The following is an interview with Mr. Timo Scheller, University IT-Center Admin at the University of Saarland, conducted by Concat AG, VMTurbo’s Value Added Reseller:
How did you find out about VMTurbo?I found out about VMTurbo from an industry blog in late 2010. The author raved about the possibility to see "behind the scenes” of a VMware environment.
What made you choose VMTurbo?
After I downloaded the software, the set up was very easy, taking just 10 Minutes. Within two hours I saw the first results! At that time the software was not as advanced as today, but already very impressive, especially their analysis and reporting capabilities.
What advantages do you see in VMTurbo?
It offers true real-time monitoring of the entire VMware environment, including storage. This is typically quite difficult to accomplish in day to day operations, whether it’s FC storage, iSCSI or NFS storage.
Why is this so important?
VMware itself does not provide detailed views (eg, IOPS, latency) of the datastores or VMs. With the data offered by VMware, only the throughput per VM and hosts are measured, but never the number of IOPS, nor latency. However VMTurbo provides this.
Considering VMware licensing costs and the need to “to place as many VMs on a LUN/Datastore as possible” it can get really tight, especially if different server loads (DB-Server, web servers, domain controllers, etc.) are being placed there for cost or storage reasons.
From the perspective of Vmware’s dashboards, everything might be green (no bottlenecks, no issues), though in reality plenty of issues may be hiding under the surface. Which you often only hear about from your customers and users who complain, for example, that their VMs had performance issues at certain times (say, 8-9 o’clock). And the admin? Well, he may ask the storage and networking teams –but there, everything is green! He looks into his VMware environment: all green. And yet there seems to be an issue…But where? VMTurbo reveals this for him, and he can then return to his work, if the problem does not sit in his virtual infrastructure; or he can resolve the problem immediately, because he can see where in his infrastructure the issue is.
Why are reporting (over a longer period) and VM-specific reports so important to you?
This can be explained with the same example as above. Imagine if you could create a custom report for your client while you are still on the phone with him, giving him a detailed overview on the usage and performance of his VM, which can either help clarify that the VMware infrastructure or the Storage are not the cause of a performance issue; or if there was indeed a failure, being able to send a detailed hour-by-hour report to your management team regarding this. Indispensable!
What changed in the too familiar question of: "We would need 10 new VMs for a project, can we deploy them?"
This question is certainly familiar to many administrators. Until now, administrators have been making decision based on their gut feeling (“well, this should be possible, but…”). VMTurbo now helps them run “what if” scenarios enabling them to simulate an infrastructure with changes in VMs, hosts, storage as well as workload policies (rules of how vms should be allocated within a cluster) and enables them make informed decisions. It allows for customized VM templates (getting as detailed as specifying IOPS and network bandwidth specs) that are being taken into account for the planning scenarios.
So the motto is: Better proactive than reactive?
Knowing ahead of time where bottlenecks might appear in the future should be a priority for every IT admin and management. That way, appropriate actions can be taken in time to avoid problems. Again, this very quick and easy with VMTurbo. And in the worst case, if you haven’t been able to identify bottlenecks ahead of time, this tool helps you quickly respond in real-time, before it affects other parts of the infrastructure.