The Seven Challenges

of VMware Management

By Eric Siebert

What’s in?

Virtualization adds very much efficiency to but it also creates new challenges.

Enterprise monitoring

Monitoring & Reporting

Capacity planning

Storage management

VM sprawl

Business view

Change management

Challenge 1. VM Sprawl

VM Sprawl

Virtual Machine Sprawl to virtual environment is what urban sprawl is to cities

It contributes to:

uncontrolled growth of virtual machines

over-allocation of resources.

Why VM Sprawl is the thing to happen?

Virtualization changes the approach to server provisioning.

It took weeks (if not months) with physical servers, it takes 2 Minutes now with VMs

Creating a new VM is way too simple:

● Tell the VMware admin your requirements (CPU, memory, disk);

● VMware admin selects a host and completes a wizard to create the VM.

Why is VM Sprawl BAD?

VM Sprawl makes the management of your virtual environment more difficult and can even cost you real money:

Every VM in an environment consumes resources >> has a cost associated with it.

So, while VMs may seem free, they are actually not!

How to avoid VM Sprawl?

implement approval process that requires justification and tracking of requests to create new VMs.

implement chargeback by monitoring metrics on host resource usage so you can help the business understand the real cost of VMs.

document any new VMs and monitor their lifecycles; delete VMs if they are no longer needed.

monitor VM resource usage to identify VMs are no longer active and VMs that no longer need the assigned resources.

Best Solution to Prevent VM Sprawl

Veeam ONE™ provides tools that can help you identify and stop VM sprawl so your virtual environment doesn’t become a virtual junkyard.

Challenge 2. Storage Management

Storage Management

Managing storage is always a challenge;

You have to ensure storage performs well and has enough capacity for your VMs;

One of the biggest challenges with storage management lies in VM snapshots and thin disks as they can over time exhaust disk capacity!

Insufficient disk space may result in VMs being suspended or even data corruption!

Input-Output Bottlenecks

The path between a VM and storage is complicated, the I/O has to go through many different components and queues. The following factors may also cause I/O bottlenecks and affect storage performance:

Disk alignment;

Multi-pathing;

Improper configuration and settings;

Excessive I/O;

Improper architecture/design;

Too many snapshots.

How to avoid I/O bottlenecks?

To avoid I/O bottlenecks you need the right tool that can monitor your storage resources and alert you when performance is degrading.

Veeam ONE provides full storage monitoring capabilities to help you prevent I/O bottlenecks, including:

Disk space monitoring;

I/O latency monitoring;

Disk issues monitoring;

Datastore monitoring.

Veeam ONE also helps you keep an eye on over-provisioned datastores, provides utilization trend analysis and assists in optimizing VM placement on datastores.

Challenge 3. Business Views

Structuring your environment

The number of virtual machines that can run on a host is increasing at a rapid pace.

This can pose a problem when VMs with different functions and from different departments and business groups get lumped together on the same host.

It makes chargeback and reporting quite a challenge.

What your business needs

For more efficient VM management your environment should be categorized with your business needs in mind, such as:

Service level agreements (SLAs);

Departments (sales, marketing, R&D, IT);

Company or business unit;

Geographic location;

Server role (database, email, web, authentication);

Operating system (Windows versions, Linux Distros).

A better way to do this

You can do this manually using standard VM folders, but there is an easier and more comprehensive way to do this!

Veeam ONE:

Provides an automated, flexible and dynamic way to group objects of your infrastructure in different categories;

Allows you to edit attributes both individually and in mass;

Do it all with ease!

Challenge 4. Change Management

Why should changes be a challenge?

Virtualization is all about the sharing of common infrastructure components and resources between many VMs.

This is why seemingly innocent changes can have really big impact on entire virtual environment.

Changes can have ripple effects across all the hosts and have large scale consequences.

“It’s been working fine, what’s happened?”

This is the first question to arise when a problem occurs.

To know the answer, one should know exactly what has changed in the infrastructure.

That’s why change tracking can play a big role in troubleshooting.

Keep an eye on all the changes

Veeam ONE automatically captures all changes that occur across all the hosts in your infrastructure.

With Veeam ONE you will always know the “who, what, where, when and how” of every change.

Veeam ONE also provides instant visibility of changes allowing you to easily isolate the root cause of performance slowdowns and availability issues and get your environment back on tracks within minutes.

Challenge 5. Monitoring & Reporting

Performance monitoring

Monitoring performance in a virtual environment is much more complicated than with physical servers because physical resources are shared by many VMs.

In a virtualized environment there is more to monitor >> interpreting the statistics and results can be difficult.

Performance Statistics Tornado

There is an overwhelming number of performance statistics for VMs. Don’t try to analyze and understand them all – most of them you don’t even need to bother with!

Not to get lost in this “statistics tornado” you should focus on those of them that really matter:

CPU Ready

Mem Swapped

Disk GAVG

Disk Commands

Net Usage

Pro-active, not re-active

When it comes to performance of your whole virtual infrastructure you can’t afford being reactive, you should be pro-active!

Veeam ONE not only monitors at the virtualization layer but it also provides visibility into the guest OS and provides capabilities for managing processes there so that you can prevent any performance problem to occur!

Challenge 6. Capacity Planning

Keep the resources well-balanced

Balance of resources is critical for virtual infrastructure!

If resources are not balanced, it can lead to wasted resources that cannot be used:

E.g., if a host with plenty of other resources available runs out of physical memory, it limits the number of VMs that can run on it.

Wasted resources

Having wasted resources reduces your ROI and decreases efficiency!

This is why proper capacity planning is very essential.

Calculating capacity needs

Trying to calculate your capacity needs is also complicated by the need to have sufficient spare capacity available to be used to support features like VMware High Availability (HA) admission control.

In order for HA to work properly, you have to leave enough spare capacity to support the loss of one or more hosts so that VMs can be started on other hosts when needed.

Identify your needs & plan for future

Veeam ONE makes it easier to:

plan future capacity needs

Identify resource optimizations.

It tracks your virtual environment’s configuration as well as trends based on past and current resource utilization.

Veeam ONE indeed makes capacity planning easy and efficient!

Challenge 7. Enterprise Monitoring

Different Management Silos

Every data center has many separate management silos for all the various technologies/products/applications.

Trying to manage all these silos can be particularly challenging, and using multiple tools to manage multiple systems can result in multiple headaches.

Having fewer panes of glass to look through makes management much easier.

VMware monitoring with SCOM?

Most data centers that use VMware as their virtualization platform also use Microsoft for the operating system and applications running within their VMs.

If you are already using SCOM and SCVMM, why not use these to manage VMware as well?

You will get a single management pane of glass that allows for centralized management and monitoring of multiple layers within your environment.

All you need is the right tool to integrate VMware with SCOM.

Veeam Management Pack

Veeam Management Pack is a unique software package that provides seamless integration of VMware into SCOM environment.

With Veeam Management Pack you can use all the capabilities of Microsoft SCOM for efficient VMware monitoring and management from one console!

More questions?

If you have any more questions on this or any related

topic, don’t forget to visit our treasury of free educational

content at www.veeam.com/whitepapers

And don’t forget to add your feedback!

Thank you!