[Ed NOTE:  Today's post comes courtesy of SolarWinds' Head Geek, Josh Stephens.  He offers his special blend of insight and perspective on day to day IT operations management over on the Geek Speak Blog.  Follow Josh here --> @sw_headgeek.]

Today, let’s talk about the need for insight into the entire picture in order to optimize performance.  Whether you’re a small shop with a simple IT infrastructure or a large enterprise with technology and equipment taking up big-time real estate in your buildings, performance is critical, especially application performance.  At the end of the day, it all comes down to application performance.

Users expect near instant and constant access to the applications they need to do their jobs whether they’re working on site or (increasingly) off site.  Generally speaking, they see no reason that their applications and data shouldn’t just be there when they log in, regardless of location.  And why shouldn’t they expect this?  Companies have an obligation to provide the resources and tools necessary to get the job done, don’t they?

Herein lies the rub for IT departments everywhere – how to ensure application performance with zero to low threshold for anything less than 100 percent up-time.  An application performance issue is still often identified when the users start calling the help desk complaining that an application is “slow.” “Slow” meaning that the speed of the retrieval or manipulation of data within the application is taking more time than the user is willing to tolerate.  (Granted, totally subjective… some users are more patient than others.)

Nonetheless, the problem for IT teams is that a performance issue may have little to do with the application itself, so where to begin to start to figure this out?  Application performance can be affected by the network, server, storage, as well as the application itself.  The only way to effectively diagnose the issue is to have visibility across the infrastructure.

To get to the bottom of a performance issue, you have to understand the interdependency of multiple infrastructure components – servers, storage, backup, applications and the network – and the effect each can have on application performance.  If you don’t know what’s connected to what, you’ll be hard pressed to find the problem or at least to find it quickly.  Add to this the layer of abstraction over everything in today’s increasingly virtualized infrastructures and you have a real challenge to address.  A comprehensive view of the interdependency of the infrastructure components allows IT admins to pinpoint the true root cause of a performance issue and solve the problem quickly.

And, real-time data is just the tip of the iceberg… it certainly helps identify right away if the issue is indeed with the application. But, IT admins need to be able to see both historic and real-time application performance data.    Historic data allows for analysis than can arm IT teams with the data they need to assess and make decisions around trending.  Plus, the ability to conduct performance analysis of multiple components simultaneously is great for load-balancing and identifying bottlenecks to avoid issues in the future.

So the next time users are complaining about how slow their email is, before you blame the application… or the server… or the storage… or the network… better yet, before the next time, get performance visibility with a solution that can monitor all the components of your infrastructure.
Flame on…
Josh

Follow me on Twitter

Learn more at www.solarwinds.com

[Ed. NOTE:  A version of this post originally appeared on SolarWinds’ corporate blog, The Whiteboard.]

For what seems like 20 years, IT industry analysts, pundits, vendors and CIOs have been advertising the coming “unification of IT”- breaking down the silos of traditional enterprise IT infrastructure and teams: systems, apps, networks and (of course) storage. Despite all this talk and all the supposed agents of change, from processes (see ITIL), to centralized technology (see CMDBs) to philosophies (see “Business-aligned IT”), nothing’s really driven a truck through those silo walls. But, virtualization may finally change that.

As virtualization moves from the test lab to the data-center or server room of almost every sized business, IT teams can’t help but first decry — then deal with — the fact that lines of responsibility, visibility, and control are blurred by this technology. Servers can move from one host to another, from one network port or device to another, taking their traffic and security needs with them. Server teams now depend on the storage team to guarantee I/O and space requirements from newly networked storage. The storage team may require security & bandwidth policies from the network team. It’s all inter-related – really (not virtually).

This confusion forces those folks to talk – to determine how they are going to plan for and execute changes (ITIL), and how they are going to track all these pieces (CMDB), so that they can collectively deliver the great value to the business that virtualization promises (Business- aligned IT). Those parenthetical themes may owe their growth to virtualization, when it’s all said and done.
For sure, it’s been hyped. “Virtualization changes everything!” they say at conference after conference. Lots of agendas are attached to those claims, but of all the hyped facets of this technology wave, from rapid development and server cost savings, to energy-reductions and cloud computing, virtualization’s lasting legacy could be the role it plays in making network, server and storage teams talk to each other without a pointed finger between them.

In order to help those teams stay happy in the same sandbox, companies of all sizes will need the visibility and understanding that an integrated network, application and storage performance management solution can offer.

Over the past 10 years, we have had the opportunity to show how our powerful, affordable network and application management solutions can succeed for a wide range of customers. Our customers have come to depend on our technology to solve complex problems in very simple ways. We see a number of similarities in the network management, SRM and virtualization management markets, and we think that you will be pleased with our approach.

As you may have heard, Tek-Tools is now a part of the SolarWinds family.

Starting today, we will begin introducing some new voices and perspectives via this blog. Some are the folks who have been working behind the scenes on the Profiler products for years and others are members of the SolarWinds team.

If you like what you see here over the next few weeks, we encourage you to take few moments to visit SolarWinds’ other blogs:

The Whiteboard, our corporate blog, offers perspective and insight into the IT management landscape from Kenny Van Zant, SolarWinds’ Chief Product Strategist, and other SolarWinds execs.

Geek Speak Blog is authored by our Head Geek, Josh Stephens, to provide IT professionals with real-life, practical insight on day to day network and application management.

The Orion product blog offers our Orion users a deeper understanding of our flagship suite of network and application management products from the perspective of the folks who know it best, our Product Managers. The product blog lives on thwack, our 30,000+ member community site.

