Infrastructure Management Software Blog : virtualization

The best way to manage VMware environments

pspielvogel — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:28:00 GMT

Virtualization management seems to be the hottest topic for discussion, among both customers, partners, and my product marketing and product management peers. I was recently involved in a conversation with some sales people about why HP’s approach is unique.

The reference platform for virtualization management of VMware environments is vCenter (formerly Virtual Center). But, many customers do not want their virtualization experts to spend their (very expensive) time managing first level events. So, they look to a centralized management console such as Operations Manager to handle events from both the virtual and physical IT infrastructure. This is the value behind a consolidated event and performance management approach.

So, the challenge is how to get information about the virtual infrastructure into central event console. The old way, which we used to do, was to install our agents on the VMware hypervisor. We worked closely with VMware to ensure that it worked and was supportable but customers got nervous because the general advice is "do not install anything in the hypervisor". Obviously, if the hypervisor becomes unstable then all of the virtual machines suffer.

The new, and recommended by VMware, approach is to use the vMA or “vSphere Management Assistant”. The vMA is a pre-build Linux virtual machine. It is built and owned by VMware and is downloaded free of charge from their web site. You run the vMA just like any other virtual machine.

The vMA includes all of the VMware-approved and supported interfaces and APIs to enable access to VMware environment monitoring. It provides access to information such as current configuration of the VMs, fault information and very accurate performance information. This is the new way that VMware wants other management systems to get their information from the hypervisor. vMA provides more granular, fine grained, and real-time information than you can get from vCenter. HP was the first vendor to release a management product using the vMA.

We install our agent and Virtualization SPI onto the vMA and make use of the interfaces. One vMA can provide access to monitoring information from multiple VMware server hosts. The “resolution” of the data that we get with the Virtualization SPI vs. vCenter is really just a reflection on what customers told us they wanted. I'm sure that VMware could provide much of the same detail - certainly for a VMware server - but they did not. Customers told us they wanted more - "Don't just give us what Virtual Center provides, go deeper".

The advantage of using the HP Virtualization SPI and Operations Manager is that you can see very granular fault and performance data for both physical and virtual infrastructure in your Operations Manager console. This means your tier 1 operators can manage events and handle basic triage and remediation functions. This keeps your virtualization experts focused on more strategic tasks, until they need to manage an escalation.

This is just one example of HP’s close ties with VMware. We also have integration between HP Insight Control and vCenter that allows customers to manage both physical and virtual infrastructure through the VMware vCenter console. We announced this capability at VMworld in September.
This is aimed at server administrators who want a single expert tool for troubleshooting complex problems that could span the hardware and hypervisor.

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth and Peter Spielvogel.

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Software Universe in Hamburg sneak preview

pspielvogel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:53:00 GMT

Software Universe is only five weeks away. We hold this event twice each year, alternating between a United States and European location. The upcoming event is in Hamburg at the Congress Centre Hamburg (CCH) from Wednesday, December 16th – Friday, December 18th 2009.

(If you missed our last Software Universe in Las Vegas, you can download some of the presentations here.)

I’m very excited about this year’s show, as it gives me a chance to connect with many European customers and colleagues, many of whom I have only “met” through email and phone calls. In addition, there are many interesting presentations. Some highlights* (based on their relevancy to managing IT infrastructure - both physical and virtual) include:

Wednesday December 16

16:00-16:45	Optimizing cost by automating your ITIL v3 processes Jeroen Bronkhorst, Hewlett-Packard
17:00 - 17:45	“Monitoring ....inside the Cloud" Vincenzo Asaro, Telecom Italia
18:00 - 18:45	Orchestrating Virtual Infrastructures with HP OO Ralph Capasso, Hewlett-Packard

Thursday December 17

09:00 - 09:45	Automating operations management with HP Operations Orchestration Ralph Capasso, Hewlett-Packard
09:00 - 09:45	HP management of VMware vSphere: How does VMware fit in with your HP Software Infrastructure? Terry Lyons, VMware
10:00 - 10:45	The all new Operations Center licensing model: escaping the hardware bonds Jon Haworth and Peter Crosby, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	HP Operations Manager i: Best practices and lessons learned at CMT Kai-Uwe Jensen, Hewlett-Packard
15:15 - 16:00	BTO Impact of Virtualization on IT Management Dennis Corning, Hewlett-Packard
15:15 - 16:00	Operations Center, the road ahead Norm Follett, Hewlett-Packard
16:30 - 17:15	HP Operations Manager on Linux Lillian Hull and Hans-Peter Schmollinger, Hewlett-Packard
16:30 - 17:15	Capabilities in a Virtualized environment Lutz Bartsch, Hewlett-Packard

