Five Myths of Virtualization Management

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Five Myths of Virtualization Management
Rick Ruskin, VP Sales eG Innovations,
Inc. http//www.eginnovations.com IT Expo Booth
749
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April 13, 2020
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Myth 1
Myth Virtualization makes monitoring easier
because there are fewer servers to monitor.

• Truth Virtualization makes monitoring more
  complex.
• Same number of operating systems and applications
  to manage as in a physical world.
• New virtualization components and functions need
  to be managed Hypervisor, Service Console,
  Hardware, Datastores, LUNs, vSwitches,
  vNetworks, Resource pools, Clusters, DRS,
  vMotion, Thin provisioning, Resource
  reservation,

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April 13, 2020
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Myth 2
Myth Virtualization offers ways to reserve
resources. I can just reserve resources for
my VMs and they will not interfere with
each other.

• Truth Resource reservation is not always
  possible nor efficient.
• Not every resource can be reserved statically.
  CPU and memory can. Disk and Network cant.
• Static reservation of resources precludes
  resource sharing. Results in operational
  inefficiencies.

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April 13, 2020
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Myth 3
Myth Virtualization technology allows VMs to be
provisioned rapidly on-demand. The
virtualization teams job is managing VMs
and they can operate independent of the
enterprise IT ops team.

• Truth Virtualization monitoring has to be
  integrated into the business service
  management framework.
• Virtualization is a critical component of an IT
  infrastructure.
• A problem in the virtual infrastructure can
  impact applications running on it and hence,
  affect the business services.

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April 13, 2020
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Myth 4
Myth Virtualization platforms offer a lot of
metrics. These metrics reveal all I need to
know to monitor my VM infrastructure.

• Truth An inside view of a VM is necessary to
  understand what is happening inside a VM.
• Virtualization platform metrics indicate the of
  physical resources of each VM takes.
• They do not reveal why a VM is taking excessive
  resources.

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April 13, 2020
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Myth 5
Myth Virtual desktops are just VMs. So the same
tools used for monitoring virtual servers
can be used for monitoring virtual
desktops.

• Truth VDI monitoring is not the same as VM
  monitoring.
• The workload of a virtual desktop depends on the
  user who is logged in to that desktop. Therefore
  VDI monitoring should be based on USER ACTIVITY -
  not VM activity.
• The virtualization platform is only one of the
  tiers in a VDI. Therefore monitoring of every
  layer of every tier, including connection
  brokers, terminal servers, profile servers,
  license servers, etc., is required.
• Processing overhead can make running a full-blown
  monitoring agent on each virtual desktop
  impractical. Therefore an agentless method to
  get the inside view of each desktop is needed.

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April 13, 2020
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The Truths of Virtualization Management

1. Virtualization makes monitoring more complex.
2. VMs can and will interfere with each other if the
   infrastructure is not carefully planned and
   monitored.
3. Virtualization must be monitored in the context
   of the business services it supports in order to
   be effective.
4. Management tools included with virtualization
   platforms fail to look inside the VMs to
   understand why resources are being used.
5. VDI monitoring is more complex than VM monitoring
   and has different requirements as compared to VM
   monitoring.