1. 1 Cloud Computing/Virtualization 2.0 is all about Manageability Key considerations for a Cloud Computing Ready Monitoring Solution Bala Vaidhinathan Chief Architect bala@eginnovations.com

2. Slide 2 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Agenda Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing Management challenges with Cloud Computing Key considerations for monitoring Cloud Environments How to ? Summary

3. Slide 3 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Virtualization 1.0 Focus on getting the functionality right, proving the benefits  Energy and space savings, ease of provisioning, HA Predominantly used in staging and development environments Over-provisioning to ensure acceptable performance Single-vendor (VMware) dominated New service opportunities developed – e.g., VDI

4. Slide 4 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing Choice of virtualization technologies  VMware® ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris xVM The hypervisor is now a commodity Virtual environments prevalent in production  Critical applications, business services Key challenges - Provider: Need to deliver on the promise of high availability, reliability, performance  Shrinking budgets result in emphasis on right-sizing!  Performance depends on several layers of software  Troubleshooting, diagnosing problems now key

5. Slide 5 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing Saas, Paas or Iaas What is right for you? Key challenges - Consumer:  Lack of visibility.  Management tools not mature enough to handle this explosion in technology.  Service levels

6. Slide 6 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Finger-Pointing End User Client Admin LAN Admin Firewall admin Server admin VMware admin Domain admin ERP Admin Sys admin Application Admin Database Admin Hey, this is not working Siloed organizations result in the “It’s not me!” syndrome Talk to the Other guys The server is working OK Everything Is OK No other complaints VMs are lightly loaded We don’t see anything wrong All lights Are green Not our problem Looks fine Not mine either

7. Challenges in monitoring Cloud Computing Infrastructure decoupled from Applications  Infrastructure failure should no longer affect my apps?  Are we there yet? Higher complexity because of resource sharing across VMs  Guests share CPU, memory, disk, network resources  A single malfunctioning application in a guest can impact performance to all other VMs Performance degradation due to incorrect provisioning  Insufficient memory, CPU allocated for the VM’s workload For a technology that makes delivery and scaling of computing easier, Cloud computing presents a ton of challenges in monitoring and management.

8. Slide 8 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Key Considerations for Monitoring Cloud Environments

9. Slide 9 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Cloud Ready Monitoring  End-to-end view – across virtual and physical infrastructures  Physical and virtual infrastructures will co-exist  Private, hybrid and Public Clouds can co-exist  Common dashboard for heterogeneous cloud technologies  Non-cloud, Private and Public clouds have different designs and behaviour patterns.  However they all serve your IT and you should have the ability to look at all of them using a consistent dashboard.  Virtualization-aware physical server monitoring  Are the servers sized correctly?  Where is the bottleneck – CPU? Memory? SAN? Network?  VMware ESX, Citrix Xen, Solaris LDOMs, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris xVM, AIX LPAR

10. Slide 10 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Cloud Ready Monitoring  VM auto-discovery, availability and configuration tracking, physical resource usage  Which VMs are on an ESX server?  Which ones are powered on?  What CPU/memory resources are they taking up?  Which VM is generating max. network traffic?  Which VM is accessing the disk/SAN the most?  Is Live Migration working?  How many migrations are happening and how long did a migration take?  On demand monitoring  Ability to deploy monitoring probes on demand.  Ability to integrate your probes into your cloud computing units.  Understand the dynamic nature of auto-created VMs.

11. Slide 11 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Cloud Ready Monitoring  Inside view of a VM with clear problem demarcation  “Outside view” indicates which VMs are consuming physical resources and the portion of resources consumed  Limited information for problem diagnosis Why is a VM taking up more resources? Malfunctioning application? Which one? Excessive workload? VM not sized properly?  Inside view of a VM critical for problem diagnosis What % of the resources available to a VM are used by each application? Is it the physical server? Application? VM? Network?

12. Slide 12 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Cloud Ready Monitoring  Scalability  Ease of installation and configuration  Automatically establish performance baselines  When there is a problem, administrators want to know what’s changed  Need proactive baselines & trends, so alerting can be proactive  Minimize the time and effort spent configuring the monitoring  Tracking Service Levels  Ability to provide different models of Service Levels  Dynamic Service Levels  Equally important for Providers and Consumers

13. Cloud Ready Monitoring  Automated root-cause diagnosis Slide 13 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Disk reads Media Streaming Database Queries Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses Multi-tier infrastructures are difficult to manage. Adding dynamic Computing units to the mix makes the problem even harder!!!

14. Cloud Ready Monitoring FIREWALL WEB SERVER USER Suppose the database server is 50% slower than normal APP SERVER DB SERVER Login Register Browse Slide 14 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved  Automated root-cause diagnosis at business service levels  Differentiate cause from the effects

15. Cloud Ready Monitoring Support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) Not feasible to deploy an agent per OS / VM  Higher deployment overhead, time-consuming  Higher licensing cost, higher resource consumption Different requirements for monitoring application server and virtual desktops Slide 15 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Virtual Application EnvironmentsVirtual Desktop Environments Few VMs (<10) per ESX server30-40 VMs per ESX server VMs mostly powered on all the timeVMs powered on/off dynamically Monitoring mostly from the VM perspective – which VMs are on, what resources are they using Monitoring from the user perspective (who is logged in, what resources are they using, who are the top users, etc.) In-depth application monitoring required (Citrix, Oracle, etc.) Monitor user activity, access patterns

16. Slide 16 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Cloud Ready Monitoring Virtualization 1.0Virtualization 2.0/Cloud Monitoring physical servers: hypervisor, service console Auto discovery of VMs and tracking of up/down status Outside view of the VMs: What physical resources is each VM taking up? Detecting VM bottlenecks - CPU ready time, throttled time, balloon memory, disk latencies Support for multiple, cloud architectures Inside view of VMs to understand how applications are consuming the resources of the VM Dynamic / Configurable service levels. Automatic baselining of performance and understanding norms Correlation between VM and physical server performance to understand bottlenecks Automated root-cause diagnosis by correlating business service, network, application, VM and physical server performance Monitoring of the virtualization ecosystem - virtual desktops, connection brokers, datastores, terminal servers, etc. Dynamic and real-time deployment of monitoring models. Different stake holder views for different parties in the eco-system

17. Slide 17 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Lets take a closer look...

18. Monitor physical and virtual servers, networks, applications from a single console (Req #1) Integrated Dashboard Slide 18 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Dashboard customized for each administrator – “personalized views” (Req #7) Root-cause of a problem is shown as ‘Critical’, effects of problems are shown as ‘Major’, and proactive alerts are shown as ‘Minor’ (Req #6)

19. Slide 19 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Topology of Virtual Environment The topology of the VM infrastructure reveals the VMs and applications that co-exist on a physical server currently (accounting for Live Migration).

20. Virtual Desktop Monitoring View of all Virtual Desktops on a VMware ESX Server Slide 20 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Clicking on an icon drills down to the “inside” view of that virtual desktop. (Req #4).

21. View of all virtual resources used by a VM Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM Slide 21 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Clicking on a magnifying glass “diagnosis” button lets us drill down deeper into the information supporting a particular metric. Problem is low virtual disk space.

22. Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM List of the top 10 memory consuming processes of a VM Guest Slide 22 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved

23. Slide 23 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Auto-Baselining of Metrics Time-varying alert threshold based on historical data Reduces system configuration time and produces more accurate alerting (Req #5)

24. Slide 24 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Layer Model for Root-Cause Diagnosis The component layer model allows clear problem demarcation: Is it the Network? Physical server? VM? Application?

25. But wait: the SQL server is running on a VM, and there appears to be a critical problem in the VM infrastructure. Clicking on this link displays a virtual infrastructure topology diagram for this VM. Slide 25 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example There is a major alert condition at the OS layer. Disk write times are over 11 seconds even though there is little disk activity! The problem is with disk activity of Disk0. Layer model for the MS SQL Server

26. Slide 26 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example VM infrastructure topology diagram (accounts for Live Migration) The SQL Server VM is hosted on an ESX Server, and something in the ESX Server itself is impacting the SQL Server VM. Clicking on this icon brings up the layer model for the ESX server.

27. Slide 27 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example Something is wrong with CPU usage of the ESX console. The ESX console is taking up close to 50% of the server’s physical CPU. This is very unusual ! Layer model for the VMware ESX Server The problem is at the OS layer. Clicking on the diagnosis button lets us find out why.

28. Slide 28 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example List of the top 10 CPU processes running on the ESX service console A Samba backup job is using almost 95% of the ESX console’s virtual CPU ! This is the root-cause of the web response time issues !

29. Slide 29 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example All of the alert conditions are also summarized in one screen: An Alarm Console. The root-cause of the problem The effects of the problem Simply clicking on this diagnosis button shows the root-cause of the problem: the Samba issue shown in the previous slide. Color coding clearly distinguishes the root-cause from the effects.

30. Custom Service Levels – Graphical view

31. Custom Service Levels – Metric view

32. Slide 32 Flexible Web Reporting  Executive & operations reports  Network, system, application Reports  Enables triage across disparate infrastructure components  Real-time or historical analysis  Trend analysis, capacity planning © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved

33. Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready Slide 33 © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved Virtualization 2.0 Ready RequirementWhat you need to look for Ability to handle a mix of physical and virtual infrastructures Monitoring for multiple OS types, variety of applications and support for physical and virtual machines Support for heterogeneous Cloud computing models Support for Private and Public clouds Support for VMware VI3, Citrix XenServer, Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), and MS Virtual server Visibility into physical server and virtual machine configuration and performance “Outside” view of performance of each VM Monitoring of the virtualization platform – the hypervisor, VM kernel, console Inside view of VMs with problem identification A monitoring solution that can provide an “outside” and an “inside” view of the virtual environment using a single agent. Critical for root-cause diagnosis – to know which application inside the VM is faulty. Baseline metrics automatically Uses past performance to automatically determine the norms of every metric Proactively alerts when these thresholds are violated Automatic correlation for pinpointing the root- cause of a problem Correlation across VMs and physical machines Correlation across protocol layers to identify problematic layers Correlate between applications responsible for business service delivery

34. Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready Virtualization 2.0 Ready RequirementWhat you need to look for Scalability of the monitoring solution Highly scalable, 100% web-based architecture Agent-based and agentless monitoring flexibility Integration with virtualization platform monitors like VirtualCenter Support for virtualized desktop environments Monitor of user activity, application mix, access patterns Reports revealing the overall effectiveness of your virtual desktop environments – most frequent users, login/logout times for audit, applications accessed by users, top resource consumers Personalized role-based views for different stakeholders Roles to restrict access to users based on their roles Personalized views for each user limiting their view to the portions of the infrastructure that they are responsible for. Dynamic and Configurable Service Levels Ability to provide customizable service views depending on the situation Ability to dynamically allocate service view based on patterns observed

35. Slide 35 For more information Web: www.eginnovations.comwww.eginnovations.com © 2009 eG Innovations Inc All Rights Reserved