center, and foresees expanding its ‘community cloud’ as a result.
Partnering
Robert Reynolds is very impressed with the VMTurbo team, saying they are agile, easy to work with, and as interested in creating long-term relationships as the University is. As part of their partnership, Indiana University will be beta testing future VMTurbo products and advising them on features, functionality, and value.
“What VMTurbo
has over all the other vendors in this space that I’m aware of is their unique economic model, the way they look at things,” exclaims Reynolds. “Instead of just pulling raw data out of VCenter on CPU use or memory use, they actually drill in and create an entire model which they also include in their planning tabs. That’s something that no other vendor really has to offer. Their approach is something really different and worthwhile.”
Robert Reynolds, lead virtualization architect at Indiana University