Friday December 18

09:00 - 09:45	Virtualization SPI - VMware management plug-in for HP Operations Center Jagannath Harish Gangaiah, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping: a solution to regain control on your infrastructure Thomas Wirtz, Hewlett-Packard
11:45 - 12:30	Integrated approach to monitoring and the challenges encountered and overcome Mark Laird and Romain Maitret, Steria Ltd

* dates, times, and speakers subject to change

Hope to see you there.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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Two strategies for your new data center

pspielvogel — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:33:00 GMT

I read an interesting article in eWeek on “HP vs. Cisco: Polar Opposites in Data Center Strategies.”

The article focused on whether it is better for companies to choose from a collection of partners or a one-stop shop. From my personal experience with my home electronics purchases, I prefer to purchase components from a single vendor, as the integration and support generally runs more smoothly. On the other hand, I have other friends and colleagues (many of whom are more technical than I am) who follow the opposite approach, picking what they believe are the best in class components and integrating all the pieces themselves.

In both cases, when the systems run smoothly, both approaches work equally well. The challenge, of course, is when things do not go as planned - either during the setup or when something breaks. In a home environment (at least mine), things are pretty static. I don’t add or update components very often. A corporate data center is another story. Data centers are very dynamic, with companies adding servers, applications, and other components daily in many cases. And, add to that the changes from virtualization, where business services are created on-the-fly, based on changing demands. And, if you want to leverage runbook automation, it’s probably easier if you are automating software from a single vendor.

The data center has no time for finger pointing or blame storms. When an incident occurs, I want a single console to see what broke, its impact on the business, and the shortest path to resolving the problem. In my mind, this is a clear reason to follow the one-stop approach.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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Virtual Infrastructure Management (Q&A from HP-VMware webinar)

pspielvogel — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:52:00 GMT

Thank you to everyone who attended the joint HP-VMware webinar on how to “Reduce Costs and Gain Control of Your Virtualized Infrastructure with Consolidated Management.” The speakers were Terry Lyons, Technical Alliance Manager, Enterprise Systems Management, VMware Corporation and Mike Shaw, Director of Product Marketing, HP.

If you missed the live event on October 7, 2009, you can view a replay here.

Here are the questions that people asked during the event, along with the answers.

Question	Answer
Great to see you are working closely with VMware. What are you doing to support other hypervisors?	For now, the HP Virtualization SPI supports VMware ESX and Microsoft HyperV. We are looking at adding other hypervisors, based on our customer’s needs.
Can you explain the difference between siloed management compared to Central? What is the benefit to centralizing?	Siloed management refers to managing each IT silo using a separate element manager. Centralized management relies on a single event console to consolidate and correlate events from disparate IT domains. Using a single event console can reduce costs and speed the time to problem resolution.
How do you plan the systems and applications for the data center capacity? Which kind of instruments/solutions do you use for the capacity planning?	Please see our blog post on capacity planning, written by Hyperformix.
What is the minimum release of HP Operation Manager that enables the VMware API integration, or is the VMware SPI the only dependency?	First, the Smart Plug-In (SPI) is called the Virtualization SPI, because it supports hypervisors beyond just VMware, although that is the most commonly requested platform. The Virtualization SPI works with Operations Manager on Windows 8.10, Operations Manager on Windows 8.16, Operations Manager on Unix 9.0, and Operations Manager on Linux 9.0.
Can you talk about how HP SIM fits in to this? i.e. hardware and VM Management. thanks,	HP Operations Manager consolidates events from all the various element managers across the enterprise. In the scenario you mention, SIM will send its events to Operations Manager where a single team can monitor the HP servers and any other infrastructure. There is a SIM Smart Plug-In (the SIM SPI is available at no charge) that integrates between SIM and Operations Manager. If an operator needs to perform advanced troubleshooting of the HP servers, he or she can launch SIM through the Operations Manager console.
Can this solution allow me to generate FTE savings?	We answered this during the webinar. This solution centralizes event management to a single Operations Manager console, leaving vCenter as the expert tool for advanced troubleshooting or escalations. This shifts event management to your tier 1 operators in the Operations Bridge, freeing your virtualization administrators (very hard to find these days) to work on more strategic tasks.
What specific HP software products are needed to implement the scenario presented?	We answered this during the webinar. You would use Operations Manager, agents for each of the managed nodes, along with the Virtualization SPI to manage the hypervisor.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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Capacity planning in virtualized environments

pspielvogel — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:42:00 GMT

In our joint webinar with VMware last week “Reduce Costs and Gain Control of Your Virtualized Infrastructure with Consolidated Management”, a question arose about capacity planning in a virtualized environments. I asked Rob Carruthers of Hyperformix to share his expertise on the topic. Readers of this blog may recall his podcasts on “virtualization and IT transparency” and “virtualization and capacity management”. Rob's response follows.
-Peter

Capacity planning is becoming more important because virtualization offers a safe and logical method to get more out of IT infrastructure elements at a lower cost. For example, many companies are stacking between 10 and 15 virtual machines on a single server. Traditionally, companies have been using rules-of-thumb estimates and spreadsheets for capacity planning. Over the past few years a host of automated solutions have come on the market to assist IT professionals with getting the most out of virtualized environments. These tools fall into two broad categories – Placement tools and capacity planning tools.

Placement tools – Help answer the question: How do I correctly place applications within a virtual cluster for optimal performance? These tools provide analysis of current resource consumption, behavior, and assist with placing complementary workloads within a virtual cluster. Some of these tools perform linear forecasting to estimate future resource consumption based on past growth.

Limitations: Growth is often not linear. Demand for some applications grows faster than others, which can result in mismatches in capacity. Some clusters may have excess capacity, while others have shortages. Most placement tools do not factor in end user response time SLAs, which can result in “green” status for capacity but “red” status when users experience application slow-downs.

Capacity planning tools – Examine both the migration of applications to the virtual environment, and the post migration capacity requirements. These tools generally allow IT to plan growth based on the number and types of users, and take into account the non-linear aspects of business growth and can translate that into an actionable capacity plan. More mature tools also consider the end user experience and can forecast response times that users will actually experience for the business transactions they are running. Tools which provide ongoing (not just one-shot plans) are referred to as capacity management tools.

Limitations: These tools generally require more granular data and automated collection to produce accurate and timely results. Hypervisor and system management vendors have been adding support for key virtualized metrics of late, remediating this issue and making capacity planning easier and faster.

The market need for both placement tools and capacity planning tools has encouraged several vendors to create solutions. Some key players in this space include: VMware, Vizioncore, Platespin, Cirba, Neptuny, and Hyperformix.

When evaluating which method and product to use, customers should first ask several big picture questions:

How can I get the most cost savings with virtualization without sacrificing the ability of my company to transact business?
What tools will improve my agility when Lines-of-Business owners change the plan, or our end customers do it for us?
Is my capacity planning tool integrated with my Hypervisor and System Management tools to provide “one source of the truth”?
Are the answers provided by my capacity planning tool accurate and reliable?

The full potential of virtualization depends on delivering financial returns back to the business. Capacity planning can ensure economic returns can be delivered safely without negatively impacting performance.

Rob Carruthers
Director of Product Marketing
Hyperformix

Managing Virtualization and BlackBerry Ecosystems (Q&A from Vivit technical webinar)

pspielvogel — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Thank you to the 90 people who attended the Vivit webinar on What's New In Operations Management: Virtualization & BlackBerry Smart Plug-Ins Demo". Jon Haworth and Dan Haller presented on how to get more from your existing Operations Management environment by adding the new smart plug-ins for Virtualization and BlackBerry.

If you missed the event, you can view a replay of the webinar on the Vivit web site.

Here are the questions that people asked during the event, along with the answers.

Question	Answer
Managing Virtualization - System Support
We have OVPM for UNIX. Does VISPI still only work with OVPM for Windows? Currently we have a work around from HP Support to run with OVPM for UNIX. Will newer versions of VISPI work with OVPM on UNIX?	VI SPI 1.5 is supported with OMU 9.0 - so OMU on Solaris and HP-UX and OM on Linux. We now include Performance Manager (PM) with new installations of OMU 9.
Can you run the virtualization SPI if you only have the operations agent and not the performance agent?	No, you need both agents. Stay tuned for some updates regarding our agents. This issue will become moot on November 1.
Does VM SPI require both an OV agent and an OVPA agent on all the Virtual machines and Hosts?	No. You can choose to monitor the VMs with OM agents if you wish. If no OM agent is installed on a VM then a Target Connector license is required.
Does the agent install on ESX3i version 4 USB drive?	With VI SPI 1.5 the agents are no longer installed on the ESX / ESXi hypervisor - they are installed on the vMA (a virtual management appliance VM supplied by VMware). If your ESX3i version 4 USB drive has a vMA installed or is monitored by a remote vMA then the VI SPI (on the vMA) will be able to monitor it.
Do we have any plan for supporting Solaris and HP virtualized environment?	We are investigating other virtualization technologies. We named this product the Smart Plug-In for Virtualized Infrastructure specifically to indicate that it is not constrained to monitor just (e.g.) VMware. The first version of the VI SPI supported only VMware ESX. Version 1.5 added Hyper V and ESXi. While we cannot comment on specific product plans, you can follow the trend.
Is a LINUX VM guest required? We only have Windows guests.	The Linux vMA (Virtual Management Appliance) is provided by VMware - you just download it from their web site. It's pre-built so you do not have to 'know' anything to utilize it. VMware has information on vMA on their web site. http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vima/
Managing Virtualization - Licensing
When is 1.5 of the VI SPI going to be released	It achieved Manufacturing Release status week of September 28th and is just ready for shipping now.
How much is System Infrastructure SPI?	It is included with the OM agent.
Is there a limitation on the number of virtual machines that can be monitored?	We are suggesting that a single VI SPI is limited to monitoring 200 instances. Each host, guest (VM), resource group and cluster counts as one instance. We have tested considerably more than this but are using 200 as our recommendation.
Do you need a SPI license per ESX host or per vma?	Per VM host (ESX/ESXi or Hyper-V)
Is the VISPI different than the Nworks VMware SPI and can this be used as well?	Yes it is a completely different SPI to the Nworks / Veeam SPI - and has a fundamentally different architecture (high resolution agent based monitoring as opposed to agentless monitoring). I guess you could use both products but I'm not sure exactly what you would gain.
Managing BlackBerry Ecosystem
How does licensing of BES SPI work?	You purchase on BES SPI license for each BES server that you wish to monitor (physical or virtual). It is a flat price structure (no tiers etc.). Obviously you also need an OM agent for each BES server in order to be able to deploy the BES SPI.
Is the BES SPI available for OM 8.1 or is it only available for OMi?	The BES SPI includes the OMi Content Pack. So you could purchase the BES SPI for your OMW 8.10 system and make full use of its "SPI" functionality or, if you have OMi connected to OMW, you can also make use of the OMi features such as Health Perspective Views and Topology Based Event Correlation.
Is there any reference data that shows how BES performance improves when using SPI?	Not right now although we would expect some of the existing application and service availability / performance improvements for OM to be valid
Can the BlackBerry SPI account for devices that are turned off or out of range when monitoring the number of messages waiting to be sent?	The total queue size of unsent messages and calendar updates that are enqueued for all handhelds is monitored. A report (by device) of pending messages is not available at this time.
Does the HP smart plug-in for BES support a Lotus Notes environment?	Not right now. This capability is under investigation.
Other Operations Management Questions
How do I get more information about the integrated OVO and OVP agent...what is this new agent called?	At present this is just a licensing change. We will provide more information on November 1. We will be executing on some technology updates in the future so keep listening for news.
How often data are collected from devices and how?	As per all OM message threshold policies the schedule is easily configurable. Out of the box, some are collected every two minutes, some every 5 minutes and some less often.

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth.

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Are you reinvesting IT savings? We want to hear your story.

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:25:00 GMT

We want to hear how you are reinvesting your IT saving?

When the recession hit you answered the call. Whether it was through consolidation, virtualization, automation, or other means you found ways to save money in IT.

Now comes an equally important part: how are you reinvesting those savings? Because while cutting costs keeps you competitive, figuring out how to turn those savings into business value is the ultimate goal. New products and services, innovation, training, reallocation of IT funds to sales and marketing can all build business value and competitive advantage. If you’ve saved money through one of these initiatives, what areas are you targeting for reinvestment?

We’re exploring this topic in a feature article on HP.com and want to hear your story. We are not seeking any kind of endorsement, comment or opinion of HP or any of its products or services. As a source for the story, you’ll have a chance to review and approve any quotes or references prior being published.

Please respond if you’re interested and include an email address or phone number so we can follow-up. Michael [dot] Procopio [@] hp.com

2 upcoming virtualization webinars

pspielvogel — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:16:00 GMT

It seems that every conversation about IT infrastructure management eventually turns to virtualization. To help you better understand how we help you reduce the cost of administering virtualized environments and better manage performance of applications running in a virtual machine, we have two virtualization webinars next week.

1. Wednesday 10/7/09 Reduce Costs and Gain Control of Your Virtualized Infrastructure with Consolidated Management (HP and VMware)

2. Thursday 10/8/09 What's New in Operations Management: Virtualization & BlackBerry Smart Plug-ins Demo (HP and VIVIT)

Details and registration links appear below:

Webinar 1
Webinar title: Reduce Costs and Gain Control of Your Virtualized Infrastructure with Consolidated Management
Webinar date : Wednesday, October 7, 2009 12-1 PM Eastern Time, 9-10 AM Pacific Time

Abstract: Virtualization is hot! Even in this tough economy, virtualization was cited as the top spending priority for CIOs in a 2009 CIO Insight survey. Most organizations are seeing real benefits in flexibility and utilization but virtualization also creates some unique management challenges. Join HP and VMware, industry leaders in virtualization and infrastructure and application management for this one hour webinar to learn how you can reduce management costs and gain increased visibility and control of your virtual infrastructure.
During this webinar, you'll learn:
• How virtualization can introduce new management silos and actually increase the time and cost to detect and resolve issues
• How consolidated event and performance management can reduce costs and regain control
• How new technology from HP and VMware can pinpoint the root cause of system issues and eliminate duplication of effort chasing symptoms
Don't miss this chance to get maximum value from your virtualization investments.

Webinar 2
Webinar title: What's New in Operations Management: Virtualization & BlackBerry Smart Plug-ins Demo
Webinar date : Thursday, October 8, 2009 12-1 PM Eastern Time, 9-10 AM Pacific Time

Join us for an exclusive webinar on October 8th and be one of the first to see a demo of the new HP Operations Manager Smart Plug-ins for Virtualization and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. During this webinar and demo, we'll show you how to get more from your existing Operations Management environment by adding the new smart plug-ins for Virtualization and BlackBerryEnterprise Server. These new smart plug-ins include domain-specific discovery, fault detection and performance data collection policies that provide explicit insight into the application and their impact on the entire IT ecosystem.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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Virtualization and IT Transparency (podcast)

pspielvogel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:38:00 GMT

This post includes the last of my recordings from VMworld.
- Peter

Since so many of the sessions focused on capacity planning and its importance in both gaining executive sponsorship up front and in ensuring smooth implementation, I thought it would be appropriate to share information about a product from one of our partners that helps people migrate from physical to virtual environments.

The latest version of Hyperformix Capacity Manager focuses on virtualization. It supports a variety of hypervisors, making it suitable for heterogeneous environments - which is also where HP Operations Manager excels. In addition to enhancements related to virtualization, it also includes functionality around IT transparency to ensure that IT meets the needs of the business. Application owners often express concern about how their applications will perform in a virtualized environment.

You can read about the Hyperformix Capacity Manager 5.0 release here.

Or, listen to Rob Carruthers, Director of Product Marketing for Hyperformix, discuss its importance in this podcast.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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Virtualization and capacity management (podcast)

pspielvogel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:07:00 GMT

At VMworld last week, I spent some time with my marketing counterpart at Hyperformix, Rob Carruthers. We discussed why capacity management is so important for virtualization.

In this podcast (3:13), Rob discusses:

What is capacity management?
How does it relate to virtualization?
How does performance relate to costs savings?
How a company integrated two IT environments after an acquisition?

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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Analysis of HP announcement at VMworld (podcast)

pspielvogel — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:35:00 GMT

At VMworld, HP announced its virtualization smart plug-in (SPI) for Operations Center. For companies using Operations Manager as the consolidated event and performance management console, this allows them to see events from VMware Virtual Center in the Operations Manager console.

The implications of the “Virtualization SPI” for business operations are significant. This means operators can manage all events, from both the physical and virtual infrastructure, through a single Operations Bridge. The virtualization team can focus on planning and strategy, leaving the tier 1 operators to manage events.

Dennis Corning, product marketing manager for virtualization, comments on the announcement in this podcast, which I recorded at VMworld.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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Maximizing your investment in virtualization (joint HP and VMware webinar)

pspielvogel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:03:00 GMT

For those readers that like to plan ahead...

Webinar title: Reduce Costs and Gain Control of Your Virtualized Infrastructure with Consolidated Management
Webinar date : Wednesday October 7, 2009 12-1 Eastern time / 9-10 Pacific time

Virtualization is hot! Even in this tough economy, virtualization was cited as the top spending priority for CIOs in a 2009 CIO Insight survey. Most organizations are seeing real benefits in flexibility and utilization but virtualization also creates some unique management challenges.

Join HP and VMware, industry leaders in virtualization and infrastructure and application management for this one hour webinar to learn how you can reduce management costs and gain increased visibility and control of your virtual infrastructure.

During this webinar, you'll learn:

How virtualization can introduce new management silos and actually increase the time and cost to detect and resolve issues
How consolidated event and performance management can reduce costs and regain control
How new technology from HP and VMware can pinpoint the root cause of system issues and eliminate duplication of effort chasing symptoms

Don't miss this chance to get maximum value from your virtualization investments.

REGISTER NOW

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

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VMworld Day 3 - Planning your virtualization journey

pspielvogel — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:30:00 GMT

VMware hosted a session about how to plan for your migration to a virtualized environment. It was a hands on session in which each person had access to a PC (sadly not made by HP) to go through the exercises. It turns out they provided a handy template in which you input your organization’s priorities, business service environment, and key constituencies. The end result is a nice report (somewhat generic, but customized based on your input) that you can take to management.

Here is the link they provided during the session.
http://vmware.swb-consulting.com/workbook.html

Try it out and read through the examples. There is lots of great information about the business drivers for virtualization and the key success factors for implementation.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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VMworld - Day 2: Vision for virtualization aware IT management (podcast)

pspielvogel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:33:00 GMT

Podcast added on 9/16/09

Shay Mowlem, Director of Virtualization for HP Software, presented on his “Vision for virtualization aware IT management.” During his talk, he made the case that Virtualization goes beyond the surface objective of server consolidation. The real promise of virtualization is to create a dynamic environment in which IT can assemble systems and services around business use cases. In short, virtualization allows IT to be more responsive.

Shay presented a vision in which the IT infrastructure scales based on granular usage patterns, which of course change with the needs of the business. While virtualization resolves some of the hardware issues, it introduces some new management challenges. There is much more complexity with the additional virtualization layers, which means more moving parts in any business service.

So, management means creating a consolidated view of service elements and standardizing on common management platform. In such a dynamic environment, automation is essential. In fact, Shay stated that virtualization is the biggest driver for automation he has ever seen.

He presented an integrated approach for virtualized service management.

identify vulnerability
isolate root cause
identify required changes
submit change request
implement changs
verification and compliance

Having an integrated view of events and performance, physical and virtual, is critical.

Software license governance becomes an even bigger issue with virtualization. It was a problem before, but now with virtual machines, it is even more challenging.

Podcast of Shay Mowlem discussing the impact of virtualization on IT operations.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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VMworld - Day 1: Ann Livermore announces Virtualization SPI

pspielvogel — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:27:00 GMT

The first main day of the VMworld show was great. Over 10,000 people filled Moscone center to learn about how the hottest trend in IT can help them reduce their operating expenses and improve the quality of service. (Follow us at the show on Twitter #hpvmw)

In the main keynote, Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware reiterated the statistic we often hear in our conversations with customers and analysts. “70% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on.” He reminded the crowd that IT needs to focus on delivering more business value. In this economy that is more important than ever.

In the next keynote, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, mentioned the new virtualization SPI (Smart Plug-In). Readers of this blog will know that SPIs supplement our agents in collecting data, performing some autonomous management based on policies, and sending alerts to the Operations Manager console. The virtualization SPI supplements the agent on collecting virtualization-specific metrics on both host and guest systems. This provides a single management console, freeing the virtualization administrator to work on more strategic matters than managing a separate event console for the virtual environment.

Concurrently with Ann Livermore’s address, HP issued a press release on our new virtualization offerings. My colleague, Michael Procopio summarized it on the Business Service Management Blog.

The theme of “convergence” is pervasive at the show. Just as virtualization spans servers, storage, and networks, the management software must also span these domains on both physical and virtual devices. Deploying Operations Manager allows organizations to have a single event console, saving money on licensing, training and maintenance costs. Even more important, it improves service quality by providing a single location for all events, speeding time to problem resolution and eliminating confusion about which events are symptoms and which is the true causal event.

Stop by and let’s chat in HP’s booth #2023 .

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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