Results tagged “management”

Wondering what CA has in store for virtual servers and private clouds running vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V hardware?

CA today announced that it is streamlining the management of VMware vSphere 4 platform on Cisco Nexus 1000V infrastructures by adding support for both in the company's Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager offerings. Under the management platform, administrators get a unified view of affected hardware and virtual servers; a system that prioritizes and traces events to their root cause resulting in fewer alarms; and real-time monitoring and automation capabilities.

CA's object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter(TM) Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

The consolidation of physical and virtual management is inevitable. Expect the lines to blur even further.

Source

IT Pros to the Feds: Don't Regulate Green IT - Reuters

A survey by data center operator Digital Realty Trust found that 69 percent of IT pros surveyed "were extremely or very concerned about government regulation." The study was done by Campos Research & Analysis, and surveyed senior decision makers at big U.S. corporations in charge of datacenter and green IT strategies.

Microsoft Adds Virtualization to Unified Communications - Virtualization Review

The promise of UC is to unify all communications over a common platform. However, Microsoft hasn't enabled virtualization for all components in OCS R2 quite yet. Virtualization of voice, video, Web conferencing and other collaboration apps are not supported. Microsoft cited "possible" quality-of-service issues with real-time media as the reason.

SQL Server Support Policy for Failover Clustering and Virtualization gets an update... - CSS SQL Server Engineers

...One fairly controversial aspect to this policy was our support (actually non-support is a better word) for "guest" failover clustering. We didn't support installing SQL Server failover clustering in a virtual machine. Well this policy is now changed effective immediately as updated in the article.

Virtualization Management at Interop; new focus for network managers - SearchNetworking.com

Barb Goldworm and Anne Skamarock: Network management tools are still able to provide management of the physical components within the environment. However, to manage any of the virtual components and even to see into the OS or application, these tools need to be virtualization-aware, i.e., interact with the virtual layer to gain access to the virtual components. Many network management companies have become, or at least started to become, virtualization-aware. Furthermore, application management, including performance tools and root cause analysis tools, must likewise now understand the concepts of the virtual layers as well.

Western Digital's 2TB green drive eyes surveillance market - Crave - CNET

The company announced Tuesday the new 2TB WD AV-GP. It incorporates Western Digital's AV Intelligent Drive Technology, which makes it a good choice for AV applications such as DVRs, media centers, media servers, and surveillance video recording.

SAP plans to beef up its business sustainability portfolio with the acquisition of Clear Standards Inc., makers of software that measures a business' carbon output and provides a roadmap for cutting energy costs and emissions. SAP envisions that Clear Standards will "complement" other offerings in its vast product portfolio, specifically SAP Business Suite and SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management.

And it's not hard to see why SAP would make a play for the firm. Here's a summary of what their three products do:

Clear Standards Assess provides the foundation for organizing and consolidating all emissions data across the enterprise, allowing businesses to determine and report their total environmental impact, including GHG emissions, water consumption and waste. Clear Standards Analyze provides detailed visualizations of emissions data, enabling insight-driven decisions on environmental initiatives. Finally, Clear Standards Act supports operational plans to meet sustainability goals and conform to voluntary goals and regulatory standards. By using embedded best practices in the solutions, businesses can plan for dramatic cost savings from energy and waste reduction, access decision-support metrics for optimizing investments in energy efficiency technologies, and seek to enhance brand value by providing credible transparency into sustainability initiatives.

...all wrapped up in a visualization-heavy, web-based console.

Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, it certainly says a lot of Clear Standards, which was only founded in 2007. The acquisition is expected to be completed in June 2009.

Source: Press Release

...or at least IT managers that have implemented the technology in their datacenters seem to think so. This TechRepublic blog post offers us these encouraging words:

Even in these fragile economic times, CIOs are investing in virtualization. A 2008 survey from CIO Research indicates that 85% of CIOs surveyed have implemented virtualization in the data center, and 81% believe that their virtualization efforts have resulted in significant savings. Apart from the savings, and the corporate responsibility benefits from a Greener IT profile, CIOs cite other important benefits, which include simplified maintenance, improved disaster recovery plans, and the ability to provision systems and new applications more quickly.

Some of the benefits cited include fewer hardware purchases; an up to 60 percent reduction in server footprint (!); and reduced server management.

The downsides: "Server huggers" (one app, one box traditionalists), software licensing, and a state of nebulous app support on virtual platforms.

Read the rest of the article for more good insights.

Complaints about the lack of visibility into virtual environments are nothing new. It goes without saying that many IT shops will remain reluctant to move more apps onto virtual servers until they have their concerns addressed.

You know what that means... Third parties to the rescue!

One company is using the tried and true method of using software agents to monitor virtual server performance and relay that data to anxious admins. Ixia today launched a line of IxVM testing tools that integrate with VMware to provide autodiscovery of virtualized infrastructures and provide the following:

With Ixia's new suite of IxVM products, it is now possible to test layer 2/3 virtual network resources and layer 4-7 virtual applications. IxChariot VM, a component of IxVM, uses software endpoints - small software components that run on each virtual machine - that send and receive test traffic, while measuring performance. This makes it possible to source traffic from virtual servers in the same manner as the supported applications. IxExplorer VM uses software endpoints to generate layer 2/3 traffic to test features such as VLAN and QoS.

Oh no! Suddenly the reasons to not virtualize are becoming fewer and fewer...

Deploying efficiency-boosting technology is exciting. Managing it... Oftentimes, not so much. Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler dispense some "look before you leap" advice at Network World.

Server virtualization does, however, create some significant challenges. One of these challenges is that in a typical setting servers are connected by a switch and there is management functionality inside the switch that enables the IT organization to monitor the inter-switch traffic. However, once the server has been virtualized IT organizations typically loose visibility into the traffic that goes between VMs on a single physical server.

Basically, always consider the management aspect of a virtualization platform and determine if it offers the reporting and controls that you require. Actually, it's good advice for any new IT initiative.