Now what?!?!?

CIO Radio is saying there is a lack of Performance Benchmarking - so someone at Intel or VMWare needs to step up their marketing.

Intel has had a tool out called vConsolidate since 2006 and VMWare has vMark.

The panel didn't include any CIO - so maybe its Radio For CIO's vs. by CIO's - I do know that they have had CIO's or former CIO's on former shows.

Most CIO's are thinking "weve virtualized servers, networks, storage, applications, and I/O, and reduced the physical infrastructure footprint. Now what?"

The next step is to maximize performance, reduce licensing costs, increase VM density, increase capacity, decrease $$ cost per VM.

What avenues are being explored and what benchmarks can we reach or exceed?

Well for starter's go download our Capacity Analyzer and start looking at what resources your VM's are using up - if its memory, the cost just decreased for the 4 GB DIMM DDR2 ($549 for 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) so start planning memory upgrades right now.

The folks on the panel were Citrix, BMC, Sun and Redhat - not sure where VMWare or Microsoft were.

Speaking of vMark, Dell just put out a vMark for their Dell R905 (Intel) with 4xQuadcores (2.93 Ghz / 16 CORES) wth 64 GB of RAM - 14.23@10 tiles - which holds the top spot as of 5/15/08.

B-Hive acquisition is a real smart move for VMWARE

Since the dawn of computing when it comes to performance management the most critical element is the user. It does not matter what performance metrics say inside the Virtual Center. It is all about how your users perceive the performance to be. Is it fast, Ok, too slow. It is not about the metrics. At the end of the day it is a qualitative experience. As David Marshall
correctly points out in his coverage of the news, the cool factor here is that now VMWare will be able to granularly break down where the time in application response is being spent. Is it in the network, database, application? When combined with vmotion, a vm could be moved to another host based on the analysis of where the problems are. If it is a network problem, move vm to another segment closer to ens users. If it is a host capacity issue, move it to another host where more capacity exists. The angle that really excites me is the ability to monitor more granularly down to the end user level. We would be able to answer how much resource is being utilized by a given user. This can be used in chargeback, capacity management etc. I hope to see Vmware publish this API in the near future!!

Is Hyper-V up to the task of production server virtualization?

Microsoft's has a Hyper-V performance document available.

Microsoft's trying to answer their own questiions:

"Is Hyper-V up to the task of production server virtualization?"
"Does Hyper-V have the stability and performance required to meet our needs?"

This paper describes how MSFT is running MSDN and Technet on Hyper-V systems.

Interesting to note that "dynamic disks do not perform quite as well as fixed or physical disk options".

Rob Emanuel from Microsoft.com Operations team also writes it up.

Data Rich, Insight Poor

This phrase has been gaining popularity.

It's a phrase used by CIO's to describe their business systems, the mountains of data generated by business applications.

This mountain has spawned new phrases and software to address business intelligence, dashboards, scorecards, key performance indicator's, etc.

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium, I heard a CIO talk about how easy it was to become "data rich, insight poor", she was talking primarily about how their BI product didn't make them that smart because the data was all over the place - they were engaged in new initiatives (ETL, Data Warehousing) to try and be data rich, insight rich.

I think a significant tertiary effect of virtualization is the increase of information.

Before you had individual piles of data, but with a virtualized environment you have the system and performance data from the ESX Server, the Host OS, the SAN, the Network, etc.

VKernel's Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer is a "ESX Intelligence" product - its a KPI, Dasboard, to do the analytics and automation to lift and load data out of Virtual Center and start analyzing resource constraints.

This problem is going to get worse.

The density of virtual machines is going to increase, we are going to see more CPU's, more RAM and more VMs per physical boxes.

It's time to look at the mountain of data and start working on the insight.

Capacity Planning for ESX is a multi-dimensional challenge

Windows Admins listen up. Your world has changed. No more one application running on one Windows server where none of your capacity resources were shared. Once you virtualize your servers, they have to share memory, cpu, storage, network bandwidth, disk i/o, network i/0, etc, with other VMs running on the same hardware. Capacity planning which was a non-event in the Windows world is now a must do, otherwise you will run out of capacity and experience performance problems or even worse - downtime.

Capacity Planning is a multidimensional problems. To do it correctly you must take into account literally hundreds of variables. Here are some of them:

- how many VMs do you deploy?
- where are you going to deploy them
- how much resource to allocate to them
- what happens if you want to change hardware
- will you violate any configuration constraints?
- do you need another host?
-what resource will you run out of first? memory? CPU, Storage -- and where?
- how many more VMs can you fit into each cluster?
- what happens if VMs get vmotioned?
- will you violate DRS affinity rules?
- what configuration constraints will you violate?
- will DRS work?
- will HA work?

