Cloud Computing/Virtualization 2.0 is all about
Manageability
Key considerations for a
Cloud Computing Ready Monitoring Solution
Bala Vaidhinathan
Chief Architect
[email protected]
1
Agenda
• Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing
• Management challenges with Cloud Computing
• Key considerations for monitoring Cloud Environments
• How to ?
• Summary
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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
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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:
•
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Slide 4
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
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Virtualization 2.0 / Cloud Computing
• Saas, Paas or Iaas
•
What is right for you?
• Key challenges - Consumer:



Slide 5
Lack of visibility.
Management tools not mature enough to handle this explosion in technology.
Service levels
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Finger-Pointing
Siloed organizations result in the “It’s not me!” syndrome
Hey, this is
not working
End User
Not our
problem
Talk to the
Other guys
LAN
Admin
ERP Admin
Everything
Is OK
Domain
admin
Firewall
admin
No other
complaints
Server admin
Slide 6
Sys admin
All lights
Are green
Client Admin
The server
is working OK
Looks
fine
VMs are
lightly loaded
VMware admin
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We don’t
see anything
wrong
Database
Admin
Not mine
either
Application
Admin
Challenges in monitoring Cloud Computing
For a technology that makes delivery and
scaling of computing easier,
Cloud computing presents a ton of challenges in
monitoring and management.
•
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
Key Considerations for
Monitoring Cloud Environments
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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



Slide 9
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
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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



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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.
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Cloud Ready Monitoring
 Inside view of a VM with clear problem demarcation
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
“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?
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Cloud Ready Monitoring
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
Scalability

Ease of installation and configuration
Tracking Service Levels



Slide 12
Ability to provide different models of Service Levels
Dynamic Service Levels
Equally important for Providers and Consumers
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Cloud Ready Monitoring
Automated root-cause diagnosis
Media Streaming
Database Queries
Multi-tier infrastructures are difficult to manage.
Adding dynamic Computing units to the mix makes the
problem even harder!!!
Disk reads
Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses
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Cloud Ready Monitoring
Automated root-cause diagnosis at business service levels

Differentiate cause from the effects
Suppose the database server is 50% slower than normal
USER
FIREWALL
Slide 14
WEB SERVER
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APP SERVER
DB SERVER
Cloud Ready Monitoring
 Support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI)
Different requirements for monitoring application server and virtual desktops
Virtual Application Environments
Virtual Desktop Environments
Few VMs (<10) per ESX server
30-40 VMs per ESX server
VMs mostly powered on all the time
VMs 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
Not feasible to deploy an agent per OS / VM
 Higher deployment overhead, time-consuming
 Higher licensing cost, higher resource consumption
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Cloud Ready Monitoring
Virtualization 1.0
Virtualization
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
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
Lets take a closer look...
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Integrated Dashboard
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)
Monitor physical and virtual
servers, networks, applications
from a single console
(Req #1)
Dashboard customized for each
administrator – “personalized
views” (Req #7)
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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).
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Virtual Desktop Monitoring
View of all Virtual Desktops on a VMware ESX Server
Clicking on an icon drills down
to the “inside” view of that
virtual desktop. (Req #4).
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Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM
View of all virtual resources used by a VM
Problem is low virtual disk
space.
Clicking on a magnifying glass
“diagnosis” button lets us drill
down deeper into the
information supporting a
particular metric.
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Application-Aware “Inside” View of a VM
List of the top 10 memory consuming processes of a VM Guest
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Auto-Baselining of Metrics
Time-varying alert threshold based on historical data
Reduces system configuration
time and produces more
accurate alerting (Req #5)
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Layer Model for Root-Cause Diagnosis
The component layer model allows clear problem demarcation:
Is it the Network? Physical server? VM? Application?
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Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example
Layer model for the MS SQL Server
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.
The problem is with disk
activity of Disk0.
There is a major alert
condition at the OS layer.
Disk write times are over
11 seconds even though
there is little disk activity!
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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.
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Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example
Layer model for the VMware ESX Server
Something is wrong with
CPU usage of the ESX
console.
The problem is at the OS
layer.
The ESX console is taking
up close to 50% of the
server’s physical CPU.
This is very unusual !
Clicking on the diagnosis
button lets us find out
why.
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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 !
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Automated Root-Cause Diagnosis Example
All of the alert conditions are also summarized in one screen:
An Alarm Console.
Color coding clearly distinguishes the root-cause from the effects.
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.
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Custom Service Levels – Graphical view
Custom Service Levels – Metric view
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
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Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready
Virtualization 2.0 Ready Requirement
What 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
Visibility into physical server and virtual
machine configuration and performance
 “Outside” view of performance of each VM
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
 Support for VMware VI3, Citrix XenServer, Solaris Containers and
Logical Domains (LDoms), and MS Virtual server
 Monitoring of the virtualization platform – the hypervisor, VM kernel, console
 Proactively alerts when these thresholds are violated
Automatic correlation for pinpointing the rootcause 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
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Summary – Virtualization 2.0 Ready
Virtualization 2.0 Ready Requirement
What 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
Dynamic and Configurable Service Levels
 Ability to provide customizable service views depending on the
situation
 Personalized views for each user limiting their view to the
portions of the infrastructure that they are responsible for.
 Ability to dynamically allocate service view based on patterns
observed
For more information
Web: www.eginnovations.com
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