Published: October 28 2009, 03:27 PM | no comments
by Jay Fry

I was very amused by the headline on Denise Dubie's Network World article this week about CA's big multi-product announcement. It noted that CA and other management vendors were working toward IT management "nirvana" -- a state that IT has been pretty far away from. Especially when virtualization gets involved.

So, what's the main difference between where we are now and what she described? "Now" might be described (with a little help from a certain '90s grunge band of the same name) as "Come As You Are," "Nevermind," or something equally dire.

"IT management nirvana," on the other hand, requires a coherent way to control your IT environment, regardless of whether you're talking about physical or virtual components. The good news: I think CA is addressing that combined requirement pretty well, and this week's announcements help.

 

One of the things I've liked about the CA story that I've heard since I joined is the way in which the company directly addresses the day-to-day, pragmatic interests of users. Breaking down management silos is one of the keys to that. It's also worth noting that a bunch of other aspects of IT control -- big, grown-up, important concepts -- are front and center. Management, governance, automation, and security are all in the first paragraph of CA's press release regarding virtualization management -- topics that were certainly not highlighted nor addressed by many industry players even just six months ago.

Getting to "IT management nirvana" may not be exactly only about pragmatism, but nevertheless, I think it's some of the practical parts of this week's announcements that are worth noting. In particular:

· Single pane of glass for physical & virtual management. The root-cause analysis capabilities of the new CA Spectrum Service Assurance product take both the physical & virtual into account. It's designed to offer one place to display the impact of the physical & virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. Mike Vizard's CTO Edge write-up about this announcement gives you a peek into what the product's interface looks like, in case you're curious.

· Provisioning across physical & virtual infrastructures. Enabling application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning is hard. Being able to do that across internal physical, virtual, and even external cloud environments is really hard. CA Spectrum Automation Manager has now added this, plus another neat little trick: rapid physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual server provisioning.

· Cross-virtualization management. Add to the things mentioned above broad support for virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, IBM LPAR, and Sun Solaris, and it's another reason it's worth noting. There are a few more holes to fill (Microsoft Hyper-V comes to mind), but it makes a great cross-VM story. What CA Spectrum Automation Manager now has in its cross-virtualization support is beyond what we were doing at Cassatt. You can see some earlier discussion of across-multiple-hypervisor management in this post.

· For VMware lovers out there, there's even more. A couple of the other products (you can find details about which ones in the CA press release) help discover more about VMware and performance issues, including database performance before, during, and after VMware VMotion migrations. In fact, there are a bunch more virtualization features scattered across many product lines that work in conjunction with your VMware technology. (Again, it's kind of nice to have answers to a lot of the broad management questions that customers are asking by virtue of an extensive product portfolio.)

Making a bet that integrated management is better

You'll notice that CA is putting its weight behind the concept that having a unified management capability is more efficient and more powerful for an IT organization. That's not unexpected given the breadth of management capabilities that CA can offer a customer. But, it's also in line with the complex environments that large customers actually have. But is it how they want to manage things?

Mike Vizard, again in his CTO Edge article, weighed in with one view: "At the moment," said Vizard, "customers seem to be favoring [an] integration strategy between existing systems management tools and providers of dedicated virtual machine management tools. Over the long haul, odds are good that customers will ultimately want to see more convergence of these tools rather than continuing to pay separate licensing fees for both," wrote Vizard.

Delivering tools that can provide this convergence, and seeing customers have great success with them, is the thing that will tip the balance. And in the end, that's probably a balance that will favor the customer. Vizard said something similar back in September when CA announced the deal to acquire NetQoS, postulating that "it will also ultimately prove a lot less expensive [to have unified management tools] than managing a whole slew of point products."

All that certainly sounds more like IT management nirvana (and certainly more harmonious and under control than the aforementioned namesake band from Seattle often was). Hopefully, these tools and others it inspires in the marketplace will gets us a step closer.

And, if any of my Nirvana references don't quite hit the mark: All Apologies. Blame Denise. Or her headline writer.

(The original version of this blog post appeared on the Data Center Dialog blog.)