You can also follow us:

@solarwinds_inc (SolarWinds’ corporate news)

@sw_headgeek (Our Head Geek)

We look forward to sharing our thoughts over time and welcome you to share yours as well.

Virtualization enables organizations to save money, simplify management, and improve their IT infrastructures with its enhanced high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. But, there are many differences between physical and virtual environments and IT managers should keep that in mind before deployment.

The many benefits of virtualization, such as fewer servers to manage and less energy consumed are just a few examples of the benefits that an organization can see. Don’t let server sprawl and platform dependencies prevent your organization from achieving its goals. Take control of your IT infrastructure, cut capital and operating costs while increasing IT service delivery.

While virtualization reduces the amount of hardware in the data center, you still need tools and solutions for managing workloads. Make sure you have the tools and power to manage your entire virtual infrastructure. Tek-Tools Virtual Profiler provides agentless, cross-domain visibility, management, and intelligence from applications through servers, network, and storage. Virtual Profiler allows organizations to reclaim the visibility into their IT environments that was lost when OSs were decoupled from physical servers via virtualization. Profiler enables users to visualize and manage both physical and virtual systems from a single console, using a unified view of the entire environment, to track and respond to utilization of physical resources and offer predictive alerting.

Profiler’s robust monitoring and reporting capabilities enhance control over virtualized environments. Virtual Profiler enables users to maximize availability, track system configurations, and manage the utilization of system components such as processor, memory, and hard disks, helping lower costs and increase IT agility. Profiler is designed to be tailored to the needs of any size business, and it can be integrated seamlessly into many industry-leading enterprise-management solutions.

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow us @Tek_Tools.

Today, SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, announced that it has acquired certain assets and personnel of Tek-Tools.
SolarWinds plans to continue investment in many of the Tek-Tools Profiler products that customers and partners rely on. Specifically, the company is interested in extending the network and application management foundation that they have built in their award-winning Orion product suite to include Tek-Tools’ storage infrastructure and virtualization management offerings.
The press release supporting the announcement is available here, as well as FAQs, which are available here.

Kenny Van Zant, SolarWinds’ SVP and chief product strategist, offers some additional insight into SolarWinds’ interest in Tek-Tools and how the two companies’ offerings will work together on SolarWinds’ corporate blog, the Whiteboard.

Learn more about SolarWinds’ IT management products at www.solarwinds.com.

The newest innovations in virtualized environments offer key benefits for businesses. A virtualized storage area network (SAN) gives you the bandwidth you need for intensive business applications and streaming video technologies. With the right infrastructure to support a virtualized environment, you can both simplify operations and reduce costs. The SAN’s biggest benefit may be its enhanced availability.

One drawback is that SAN performance can be adversely affected when storage runs low, resulting in application performance problems and service level issues. Many IT organizations guard against this threat by overbuying and over provisioning storage, but this frequently results in wasted capital since the additional storage investment is not necessarily utilized.  Organizations are embracing performance and capacity planning practices to avoid unexpected storage costs and disruptive upgrades. The goal is to predict storage needs over time and then budget capital and labor to make regular improvements to the storage infrastructure.

In actual practice, SAN performance and capacity planning can be extremely difficult. For IT staff it can be virtually impossible to predict the storage needs of an application or department over time without a careful assessment of past growth and a comprehensive evaluation of future plans. Many organizations forego the expense and effort of a formal process unless a mission-critical project or serious performance problem demands it. Organizations choosing to sustain an ongoing performance and capacity planning effort will need comprehensive storage resource management.

The benefits of SAN Management outweigh the negatives, especially when you have a virtualization plan in place and the provisions your IT staff need to implement that plan. Tek-Tools’ Profiler Suite goes beyond the basic functions of other tools at a fraction of the cost.  The Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources. Storage Profiler, one of the components of the Profiler Suite, is the only intuitive web-based application that combines reporting, monitoring, and notification across the entire storage stack for DAS, NAS, and SAN management. For the virtualized environment, Profiler for VMware allows organizations to reclaim the visibility into their IT environments that was lost when OSs were decoupled from physical servers via virtualization. Profiler enables users to visualize and manage both physical and virtual systems from a single console, using a unified view of the entire environment, to track and respond to utilization of physical resources and offer predictive alerting.

Check out a 30-Day Free Trial of Tek-Tools Profiler software.

Thinking back ten years we realize how far we have come with virtualization and how many companies have embraced the technology.  In the next phase of virtualization we will need to focus on efficiency, performance and agility.

John Dix, Editor-in-Chief of Network World, Inc., recently said, “virtualization technology essentially reshaped IT in the last decade, but we drank so deep and long at the fountain that we enter the new decade with something of a hangover, and lots of fuzzy questions about what we have wrought.” Dix contends that although virtualization has paid huge dividends in data center/server consolidation efforts, that the list of issues surrounding virtualization is growing as fast as new applications are created.

“Server virtualization was one of the most important data center developments of the past decade, with organizations embracing it enthusiastically for its benefits in cost, IT productivity, business agility and resilience,” said Scott Severson, director of CDW’s server and storage solutions practice.

Based on the successes and benefits that IT departments have already seen from server virtualization, continued, steady expansion of virtualized environments is expected.  As user trust builds and the software vendor community adapts to serve customer demand, the evolution of virtualization will persist.

As Dix and others have been reporting, the most-cited barriers to further adoption of server virtualization are security concerns and compatibility of current hardware or critical software applications with virtualization platforms.

