Is Your IT Infrastructure Operating at Peak Performance?

With so much going on in an organization’s IT infrastructure – from cloud solutions and virtual machines to efficient wiring and temperature control – making sure storage capacity and operational efficiency remain sharp is essential for business continuity.

As the perennial leader in Gartner’s Virtualization Magic Quadrant, VMware technology owns the vast majority of the enterprise IT market, with 90% of attendees at Gartner’s Data Center Conference identifying vSphere as their primary hypervisor. However, just because an organization is using the best-in-class virtualization technology, that doesn’t mean it is operating at peak efficiency. How, exactly, can you determine if your IT infrastructure is operating to the best of its capability?

The VMware Optimization Assessment (VOA) is a no-cost SoftwareONE service that allows our Technical Specialists to get into the heartbeat of a customer’s IT infrastructure. Customers are given a 30-day trial to run both vRealize Operations Manager and vRealize Log Insight to collect mountains of data. At the conclusion of the trial, a 20-page report illustrates areas for improvement by providing intuitive Health, Risk, and Efficiency badges to measure storage, performance, networking, and memory.

The vROPs application is built to cover very large environments in all locations. For example, if a customer has multiple datacenters in the US, a single site will be the “master site” to house as many applications as needed to cover all the objects (VMs, Storage, Hosts) in their virtual environment. Since remote sites are connected via WAN, an application is deployed to remote sites to only collect metrics to send back to the master node. This stripped down application will not display any dashboards or graphs like the full vROPs appliance since the WAN connection is almost always slower than a LAN connection, and the remote application displaying a full dashboard would eat up that connection. Regardless, all remote sites can be monitored with the vROPs appliance from the master node.

At the conclusion of the 30 day trial, the Technical Specialist will compile the 20-page report which thoroughly describes the three badges’ results:

Health

This can be determined after the first 15 days of the assessment and shows the “health” of all the different objects in the virtual environment, including:

• Workloads – How hard is an object is working?
• Anomalies – Are there any abnormal activities going on in the environment?
• Faults – What issues have occurred involving availability and configuration?

Risk

Shows the future risks within the environment by determining how long until you run out of capacity. Three minor badges constitute the Risk badge:

• Time Remaining Score = days until max capacity – provisioning time buffer
• Capacity Remaining = % of usable capacity not consumed
• Stress Score = % of the “stress zone” exceeding your optimal workload line in your selected time sample

Efficiency

Shows the rate that the virtual environment is using its objects’ efficiency by collecting data from two minor badges:

• Reclaimable Waste = Oversized (extra) Capacity + Idle Capacity + Powered-off Capacity + Unused File Capacity
• Density = % alignment of your “child:parent consolidation ratio” to the optimal ratio

New to vROPS 6.0 are Compliance Policies that are sets of rules your environment must pass to meet corporate or industry standards. The compliance score is based on the number of standards you are violating, which can be mitigated by the “Hardening Guide” which secures your vSphere environment by applying specific security guidelines.

Prior to the vOA, organizations traditionally had little visibility into their virtual infrastructure efficiency. With this appliance, customers can expect to discover numerous areas for improvement, including:

• Do you need high performance storage? And if so, would it be more prudent to use storage on your existing servers instead of investing in massive SAN chastises?
• Should you simplify your network provisioning by moving to an automated software-managed system?
• Is your virtual infrastructure ready for the move to the cloud?