Published: October 26 2009, 01:35 PM | no comments
by Jay Fry

What's riskier: standing at the top of a hill in a thunderstorm while holding a golf club...or commuting to work? Skydiving...or flying to Pamplona and then taking part in the Running of the Bulls? OK, now for the really tough one: juggling knives...or implementing virtualization in production?

Before you answer, you should be warned that humans are quite bad at assessing relative risks. TIME Magazine had a cover story a number of years back on that very subject. The problem in a nutshell, scientists say, is that we're "moving through the modern world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain."

Deploying virtualization doesn't sound all that dangerous, especially compared with some of the scarier items above (like, say, if you lacking knife-juggling skills). If that was your answer, you probably haven't been in an IT shop recently. OK, maybe it's not the same as spending the night in the polar bear cage at the zoo, but it's not without risks. And since risk is a four-letter word in large IT shops that handle mission-critical systems, it's worth figuring out how to get the benefits while minimizing potential problems.

 

The IT Process Institute survey that VMware and CA sponsored and released (actual survey available here) a few weeks back was put together to try to identify what some of the more mature IT shops are doing to deal with worries about risk that virtualization introduces.

The survey itself, which talked to 323 different IT organizations, is a bit daunting to wade through, so I pulled out some interesting tidbits worth highlighting here:

People's sights are set higher than just server consolidation. And they are being aggressive. 72% are aggressively virtualizing production servers, but only 19% are using virtualization just to consolidate servers. The bigger focus is on pursuing high availability and disaster recovery. And, nearly another third are shooting for dynamic resource optimization.

If you use virtualization in production, you are going to have to change operating procedures and controls. The survey found that those organizations with a strong foundation of process controls and procedures were likely to only need to modify the controls they already have in place. That's good news for some of the bigger IT shops and their IT ops staff. However, the more complex things you try to do with virtualization, the survey found, the more modifications should be considered. Kind of straightforward, but worth repeating.

Many mature virtualization users have at one point limited the release of virtualization in production until training requirements and management procedures were taken care of. Maybe it's just a phase everyone has to go through, but it seems many have slowed things down to err on the side of caution. The survey shows, however, that many IT organizations have now reached what it calls "a level of confidence needed to aggressively virtualize business critical systems, including those that are in scope for regulatory compliance." That's impressive, actually, and is a big change from a few years ago.

Here's where the running with scissors part comes in

The study identified a bunch of virtualization bogeymen -- things that seriously worry the IT shops working to deploy virtualization. Some of those worries included:

· It makes a mess (technology-wise). Also known as virtual sprawl (a term that VMware was very sensitive about when we started using this a few years back at Cassatt). This can also hinder compliance efforts.
· Things can hide. There are potential issues with discovery tools not tuned to work with virtual systems.
· Too much of a good thing. There is license compliance risk if virtual servers can appear too easily. You might also exceed available resource capacity.
· Putting all your eggs in one basket. Well-meaning administrators can inadvertently make things riskier by stacking critical apps together on one faulty machine.
· It makes a mess (organization-wise). Aggressive adoption probably means specialized training and new organization structures.
· A perfect target. Security is a big concern by survey respondents, worrying about the hypervisor as a new layer of technology that can be attacked.

Those probably all sound familiar. The interesting point is that the survey said they all added up to this: "putting virtualized systems into production without a well-reasoned set of operational controls creates an unacceptable level of production and compliance risk."

OK, time to hit these problems head-on, then.

The survey's recommendations for reducing virtualization risk

So what's a good way to start addressing those risks (besides hiding the scissors)? The survey has three sets of recommendations. I've noted where in the survey to find them so you won't have to dig through it yourself:

· 11 practices for those organizations with "baseline maturity" (generally doing server consolidation-type things with business critical systems). The focus for those orgs talks about host access, configuration controls, VM provisioning, and improvements to capacity & performance management. See page 14 of the survey for the exhaustive list.
· 25 practices for "highly mature, but static" uses of virtualization (generally looking at HA & DR issues). There the suggestions are about configuration standardization, approved build images for provisioning, and using a "trust but verify" approach for changes. It takes all of page 17 of the survey to list these suggestions.
· For the brave ones doing "highly mature, but dynamic" things with their virtualization, the research suggested 12 items around configuration discovery & tracking, change approvals, capacity management, and the overall process maturity needed to support automation. See page 22 for this list.

