Virtualization Management: Embrace the Black Box

I find myself repeating the phrase so often, it’s almost become my catchphrase, “The most important tasks in virtualization are performance and capacity management.”

These two tasks are so vitally important to success with running a virtual environment that not doing them is almost like professional negligence.

Yet what’s remarkably notable about both of these tasks is how little they’re actually done in virtual environments everywhere.  Ask any ten virtual administrators if they’re doing these activities and eight will give you a blank stare.  The ninth might proudly state that, “they’re keeping their eyes on the charts and graphs under vSphere’s performance tab”.

None, except perhaps the tent –the one with the tools to accomplish these tasks correctly–are really doing the job successfully.

Not managing the performance metrics behind your virtual machine’s behaviors means not knowing why your environment isn’t performing to the needs of your users.  It also means not getting the most return out of your virtualization investment.  When performance management activities aren’t done well, a virtual environment might only get a five-to-one ratio of virtual machines to physical, even when t

heir physical resources could easily handle seven-to-one or more.

Lacking a set of monitors to watch virtual behaviors, along with the linked reports and discrete actions for resolving performance issues, and you’re left with little more than a series of difficult-to-correlate charts and graphs.  That’s exactly what you’ll get out of tools like vSphere’s Performance tab.

Greg Shields is a Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert. He is a technology author, speaker and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology, with extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies.