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The Top 5 Features to Look for in VM Management

Industry insiders recommend the top features to look for in a solution to manage performance in the virtual environment.

1. Integration of Physical and Virtual Environments

“Look for a tool that integrates physical and virtual environments into a single pane of glass,” says Olivier Thierry, CMO of Zenoss. “You don’t want to create more silos.”

Thierry warns that it is very easy to establish a new silo of tools and operations staff to handle the virtual environment, but this only makes business service management more complex.

“You will always have a mixed environment of physical and virtual,” agrees Troy DuMoulin, ITIL Service Manager, AVP Product Strategy, Pink Elephant. “I can see the logic of having a single tool that allows you to manage both physical and virtual. You want one management interface that allows you to model and manage all different types of objects, regardless of where they are.”

2. End-to-End Visibility

“End-to-end visibility is a requirement,” says Javier Soltero, Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource, a division of VMware. “You need the ability to see not just the hypervisor but through the guest operating system and whatever application components are running inside of that guest.”

3. Change Awareness

“Look for a tool that understands the dynamics of motion,” Thierry advises.

Javier Soltero defines this as “change awareness”, noting, “In a virtual environment, you have the ability to move workloads, and start and stop workloads as whole machines, basically by just going to vCenter and dragging things around, and starting and stopping them. You need to have a management tool that successfully operates within that environment.”

Soltero says the tool must honor the fact that when you VMotion from one hypervisor to the other, nothing happened from the perspective of the guest operating system in the application. On the other hand, from the hypervisor perspective, the tool must also recognize that you actually moved this workload from this vSphere host to another, and make sure that was successful and had no impact on the application running on top of it.

4. Built for the New Virtual Environment

“Many legacy tools just build virtualization management onto their products,” warns Thierry. “Unless the tool has a real-time model with dependency mapping configuration built into it, the tool will not be able to do it.”

“Look for a tool that has been purpose-built for this new virtual world,” he continues. “You can’t take a 1930s car and bolt on a brand new turbo charger. It was not designed for that.”

5. Cost Effectiveness

“Look for a management tool that is cost-effective,” Thierry concludes. “The reason for virtualization is to save money, so you do not want to go back and add a seven-figure systems management tool on top of that. The last thing you want to do is take a brand new cost-effective agile platform and dump a whole bunch of legacy, inappropriate, expensive, cumbersome, complex tooling on top. The cost equation must be maintained.”

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The Top 5 Features to Look for in VM Management

Industry insiders recommend the top features to look for in a solution to manage performance in the virtual environment.

1. Integration of Physical and Virtual Environments

“Look for a tool that integrates physical and virtual environments into a single pane of glass,” says Olivier Thierry, CMO of Zenoss. “You don’t want to create more silos.”

Thierry warns that it is very easy to establish a new silo of tools and operations staff to handle the virtual environment, but this only makes business service management more complex.

“You will always have a mixed environment of physical and virtual,” agrees Troy DuMoulin, ITIL Service Manager, AVP Product Strategy, Pink Elephant. “I can see the logic of having a single tool that allows you to manage both physical and virtual. You want one management interface that allows you to model and manage all different types of objects, regardless of where they are.”

2. End-to-End Visibility

“End-to-end visibility is a requirement,” says Javier Soltero, Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource, a division of VMware. “You need the ability to see not just the hypervisor but through the guest operating system and whatever application components are running inside of that guest.”

3. Change Awareness

“Look for a tool that understands the dynamics of motion,” Thierry advises.

Javier Soltero defines this as “change awareness”, noting, “In a virtual environment, you have the ability to move workloads, and start and stop workloads as whole machines, basically by just going to vCenter and dragging things around, and starting and stopping them. You need to have a management tool that successfully operates within that environment.”

Soltero says the tool must honor the fact that when you VMotion from one hypervisor to the other, nothing happened from the perspective of the guest operating system in the application. On the other hand, from the hypervisor perspective, the tool must also recognize that you actually moved this workload from this vSphere host to another, and make sure that was successful and had no impact on the application running on top of it.

4. Built for the New Virtual Environment

“Many legacy tools just build virtualization management onto their products,” warns Thierry. “Unless the tool has a real-time model with dependency mapping configuration built into it, the tool will not be able to do it.”

“Look for a tool that has been purpose-built for this new virtual world,” he continues. “You can’t take a 1930s car and bolt on a brand new turbo charger. It was not designed for that.”

5. Cost Effectiveness

“Look for a management tool that is cost-effective,” Thierry concludes. “The reason for virtualization is to save money, so you do not want to go back and add a seven-figure systems management tool on top of that. The last thing you want to do is take a brand new cost-effective agile platform and dump a whole bunch of legacy, inappropriate, expensive, cumbersome, complex tooling on top. The cost equation must be maintained.”

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

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A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...