Some virtualization management suggestions

One of the suggestions that's "highly desirable" is a coordinated view between your physical and virtual environment, according to an October 14 Computerworld article from Beth Schultz about "Getting a Grip on Multivendor Virtualization." CA's Stephen Elliot was quoted in the article talking about some of this survey's findings. "A lot of customers are recognizing that virtualization is great, and works wonders," said Elliot, "but certain environments will not be virtualized and so they need to figure out how to manage and automate both worlds together."

I've posted before on the Data Center Dialog blog about why the automation side of the equation is important, as have Laurie MacVittie and others. The report chimes in here, too: "Many view automation used to manage dynamic virtual resources as a prerequisite for tapping internal and external cloud computing resources." But that's a subject for another day.

The Computerworld article also has some good comments about the importance of being able to manage across multiple virtualization vendors' environments, something that has also been discussed in Data Center Dialog, but was outside the more process-oriented scope of this particular survey.

"The key thing that pleasantly surprised us [in the study] is that customers right now...are thinking more proactively about the need to manage their virtual infrastructure," Elliot said in an interview with Jeffrey Burt of eWeek. "Just because they've got new innovations [in their data centers] doesn't mean that their need for management just disappears."

That, after all, would be pretty risky.

(The original version of this blog post appeared on the Data Center Dialog blog.)

Published: October 26 2009, 09:50 AM | no comments
by Ben Scheerer

Gartner Symposium & ITxpo wrapped up last week in Orlando, Florida, and, as expected, pressed on some very key issues for IT, primarily for the enterprise audience. Included in those were a lot around cloud and virtualization; this wasn’t a big surprise.

The sessions on cloud were numerous and all well attended. The analysts covered what seemed to be every possible angle from the enterprise adoption viewpoint, including associated risks, benefits, adoption models, maturity, public vs. private vs. hybrid, etc…

Management of these complex cloud models, from both the enterprise and service provide perspective, seemed to be a consistent theme among the half dozen or so sessions I attended on cloud. I thought it was very interesting how IT maturity plays a larger role than ever, especially when preparing for new and very transformational IT models such as cloud.

Another theme that reoccurred at the Gartner event was that the decisions that IT is making in virtualization today sets the stage and ability for IT cloud in the future. In essence, well-managed virtualization is one step closer in maturity towards successfully adopting and realizing the benefits of a private, public or hybrid cloud model into your IT strategy of delivering additional value at a lower cost.

CA launched some very important products today that support these themes from Gartner ITxpo. The 12 new and enhanced virtualization management products are designed to assist the enterprise in harnessing virtualization’s full potential, as well as preparing the enterprise for the next generation data center, which includes cloud. 

 

Published: October 26 2009, 09:48 AM | no comments
by Ben Scheerer

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Gartner ITxpo wrapped up last week in Orlando Florida and, as expected, pressed on some very key issues for IT primarily for the enterprise audience.  Included in those were a lot around cloud and virtualization, not a big surprise.  The sessions on cloud were numerous and all well attended - the analysts covered what seemed to be every possible angle from the enterprise adoption viewpoint including associated risks, benefits, adoption models, maturity, public vs. private vs. hybrid, etc...  Management of these complex cloud models, from both the enterprise and service provide perspective, seemed to be a consistent theme among the half dozen, or so, sessions I attended on cloud.  I thought it was very interesting on how IT maturity plays a larger role than ever, especially when preparing or new and very transformational IT models such as cloud.  CA is launching some very important products and this week to support management of virtualization (http://ca.com/virtualization) in line with assisting the enterprise in harnessing virtualization's full potential, as well as preparing for the next generation data center, such as cloud.  A theme that reoccurred at the Gartner event was that the decisions that IT is making in virtualization today, sets the stage for what IT will deliver in computing models, such as cloud, that rely on the foundation of virtualization technologies, all driven by management and automation of virtualization into the existing fabric of IT.  In essence, well-managed virtualization is one step closer in maturity towards successfully adopting and realizing the benefits of a private, public or hybrid cloud model into your IT strategy of delivering more value at a lower cost.