A “virtualization first” strategy requires that network users prove a new software application does not work in a virtual environment before the company will buy a server to support it.  Companies who employ this strategy are typically those that are also more aware of securing critical data on their virtual servers.

Many in the industry agree that we need next-generation tools that address security concerns and compatibility issues in the exponentially expanding virtualized environment.  Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware can address these concerns by allowing organizations to reclaim the visibility into their IT environments that was lost when OSs were decoupled from physical servers via virtualization. Profiler enables users to visualize and manage both physical and virtual systems from a single console, using a unified view of the entire environment, to track and respond to utilization of physical resources and offer predictive alerting.

To experience Profiler for VMware first-hand download a free 30 day trial or download a free white-paper about Profiler for VMware.

VMware announced last week, that it’s acquiring email and collaboration service Zimbra from Yahoo.  With the agreed-upon acquisition of Zimbra , VMware gains a provider of e-mail and collaboration software that boasts a customer base of “over 55 million mailboxes,” said a VMware news release Jan. 12.

The pair may seem like an odd match especially with Zimbra’s deals with Internet providers like Comcast and universities like Stanford.  This means many of its users are probably consumers and students, not corporate users. What proved to be a not-so-perfect fit for Yahoo may prove to be just what VMware needs as it moves to provide more services based around its virtualization offerings.

The acquisition suggests that VMware wants to expand into apps and collaboration. It should also help Zimbra sell itself in large, enterprise-size companies. “This is a first step of many we will take on a journey to offer a complete set of business services to our customers,” Tod Nielsen, of VMware said, “We are moving up the stack.”

It’s expected that VMware will also be willing to invest in improving Zimbra, which means users can expect to see improved features. Some of those features may be real-time communication, collaborative work spaces, and team scheduling.

Nielsen said the first step with Zimbra is to make it available to all of VMware’s vCloud partners. He said the company plans to invest in beefing up the Zimbra solution, including adding additional testing resources and increasing scale. “And we’ll continue to improve synergies between our virtualization engine and the Zimbra technology,” Neilsen revealed.

The Jan 12 news release also said “VMware plans to support existing Zimbra products and open-source efforts while further optimizing Zimbra products for [VMware's] vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, alongside Microsoft, IBM and other messaging and collaboration solutions.”

For help with your virtualization needs check out Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware.

Making IT pros lives simpler and mobile, until recently wasn’treally an option. Within the last several months more iPhone apps have come available that are worth the minimal investment, and some are free.

Bill Detwiler, TR Dojo, and Michael Kassner, TechRepublic, have both reported on the latest iPhone apps that all IT pros IT admins should add to their toolkit, or should at the very least check out.

With the current economy, and the demands on IT admins its becoming increasingly more common place to work while mobile. Carrying a notebook and data card is not nearly as easy as using a smart phone, yet, either one is much easier than dragging a laptop around with us everywhere we go. IT pros are relying on smartphones to perform tasks. If your smartphone of choice is the iPhone, there are several applications you should know about.

There are two categories that Detwiler divided the apps into, and those are networking tools and remote access applications.

Networking Tools:

1 - Network Utility Pro from Codepacity. It costs 99 cents.

It gives you the ability to perform a Ping, a TCP/IP port scan, a GeoIP lookup, and even a Whois query.

2 - Network Ping from MochaSoft. It costs $3.99 (US).

Network Ping is a series of network tests and tools ported over to the iPhone. These include: Ping, Ping a subnet, Traceroute, and Telnet.

3 - SNAP, a Simple Network Area Prober from 9Bit Labs. It costs $1.99.

SNAP locates active devices on a network, displaying available name information about the device, its manufacturer, both its IP and MAC addresses, as well as the services on the device.

Remote Access:

4 - RDP Lite — a very helpful, free application.

RDP Lite allows you to remotely connect to Windows XP Pro, Vista, or Windows 7 machines.

5 - Telnet client, from ThroughPut Inc. It costs $1.99.

This app allows the iPhone to connect to standard telnet server that’s running Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, Cisco, or Windows and has as telnet services enabled. If you want to see more iPhone apps for IT admins, check out Michael Kassner’s list of 10 applications, and Bill Detwilers video & post.

Are there smart phone apps that you are using that you would like to share?

If you have used any of these we would love to hear more about them, what you like and what you don’t, and what you would like to see in an app.

In today’s market, companies depend on technology to keep them up and operating at peak performance. In many cases, downtime can spell disaster. End users don’t want excuses; they expect 100% availability with rapid and consistent response times. Whether it’s interacting with suppliers, serving customers, or managing back-office functions such as accounting, payroll and human resources, companies rely on technology to improve efficiency and maximize profits.

Tek-Tools App Profiler database monitoring software allows administrators to proactively manage and ensure availability in essential applications such as SQL Server and Oracle in the same consolidated, intuitive GUI as the operating systems, NAS devices, SAN devices, and backup applications.

App Profiler for databases provides a simple and easy-to-use tool that allows DBAs to monitor database performance and disk utilization via an integrated database performance and usage poller. Reduce the administrative complexity of managing and monitoring storage allocated to mission-critical applications, reducing total storage costs by eliminating application downtime, and locating poorly allocated space.

If you cannot proactively manage and leverage your critical applications, remotely monitor the performance of your application, maximize the efficiency of your databases, you need to tackle these issues before they become problems.