I can go on and on. I hope you see just how complex capacity planning has become. As VM density on hosts continues to increase, capacity planning in VMware will become even more critical, because every physical server becomes more business critical and failure is not an option. Systems Management is fun again!!

2008's Hottest Startups

InfoWorld gave us some nice props today, naming us a 2008 Top 10 Tech Startup.

In order to be considered - we had to be truly new technologies, innovative approaches within existing technology areas, and technologies applied in new ways to solve different problems.

We were selected out of 95 companies were nominated this year, and their editors also looked at several dozen more.

They ruled out companies that are primarily in the consumer space, and those that have not yet seen a product through to at least beta.

Furthermore, companies had to have been founded no earlier than 2005 (you can be a startup only so long, after all).

Infoworld interviewed the founders and performed a reality check with the analyst community.

Ultimately the choices were made by InfoWorld's panel of Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr, Features and News Executive Editor Galen Gruman, Test Center Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Contributing Editor Bill Snyder.

It's all about the ratio.

VKernel is an advocate of running your hardware at high levels of capacity. I know that we would see record-breaking ratios of virtual machines to server hardware.

• A major worldwide financial services organization achieved a 12:1 consolidation ratio and increased its central processing unit utilization by 30 percent.
  
  
• An Indian petroleum refining and distribution company achieved a 17:1 consolidation ratio and expects to increase that to 30:1 with additional CPUs and RAM.
  
  
• One of Italy's largest banks improved its server utilization rates by 100 percent.
  
  
• A leading US faucet manufacturer saved $250,000 in hardware costs by reallocating existing units instead of purchasing new, achieving a 10:1 consolidation ratio.
  
  
• A South American energy company consolidated its servers by a 20:1 ratio.
  
  
• A federation of trade unions in Singapore consolidated its servers by 46:1, achieving a 26 percent savings.
  

Smallest is 10:1 and largest is 46:1.

It's all about the ratio.

Miles Per Gallon for Data Centers

At the heart of VKernel is the notion that you can't manage what you don't measure.

I wrote earlier in the week about Will Forest (McKinsey) who is advocating a CAFE-like standard for Data Centers and the MPG analogy works.

If you are running your VMWare at lower capacity levels - its driving a car with a low MPG, increase the capacity and you increase your MPG.

Forest posits CADE - Corporate Average Data Efficiency or MPG for servers.

Take a look at this graphic for CAFE - Fuel Efficiencies

In Cars (and or light trucks) - its MPG vs. Footprint (Sq. Ft).

As they increase in square footage, their MPG decreases - smaller vehicles would have better fuel economy/efficiency but not be able to transport goods/people - so their ROI might be tricky if they had to haul sheets of plywood.

In Servers (not light trucks) - its Servers vs. Virtual Machine Density.

IT shops running the early versions of server hardware are going to consolidate to increase ROI, groundbreaking virtual machine density numbers.

“It clearly makes more sense to become more efficient than to build another $100 million data center,” said Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute.

Be more efficient, drive up capacity, save the planet.

If data centers were hotels...

Steve Lohr over at the New York Times has written a piece about the fact that servers are massively underutilized and if they were hotels they would be bankrupt.

He wrote that "computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance."

This is one of the biggest selling points about virtualization - drive up utilization of the server hardware.

The piece is based on a McKinsey & Co. study by Will Forest who says "world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020."

Okay great - so its not just a capacity issue, now its an "save the planet" issue.

Another of the big selling points of virtualization is the more efficient use of power, cooling, etc.

(Ed. note: The word environment can get confusing when in a server virtualization discussion - anything that has to do with environment in this blog post is related to server power and the heat they give off, cooling of said heat and the powering the cooling. (floorspace, voltage, amps, etc.???).

It's these resources that are being consumed inefficiently when the servers are running at low capacity and directly proportional - make these boxes run at higher capacities, drives down the environmental requirements and reduces the per VM costs.)

He states (via Lohr) that the negative environmental impact will come from the electricity consumed by the growing data centers and the "the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates".

McKinsey states (via Forest) that to help fix this IT Departments will need to "bring some of the mainframe-style management disciplines to modern data centers".

Amen. Amen. Amen.

(Ed. Note: That's our first three amen blog post).

Virtualized servers as mainframes - that's genius talking right there.

And that means big iron management, capacity management, better systems management than what existed in the past - its mainframe disciplines brought to virtualized servers.