Server Virtualization

With its roots in mainframes dating back to the 1960s, server virtualization today is a strategic answer to consolidating under-utilized servers, reducing energy consumption, and trimming data center space requirements. Many IT organizations are turning to virtualization in hopes of reaping great benefits.

To mitigate risk of failure and maximize ROI requires up-front capacity planning and subsequent proactive performance management.

You want to know that virtualized systems will meet service levels. Capacity planning can ensure that physical and virtual servers are optimally configured for meeting the needs of your users. And a heterogeneous IT Service Optimization solution can help you keep multi-vendor virtualization solutions running smoothly across multiple data centers.

ITSO for Heterogeneous Virtual Servers

IT managers find it critical to use TeamQuest software to plan predict and manage capacity and performance for virtualized environments such as:

• VMware,
• AIX partitions,
• Solaris containers, or
• z/OS.

One Fortune 500 customer cited the ability to understand the following four aspects of a virtualized environment as being critical:

• The physical server - TeamQuest software allows you to analyze the utilization of different resources, such as overall CPU and memory usage, and identify which resources are nearing full capacity and which are being underutilized.
• The hypervisor - Monitoring the hypervisor is critical. You can lose the whole box if swap space is too low, for example. TeamQuest software can alert you to such problems early, allowing you to resolve it before it becomes critical.
• Individual guests - It is important to monitor the activities within each individual guest, or virtual server, to understand how well it is performing. TeamQuest software provides this information, allowing you to determine whether sufficient resources have been allocated to each virtual server so that performance requirements are met.
• Guest interaction - Understanding how the virtual servers are behaving relative to each other and to the hypervisor is also important. Clearly, the applications running on each guest must be compatible and interact nicely without competing for resources. TeamQuest software provides this information.

This report, containing two charts, shows an example of how you can view resource utilization for the container as a whole and how those resources have been allocated to the different guests.

Capacity Planning for Virtual Servers

Vendors would like you to believe that virtualized environments are a panacea, that virtual servers can be managed automatically in a reactive fashion. But experts know that to ensure a successful virtualization effort requires capacity planning. In fact, at a recent infrastructure, operations and management conference, the vast majority of respondents indicated that capacity planning is still important in virtualized environments. Capacity planning is a "best practice" for ensuring that virtualized environments will perform optimally.

TeamQuest Model is a software tool that uses analytic modeling to predict the performance of an IT environment. With TeamQuest Model you can anticipate how systems will respond when workloads ramp up or are moved as part of a server consolidation effort. You can determine how workloads will interact when consolidated and evaluate the performance effect of configuration changes.

With capacity planning using TeamQuest Model, you can avoid embarrassment from overworked virtual servers, and know in advance how many virtual servers you can realistically place on a particular configuration of a physical server. You can predict how long current configurations will perform adequately, and know when upgrades or additional systems will be needed.