‘Sprawl’ is one of those overused terms in virtualization. Although to date, in my opinion, there is not a better description out there that can conjure up fear and groans in equal measure. Simply put, it is synonymous with ‘management overhead’!

Today I’m going to write about another kind of sprawl (like you really need another kind of sprawl!) - Virtualization Vendor Sprawl.

Over the years many niche players have arisen to fill in the technology gaps that were left open by mainstream virtualization. In most organizations the process of vendor consolidation is one that most growing or acquisitive enterprises will face from time to time. It’s not a task that is relished by those involved and it always proves to be a tightrope walk of cutting costs without cutting corners.

If you’ve already been through this exercise then there is not much I can add to your experience with this article. But I would ask that you share your experiences at the end of this article, for the benefit of our readership. For those about to take this route, I hope I can give you some useful points to consider.

First, what are the benefits of vendor consolidation? Vendor Consolidation has many advantages if it is done correctly, such as:

• Reduced number of contracts/documents
• Reduced number of contacts
• Easier negotiation/purchasing/procurement
• Better discount levels
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Renewals streamlined
• Service levels are consistent
• Support is consistent
• Product interaction/integration should be simplified

Sounds great doesn’t it? But before you throw out that entire extraneous product and give all your money to the largest gorilla in the room, here are a few things to consider:

• How do we get to that point?
• Are you trading-off against ‘best of breed’ technologies?
• Does vendor ‘lock-in’ give you the best deal all-round?

In addition to looking at the technologies that a company offers, in this day and age you  also need to look at their balance sheets and financial stability to make sure that they are capable of going the distance with you.

When collecting technologies together, some products may not fit neatly into categories in the same way their physical counterpart technologies did. For example, does virtualization backup fit with virtualization technologies or backup technologies, or neither? Does it fit with DR technologies?

Are you at risk of trading off ‘best of breed’ technologies? This is always the biggest concern; throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. Despite virtualization being relatively new, it is mature enough to have multiple vendors with overlapping technologies. This means you should probably investigate how many candidate vendors can give you more. You probably won’t find a vendor that will deliver everything, but it makes sense to choose one that can deliver on a lot of things and is not focused on a single, specific aspect of virtualization.

This leads to the last point, vendor lock-in. If you bet the farm on one single vendor, then this can prove painful if not risky. It could affect your agility and ability to manage your virtualization investment. Just remember though, this process is designed for those who are in this for the long-haul. With that in mind the vendors you choose should be selected with that in mind and therefore start-ups will probably not figure in your list. The larger companies are capable of weathering the economic storms. But also, they can make the strategic acquisitions that ultimately will add value to your existing investment.

Vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Quest continually make acquisitions to help their customers “bridge the gap” by ensuring that best of breed is not lost by vendor consolidation.

Please feel free to share your experiences.

-Paul Martin

One of the most talked about areas in systems monitoring these days seems to be capacity planning; and it’s one that’s heavily clouded. The main reason is that every environment is different. Even though we all tend to run similar application stacks, how we use them is unique to our individual behaviors and business requirements.

In most cases this causes us to look for tools that can develop simple models, with virtualization being put into those models. Recently I spoke with several SMB & Enterprise level users and they told me that they’re essentially looking for a way to take a ‘slice’, and to know how many of those slices they still have and when they’ll run out. This approach assumes 100% utilization of the resources, and that’s just not realistic.

The problem is that people are still thinking about capacity from a physical hardware perspective where you get X resources because it may need X resources. With all the benefits that come with virtualization it’s time for us as a community to develop new models that can adapt to each environment, and better yet accurately predict performance and capacity bottlenecks. This is why I’m a strong proponent of looking at each individual workload and correlating those workloads vs. ‘servers or vms’.

A virtual machine is nothing more than a shim, a place to wedge an application that performs some task. If you start to look at the VM as nothing more than an application workload, that will model far better to true capacity planning for a specific resource. Does 1 vCPU for a file server equal 1 vCPU for a SQL server? Certainly not, but the general capacity models don’t take that into account. Likewise disk utilization on a file server is going to be far higher than that of a print server. So looking at the application stacks or workloads is required if you want any level of clarity. In the end this will lead to better utilization of resources, and best of all it can help predict when new hardware will be required for net-new capacity with a relatively high level of accuracy.

-Thomas Bryant

For those that haven’t noticed, Windows PowerShell has really taken the world by storm over the last 12 to 15 months.  Microsoft has a strong internal initiative to provide PowerShell support for all of their server applications and operating systems.  The technology caught on so well that we are starting to see heavy usage of PowerShell outside of Microsoft as well.  All three major hypervisor vendors are now providing PowerShell capabilities in their products via PowerShell cmdlets.  In fact, we are now seeing some storage vendors like Compellent and NetApp driving their own PowerShell initiatives.

What does all this PowerShell mean?  Simply put, we now have a single technology that can be used for scripting automation and management that crosses all four major layers of the virtualization stack.

1. Underlying Infrastructure (Storage and potentially Network)
2. Hypervisor
3. Operating System
4. Applications

The adoption of, and education surrounding PowerShell is a hot strategic goal for systems administrators in 2009 and heading into 2010.  At Vizioncore we are also embracing PowerShell as a strategic internal initiative to provide maximum flexibility to our customers and integration partners.  You will see us pushing forward with projects like Virtualization EcoShell, which is entirely focused on PowerShell management, as well as with our new vRanger 4.0 DPP.  PowerShell will be changing the way people think about managing their infrastructures, and we are prepared to be on the front line of this movement.

In order to use PowerShell scripting to resolve this issue you will need two components at a minimum:

1. Microsoft Windows PowerShell - Command line shell and scripting language that helps IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity (I’m not that cheasy, I ripped it off from Microsoft’s website).
2. VMware Infrastructure Toolkit - Powerful yet simple command line interface for task based management of the VMware Infrastructure Platform (again, stolen).
3. Virtualization Ecoshell^™ (optional) - Desktop application for novice and expert IT administrators leveraging Windows PowerShell scripts across their multi-platform virtual environments.

Check back on this blog as I provide Tips and Tricks, as well as real-life examples of how PowerShell management of your Virtual Infrastructure can open up some significant possibilities to you as an administrator.  For now, I’ve provided some useful links to help you get started.

• Virtualization Ecoshell™
• VMware VI Toolkit Community
• Alan Renouf’s Virtu-AI Blog
• Hal Rottenberg’s Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell TFM

Thank you,

Scott Herold