Operational Analytics –
Managing Virtualized Infrastructure

Achieving a good initial placement for your virtual machines is critical, but so is maintaining the order of the environment. Virtualized infrastructure requires new intelligence to be leveraged in order to keep these dynamic environments optimized.

CiRBA’s Operational Analytics continually audit environments providing the management controls required to optimize and govern virtualized infrastructure. LARGER VIEW

Optimizing Utilization through New School Capacity Planning

In order to keep a virtualized environment optimized, organizations need to establish new processes surrounding capacity planning and management. CiRBA’s advanced workload analysis enables organizations to manage virtual machine placements in ways not previously possible. CiRBA’s Proactive Resource Placement capability advances workload planning and management by leveraging historical utilization patterns and personalities, business rules and configuration constraints to proactively place VM’s to best serve the coming workload. This unmatched proactive analysis combined with integrations to virtual infrastructure management software such as VMware Virtual Center offers organizations the safest, most accurate way to truly take advantage of resource pools.

Workload Re-balancing

Virtual machine rebalancing plays a key role in ensuring an environment remains optimized despite constant change. CiRBA enables organizations to take a fresh view of the environment and optimize placements based on current requirements and constraints to rebalance workloads and achieve better utilization.

Visibility into VMware clusters and images LARGER VIEW

Controlling Virtual Machine Motioning

New technologies for motioning virtual machines are very powerful, but can also put organizations at risk if not controlled properly. VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) together with VMotion motions virtual servers based on workload balancing criteria, without consideration for the technical and business constraints that may have been used to determine initial placement. It is critical that organizations establish rules to eliminate potential conflicts and ensure that security zones, business process constraints, compliance issues, disaster recovery and chargeback systems are respected and that the virtualized infrastructure remains optimized over time. While DRS supports affinity and anti-affinity rules to identify where systems should or shouldn’t reside, these capabilities must be programmed manually. This is problematic in that data center environments and constraints are constantly changing. CiRBA analyzes environments on a regular basis and automatically populates DRS rules enabling organizations to take advantage of dynamically balanced workloads without violating critical boundaries and randomizing the environment.

Defining Appropriate Rules for VMware’s DRS Prevents Randomization of Virtualized Environments LARGER VIEW

Avoiding Re-sprawl

Server sprawl can easily re-occur within a consolidated environment. CiRBA audits new applications in staging environments and finds the best place for those applications within existing infrastructure, enabling “Forward Consolidation”. As part of an overall application deployment process, these steps ensure that new hardware is purchased only when all other options are exhausted.

The ease with which new virtual machines can be created also poses a threat of virtual sprawl. CiRBA’s audits help managers to keep track of what has been created to control and curb sprawl.

Find a Place for New Software on Existing Infrastructure to Avoid Resprawl LARGER VIEW

Hardware Refresh

Hardware refresh is a necessary and ongoing process within data centers. However, upgrades have a negative impact on utilization rates as new hardware typically offers increased capacity. CiRBA analyzes environments to reveal the impact of new hardware options on utilization rates, enabling organizations to examine various options for further consolidation and the composition of virtualized infrastructure to ensure efficiencies are maximized and risk is managed.