Tek-Tools App Profiler offers application monitoring and reporting on critical applications and host resources. For most organizations storage administrators and storage managers do not have a clear view into their applications, which requires them to request manual reports and statistics directly from the DBA. App Profiler entirely eliminates this process with its centralized reporting features.

Many organizations servers typically run at 15-20% of their capacity. Businesses now are increasingly looking to server consolidation and virtualization as a way to cut unnecessary costs and maximize their return on investment in the datacenter.

Consolidation reduces the number of physical machines to avoid “server sprawl” – when the servers take up too much floor space. And virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments.

Server consolidation and virtualization are proven solutions that are readily transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way businesses compute. Desktop virtualization can further these money-saving transformations and expand your virtualized business environment.

Benefits

* Consolidates multiple, under-utilized physical servers on a single host, running Virtual Machines
* Reduces workforce/space/kilowatt by leveraging virtualization for server consolidation and agility
* Helps save money because less managing, less space and less kilowatt hours are needed

Use virtualization to save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer hardware you already own. Make your servers work for you, not the other way around.

A cost-effective storage strategy starts with a simple, cost-effective technology that can ensure business continuity, increase operational efficiency, and reduce costs. Tek-Tools Software solutions provide end-to-end visibility and control of your physical and virtualized infrastructure.

]]> http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1522/server-monitoring/server-virtualization/feed http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1518/database-monitoring/dont-forget-the-database http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1518/database-monitoring/dont-forget-the-database#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:22:24 +0000 admin http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/?p=1518

It is critical for organizations that are working within limited IT budgets to get the most out of their virtualization investments. Virtualization is no longer just for large enterprises, today many small and mid-sized businesses are turning to virtualization to reduce costs, reduce energy consumption and get a better handle on their IT resources.

The big question used to be: Why do it? Now many small and mid-sized businesses want to know: How quickly can I get it done?

Microsoft is helping to fuel this trend. By offering Hyper-V as part of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has made it simpler than ever for small and midsized businesses to go to virtual server environments.

For small and mid-sized businesses the benefits of virtualization come down to utilizing current technology to reduce costs without taking on major increases in staffing or overhead.

So, what are the advantages of virtualization?

• Reduced Costs through server consolidation.
  This often helps improve performance as well, since the organization will also upgrade the power and quality of its servers to increase stability and scalability.
• Reduced Energy Consumption to save money.
• Greater Manageability improved backup, greater redundancy and an enhanced ability to recover from disasters and other unplanned disruptions.

“By using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V built-in, it’s a lot easier for virtualization to grow in small to medium businesses. People trust Microsoft and the attitude is, ‘If Hyper-V is here, I may as well try it. If it’s builtin anyway, I may as well give it a try and save some money that way.’” For those small or mid-sized businesses that plan to take the virtualization route – particularly those doing so with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 – it is also important that they look at upgrading their database servers to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to gain the most benefit out of their deployment. “If you’re going to use Windows Server 2008 for virtualization, it makes sense to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 as well,” Rick Heiges, a senior solutions consultant at Scalability Experts.

In today’s challenging economic times, businesses are finding the benefits of virtualization more than just a return on their investment, they are also trying to deliver greater performance with fewer resources.

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow Us @Tek_Tools

Protecting your organizations data in a virtualized server environment adds another layer of complexity for the backup administrator. Traditional backup and recovery methods create gaps in a complete protection strategy - either impacting system’s resources availability or leaving the application data unprotected.

There are software programs that protect the data, but one of the better tools available is the HP Data Protector software which addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive and advanced set of tools to protect the data in virtual server environments. The fully automated integration with VMware simplifies backup management while enabling IT departments to meet the most demanding requirements for Recovery Time and Point Objectives.

HP Data Protector software for VMware delivers:

* A single tool for both physical and virtual environments
* No scripting required
* VMware backup specification done in just three clicks
* Full VMotion support
* Zero-impact backups for both VM and application data
* Cost-effective and simple licensing structure that reduces upfront and future backup costs

Because information is your business (its every organizations business), your IT department must optimise its business continuity and availability capabilities. Your IT department has to meet business-specific recovery objectives, protect your information and make it available around the clock – with limited resources and within tight budgets. As the volume of information continues to grow, data management problems and increased risks will challenge your IT department even more.

Every organization should find appropriate software that can automate high performance back up and recovery from a disk or tape to enable 24/7 business continuity. Organizations need software that helps you reduce IT costs and complexity while delivering the reliability and scalability needed to grow from a single server environment to the largest distributed enterprise infrastructure.

]]> http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1514/data-storage-management/simplifying-the-data-protection-process/feed http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1507/server-monitoring/configuring-servers-for-the-data-center http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1507/server-monitoring/configuring-servers-for-the-data-center#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:02:13 +0000 admin http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/?p=1507

Virtual servers are about as diverse as the organizations that own them, but one thing is clear— a server absolutely must meet the computing needs of the workloads planned for it and often supply reserve computing capacity for workloads moved or migrated to it from other servers.

In order to succeed in virtualization, all enterprises must have a well planned system, and one of the most important aspects of that system will greatly depend on the underlying servers. Even though virtualization introduces a software layer that abstracts each workload from the hardware, the servers must still provide adequate computing resources that fit within an organization’s financial goals.

Enterprises  need to understand the forces that drive server selection, recognize the offerings from different vendors and have a keen knowledge of their internal budgeting. It’s then possible to focus on more specific details such as hardware considerations, operating system choices, systems management decisions and even the virtualization platform itself.

So what kind of servers should you specify for your enterprise? Which vendors and operating systems should you consider? How might virtualization influence your choice?  Selecting a server vendor can be challenging. Not only must the product be appropriate and affordable, but there are also other factors to consider, of which we will address some of those in this post.

CPU configurations are the foundation of all workload processing. Many enterprises if not a large percentage, use smaller servers with four or fewer CPU cores. Mid-sized servers, those with 8-16 cores, make up a large percentage as well. Large SMP servers with more than 16 CPU cores, and Blade servers are also found in many enterprises.

Although CPUs are important, the server’s RAM may be even more important. CPU processing cycles can be shared between workloads if necessary but memory space cannot. What this means is that a server will need enough memory to hold every anticipated workload. Typically, the memory in today’s virtual servers is 8 GB to 16 GB. Some enterprises will need to use servers with more than 16 GB of memory, while others will only need to deploy servers with less than 8 GB of memory.

Network connectivity is a critical attribute for virtual servers, allowing users to access business applications or data repositories. Recently a several surveys were conducted and all used to share data from large groups of enterprises. What was found was that when it came to the type of network connectivity, 68% of respondents said they use standard 1 Gigabit Ethernet as the data center cabling/network backbone. In comparison, 44% of respondents reported that they use Fibre Channel as the backbone of choice. Interestingly, almost 39% of respondents said they use 10 Gigabit Ethernet as the data center/network backbone, indicating strong adoption of the high-speed networking technology, while more powerful standards like InfiniBand have the lowest usage with roughly 4.2%

With so many considerations at hand, its important to have all the information that you can, available to you.  The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow us @Tek_Tools.

It also increases the speed of service, and reduces costs.

Data deduplication is a specific form of compression where redundant data is eliminated, typically to improve storage utilization. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored. For example, a typical email system might contain 100 instances of the same one megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand could be reduced to only 1 MB. Different applications have different levels of data redundancy. Backup applications generally benefit the most from de-duplication due to the nature of repeated full backups of an existing file system.Source: Wikipedia

Data Domain deduplication storage systems dramatically reduce the amount of disk storage needed to retain and protect enterprise data. By identifying redundant files and data as they are being stored, Data Domain systems provide a storage footprint that is 10x-30x smaller, on average, than the original dataset. Backup data can then be efficiently replicated and retrieved over existing networks for streamlined disaster recovery and consolidated tape operations.

The business benefits from data de-duplication start with increasing overall data integrity and end with reducing overall data protection costs. Data de-duplication lets users reduce the amount of disk they need for backup by 90 percent or more. There are several deduplication methods to choose from. This should be sometjhng that is done with careful consideration as  to the best method.

Deduplication Methods

• Chunking and Dedupe
• Chunking Methods
• Source versus Target Dedupe
• Client Backup Deduplication
• Post-process Deduplication
• In-line Deduplication

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow us @Tek_Tools.

Making positive changes to your virtual environment can bring significant benefits to your organization. With all the IT predictions being passed around, we wanted to bring some of those together in a list to see what was really being said by the vast majority of IT departments. Many IT heads say their focus and resolutions for 2010 are focused partially on virtualization storage and deploying more virtualized applications. But wait, that’s not all that has been said.

Virtualization is applicable for all applications, including mission-critical ones, and for disaster recovery. Virtualization was the most disruptive technology of the 2000s, and in 2010 its predicted that we will see:

* Virtualization will bring cloud computing closer to reality.
* VDI will become much more common.
* Solid-state drives for storage will become more popular options for reducing power and cooling (green IT initiatives) and increasing IOPS, which is critical for effective VDI deployments.
* Virtualization will continue to challenge traditional backup environments, making deduplication (of both source and target) more prevalent.
* Management tools by virtualization technology vendors as well as third-party companies will continue to improve as virtualization utilization, reporting, analytics, etc. become more important.
* 2010 will be a year of innovation and acceptance of virtualization, and it will be fun to be a virtualization consultant.
* Decommissioning legacy Virtual Server 2005 environments and cleaning out the test/development pool will bring a sense of control back into the environment and help control VM sprawl. Seriously looking at third-party products to reduce storage requirements
* Using third-party tools will be a big step that will alleviate some virtual server pain points
*Many companies implementing a full migration to vSphere across all virtualization environments.
* Multi-hypervisor advocacy is on the rise. You can see the signs of this new trend in today’s third-party add-on products. Vizioncore, vKernel, Veeam, 5nine, Citrix and other companies have seen the value of unhitching from a single hypervisor and becoming the management layer for everyone at once.
*Consider today’s hypervisor playing field: On one hand you’ve got high-end capabilities with high-end price tags. On the other hand, you’ve got general-purpose virtualization that in many cases has no price tag at all. Now, combine this with the new recognition that not every workload has the same virtual infrastructure requirements, and you can see how multi-hypervisor management tools become a brilliant play.
There have been screaming matchs about whose hypervisor is better, but that’s old news, and it isn’t particularly constructive. Instead, those who are making the most mention of hypervisors are saying its all about implementing the right one in the right circumstances, and layering a pervasive multi-hypervisor solution over the top to manage them all from a single pane of glass.
*In 2010 more IT departments will also replace ESX with ESXi for production-class hypervisors. Moving to vSphere from VI3 is the right time to revisit the hypervisor choice. VMware has made it clear that ESXi is the forward-looking product, and ESX has a sunset date. Migrating to ESXi is not without careful consideration, however. A thorough review to ensure that ESXi will support the larger virtualization ecosystem is a required step for organizations currently using ESX.
*Some mention was made for a new virtualization installation to pilot vSphere for production workloads. Once that is fully tested and accepted, the process will repeat as an upgrade for the rest of the environments, which makes for no surprises either time around.

These are just a few of the predictions and plans that enterprises are making for 2010. Have you made a plan to virtualize your environment?

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

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]]> http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1500/virtualization-management/for-many-it-departments-its-no-longer-making-the-case-for-virtualization-its-about-action/feed http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1494/data-storage-management/the-data-storage-market-already-making-news-in-2010 http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1494/data-storage-management/the-data-storage-market-already-making-news-in-2010#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:36:53 +0000 admin http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/?p=1494

The Data Storage market was a hot topic in 2009 and seems to be a trending topic for 2010. Three analyst reports this week see an improving data storage market in 2010. With so many acquisition deals being talked about in 2009, the biggest (and the only one to be completed) is the EMC deal.

As Dave Raffo, TechTarget.com put it:

Picking the biggest enterprise data storage acquisition of 2009 is a no-brainer. EMC’s $US2.1 billion buy of Data Domain held the storage industry’s rapt attention for six weeks while EMC outbid NetApp and created waves in the backup market. It also was the only major data storage acquisition completed in 2009.

Coming into the new year on the tail of an already good year in 2009, the storage market is already showing a strong penchant for mergers and acquisitions with Dot Hill’s acquisition of storage virtualization software vendor Cloverleaf and rumors of a potentially big acquisition of virtual storage vendor 3PAR.

The stage is set for a great year for the data storage industry, and it out to be an exciting one at that! ChannelWeb has a good run down of the Storage M&A Activity and some of the mergers and aquisitions that are currently being discussed as well as some of the bigger stories of 2009.

It seems we are all interested to see what is going on, and how these mergers and aquisitions will develop and what will come of them technologically speaking. What great new tools, products and services will come from these deals. Its too early to say now, but will be interesting to keep an eye on. For now, we will be focusing on tools to improve your visibility and make your virtualization planning  and implementation smoother.

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow us @Tek_Tools.

I am sure you are all seeing some of the IT predictions for 2010, and how they will impact the industry, some seem spot on some seem completely off. We have put together links to some of the interesting predictions for 2010 here, but if you have any we have missed, we would love to hear about them.

Some of the predictions in these lists are pretty spot on, but some are just plain interesting. VMware had their own post about predictions as well as many IT’s around the net. Virtualization and everything it encompasses will be interesting to watch this year, we certainly hope the industry grows and brings with that growth some stellar new technology and tools.

How would you respond to a power outage that blacked out your servers or a storm flooding your data center? Do you have a plan in place to recover your data and keep your business running after an unforeseen disaster?

The starting point of disaster recovery is a careful examination of all the different kinds of disasters that can happen, and the impact each can have on the business.

Disasters strike all the time, yet many of us don’t take into consideration that it may happen to us. The consequences of being unprepared range from prolonged system downtime and its resulting revenue loss to going out of business completely. Even with such drastic scenarios many IT departments are not prepared to deal with such scenarios.

The key to surviving any disaster or unforeseen event is a business continuity strategy, a set of policies and procedures for reacting to and recovering from an IT-disabling disaster. The main component of a business continuity strategy is a disaster recovery plan (DRP).  The starting point of disaster recovery is a careful examination of all the different kinds of disasters that can happen, and the impact each can have on the business.

The 4 Main Components of Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan:

Step 1: Risk Analysis

The first step in drafting a disaster recovery plan is conducting a thorough risk analysis. List all the possible risks that threaten system uptime and evaluate how imminent they are in your business. Threats should be categorized and prioritized. Common threats would be things like virus attacks and accidental data deletions, to more rare natural threats like floods and fires. Determine which of your threats are the most likely to occur and prioritize them. Using a simple system, rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact. In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high. The results of Step 1 should be a comprehensive list of possible threats, each with its corresponding solution and cost.

Step 2: Establish the Budget

Once you’ve determined your risks, you need to figure out what needs to be done to suppress them, and how much will it cost. You should also know if you can detect a threat before it hits and how to reduce the potential of it occurring. Once you have that down you need to also determin how to minimize its impact to your business. A good place to begin is by presenting the cost of downtime to the business. How long can your business afford to be without its computer systems should one of your threats occur?

Ultimately, you will have to asses which threats the business can tolerate and on which data and applications are most critical to the business and need to be recovered most quickly in a disaster. A company’s disaster recovery budget can vary but they typically run between 2 and 15 percent of the overall IT budget.

Step 3: Develop the Plan

Feedback from other departments within your company will help you shape your DRP procedures. Depending on the amount of time and what information needs to be available, to stay viable, you can then calculate the amount of time it would take to execute the recovery plan and have the business back up in that timeframe. The recovery procedure should be written in a detailed plan or “script”. Your IT department should also have an established recovery team and each staff member should be assigned specific recovery duties. The recovery systems should be tested, configured, and retested 24 hours prior to launching them, which can take anywhere from 40 hours to days to complete.

Defining how to deal with the loss of various aspects of the network (databases, servers, bridges/routers, communications links, etc.) and specify who arranges for repairs or reconstruction and how the data recovery process occurs should also be part of your overall DRP. The script will also outline priorities for the recovery: What needs to be recovered first? What is the communication procedure for the initial respondents? To complement the script, create a checklist or test procedure to verify that everything is back to normal once repairs and data recovery have taken place.

Step 4: Test, Test, Test

Once your DRP is set, test it frequently. You will eventually need to perform a component-level restoration of your largest databases to get a realistic assessment of your recovery procedure, but a periodic walk-through of the procedure with the Recovery Team will assure that everyone knows their roles. Test the systems you’re going to use in recovery regularly to validate that all the pieces work. Always record your test results and update the DRP to address any shortcomings.

As your business changes so should your DRP. Every year you should re-examine your DRP and determine if you still need every part of the plan, if you need to add to it, and if your IT budget will need to be adjusted to accommodate changes to the plan. As you add applications, hardware, and software to your network, you must also bring them into the DRP. New threats to your business should be evaluated and taken into account.

There are a number of options and services available. Consider the true needs of your business and then search to find the best match. Remember, though, that this is an area you do not want to cut corners on.

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As we closed out the year 2009, and look back at what was a good year when we consider what it really could have been, I say we did pretty good as a whole. In looking back there were many great advancements, opportunities, and many realizations that we still have more work to be done. One thing that came to more of a realization for many is the lack of security that many enterprises have, that may not be necessary if proper adjustments are made. VMware also released their APIs for companies to produce tools to help with security.

As we look to the year ahead with great anticipation, we thought we should also take a look back at some of the posts that we enjoyed around the web. Some of the posts in our list come from our blog here, but many come from stories “Around the Sphere”.

We hope you enjoy these posts and feel free to share your favorites with us as well! Happy New Year!

]]> http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1475/uncategorized/wrap-up-of-our-favorite-virtualization-posts-of-2009/feed http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1471/vmware-performance/virtualization-security-will-be-the-topic-of-2010 http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1471/vmware-performance/virtualization-security-will-be-the-topic-of-2010#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:19:32 +0000 admin http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/?p=1471

Okay, that is simply a prediction, and no I am not even remotely good at predictions, but this one I feel pretty secure about saying out loud.

What we learned this year is that although we gain many benefits when we virtualize our environment, we also often have more questions than answers, especially when it comes to securing our virtual servers.

Recently we posted about this very subject, and gave some great information about security, but recently we ran across an article that Dave Rosenberg wrote for CNET. In this article not only is there a great interview, but some really great practical information for all IT management and staff. Dave interviewed Amir Ben-Efraim, who  gave a few examples of things to look out for when deploying a virtualized environment. (Note: This information is focused on VMware solutions, as they are the most prevalent in today’s data centers, and Altor recently became VMsafe-certified.)

Virtual networks have many unique features and functionality, compared to a physical server environment, and they thus require a security solution that is architected specifically for protecting inter-VM traffic without detracting from virtualization’s value, Ben-Efraim said.

* VMs have Internet Protocol and MAC addresses (for each virtual-network adapter), but those change when a VM moves or goes to a different physical host. Any security policy that has been explicitly defined to protect a VM must be adhered to the VM by its, in the case of VMware, Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), rather than the MAC address; otherwise the security “breaks” during VM migration.

* VMs can move from ESX host to ESX host, in order to take advantage of capacity and memory that will optimize performance. Traffic flowing through this VM should not be impeded. So if, for instance, a virtual firewall is statefully handling a session into and out of a VM, the session should continue, as should the application of the security inspection, without disruption. Security policies can carry over as well, provided that they are not tied to a specific address.

* Rather than having IT personnel prepare and connect a physical server, they can simply clone an existing VM, and have it up and running in minutes. The new VM will simply inherit the settings of the parent. However, the inheritance needs to include the security policies and applications in existence for a VM of that type.

When implementing virtualized networks, system architects need to take security into account from start to finish. A solution that’s not secure compromises not just one server, but potentially hundreds of virtualized instances.

If you haven’t read the article by Dave Rosenberg in full, you really should. Dave broke down the information and presented it in a concise manner.

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.

Follow us @Tek_Tools.

]]> http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1471/vmware-performance/virtualization-security-will-be-the-topic-of-2010/feed http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1466/virtualization-management/adoption-of-server-virtualization-technologies-is-changing-the-data-center http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/index.php/1466/virtualization-management/adoption-of-server-virtualization-technologies-is-changing-the-data-center#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:23:47 +0000 admin http://www.tek-tools.com/blog/?p=1466

As technology evolves hypervisors become more sophisticated and the list of available management tools continues to grow. But that’s just the beginning of the changes we should expect for 2010.

Disaster Recovery ought to be on the list of predictions for 2010. As server virtualization technology continues to progress so will disaster recovery considerations and planning. Virtualization in itself is somewhat of a backup, however its not a fool-proof method.

Server virtualization technology is very promising as well as server consolidation. With continued advancements, and more processor cores and memory for the same investment, more and more enterprises will be able to host more VMs and reduce the total number of their physical servers. Server consolidation is one step closer to a fully virtualized data center that abstracts business data from its infrastructure.

If you have tested and deployed server virtualization and worked with VMs your next step would be to investigate using storage area networks (SANs) to centralize all files comprising your VMs in an effort to improve performance. You should keep in mind that you must still put proper backup and recovery practices into place.

Storage virtualization has been around in one form or another for quite some time now, and some believe its use in storage pooling and consolidation may have peaked while others believe that this is just the beginning for other aspects of the technology. Network performance is also shifting, and we are seeing FCoE and 10 GbE slowly emerging to provide the bandwidth needed for critical storage-intensive applications across Ethernet LANs. Deduplication also plays an indirect role by reducing the size of the overall data set, which can improve backup times and dramatically boost data migration speeds to DR sites.

Virtualization Security is something we have recently talked about, it has its weak points, and security flaws can easily surface. Traditional security techniques generally monitor network traffic and its behavior, which is fine when you have distinct physical servers and networking hardware. But, when multiple servers are hosted on the same machine, along with network virtualization technologies, virtual security must emphasize inter-process monitoring of VM interaction.

Virtualization security flaws also surface in server configuration and OS patching. Keep an eye on your hypervisors. This technology is quite well advanced, but, there is a great deal of speculation on where this technology is headed in 2010. With VMware opening their APIs, there will be more security tools developed to help with virtualization security flaws, and more attention to the  importance of security in virtual and cloud situations.

We would love to hear more about your ideas and predictions for 2010!

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If you want to be a better virtual desktop admin, there are 3  skills you need that your co-workers most likely won’t have.

#1 - Be proficient with the operating systems of the desktops you are virtualizing.

#2 - Learn the various Windows deployment options.

#3 - Spend some time learning about the underlying changes to security that Microsoft has implemented since Windows XP.

Brian Madden has created a good list of why these are important as well as links to where to find the information you need. It would be well worth your time to check out his article at TechTarget.

“Over the years, desktop virtualization has faced barriers to adoption, some financial, some technical and some cultural. On the financial side, desktop virtualization often required a more extensive infrastructure overhaul than many businesses wanted to do. On the technical side, poor application performance and a lackluster user experience compared to a full-function PC or laptop raised productivity issues. On the cultural side, neither users nor IT departments embraced desktop virtualization.” Margaret Lewis, AMD

Just as the choices in desktop devices are booming, a variety of desktop virtualization solutions are available from leading providers like Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. However, like any emerging technology, desktop virtualization must meet the needs of both the enterprise and its users.

Virtual desktop management can empower a mobile workforce, simplify desktop deployment and improve endpoint security — but only when you create a virtual desktop strategy that suits your environment. Essentially, it’s best to focus on the core skill sets that most people miss.

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Server virtualization has been steadily growing even despite the economy, however, virtualization security has not.

According to Gartner Research, roughly 18% of server workloads have been virtualized, and Gartner expects that in 2010 it will climb to 28% and by 2012 nearly 50%. Great news for the virtualization industry, but what hasn’t adapted at the same rate is the security or adapting traditional security in this radically changed hypervisor-based architecture. Only 9.6% of participants are deploying any security tools specially designed to deal with virtualization. Another 21.2% expect to do so within the next three years. And 69.3%, though, have no plans at all to do anything specifically aimed at securing their virtual environments.

After a year of talking about the idea of releasing VMware’s security APIs, in April of this year they released the VMsafe APIs with the intention of helping security vendors build products to work with its platform. Some vendors have said that these APIs pressent performance issues. At the moment the biggest demand for VMware based virtualized servers is for monitoring.

The VMware APIs are a positive development because they provide fine-grained visibility into virtual-machine resources such as the introspection ability to examine what’s going on the VMware platform. On the user side, enterprises IT security staff typically have more questions than answers. IT teams are asking questions such as “Is the hypervisor secure? Is the IT ops team doing something they shouldn’t? What visibility do we have to the virtual machines?” says Andrew Jacquith. There is an upside however, the VMsafe program, along with more options from vendors for offline patching and update capabilities, means there’s been progress in security virtualization this year.

Virtualization is bringing change and we’re all seeing the pressure, and the opportunity, for security vendors to optimize the security of virtualized infrastructures. VMware has been among the most aggressive of the virtualization software vendors to open up their technology to optimize security functions. There is a great need as well as a greater enthusiasm for creating security tools for virtualized environments.

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Are you able to inventory and identify all of the parts of your IT infrastructure and how they relate to one another?

To meet the constant demand to deploy, maintain and grow a broad array of services and applications, IT organizations must continually add new servers.  However, as a consequence of purchasing more and more servers, organizations face a growing server sprawl presenting challenges that include:

• Rising Costs.
• Poor return on investment.
• Decreasing manageability.
• Reduced efficiency.

The ease and freedom to deploy servers for individual or small numbers of applications or to add storage often results in infrastructure sprawl. Data centers can become bloated with larger numbers of machines with very low levels of utilization. This leads to inflated operating costs in terms of support, data center capital expense, and utility costs. In addition, network administrators can lose sight of how various components fit into the network and impact availability and performance.

This problem is further complicated by the entry of virtualization technologies into the picture. Organizations may find that while they have controlled the sprawl of physical devices, the number of virtual systems to be managed has exploded-virtual machine sprawl. The ease with which a virtual machine can be created is a root cause of virtual server sprawl. Once created, many machines are abandoned creating a larger storage footprint than necessary, burning valuable storage resources, and increasing backup demands. These problems often negate the original intention of virtualization: to save money and resources.

Enterprises can realize numerous benefits on a daily basis from implementing a VMware server consolidation solution. These benefits include:

• Dramatically lower costs.
• Boosted utilization and availability.
• Improved manageability and reliability. VMware Infrastructure reduces data center complexity by reducing the number of servers that IT organizations need to manage.
• Simplified server provisioning.
• Increased IT efficiency.
• Improved ability to handle future growth.

The Tek-Tools Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into both physical and virtualized infrastructure, all from a single pane-of-glass view. This visibility enables users to reclaim wasted and under-utilized resources that they have lost track of. Profiler allows users to optimize their investment in technology by saving time and money, as well as by streamlining network operations.