- To Manage or How to Manage, That Is the Question
In the last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of moving my lab and as my environment gets bigger, it gets increasingly difficult for me to stay on top of it. In talking with customers, many of you share the same problem and are looking for tools to make managing your environment easier and more efficient too. Our criteria just differ depending on the projects, applications and lines of business we’re trying to manage.
There are a lot of tools out there for monitoring datacenter environments, and there are many different components. The key is to consolidate the dashboard while still reporting the needed metrics for planning. Anyone who has tried to configure a tool across their enterprise understands there are tools that can grab just about any piece of data, but customization allows that data to be useful. There will need to be many different views based on the job function of the reviewer. Most of the customization time is spent getting the data out of the repository and displaying it in a way that makes it easy to manage and report on the environment.
I’ve decided on a couple of tools – VMware Operations Manager and EMC Data Protection Advisor – for my environment, and will be tasking my team to bring them together. I will be focusing on a couple of aspects of my environment that will help with the testing:
- Storage consumption in my virtual environment. I’m getting a little tired of people asking for virtual disks of 500 GB but only leveraging 10% of the space over a few months. We will be leveraging this to size future projects and make sure unconsumed space is allocated to other people.
- Performance of my VMware environment from a CPU, memory and disk perspective, and I wouldn’t be complete if I wasn’t looking for backup performance and contention. We will be leveraging this report to see how backup is affecting our production environment.
I’ll be using this blog to keep you posted on our implementation. Be sure to keep checking back for updates on our progress. Also, if you have anything that you think would be good to add or want to share any stories, comment away!
I believe that this vision seperates the EMC portfolio from other management offerings in the partner community. For some time, I have worked with EMC partners that share Mr. Zolla's belief that linking Operations Manager with Data Protection Advisor provides the core of a data center management strategy for small to medium sized organizations. These organizations do not have the staffing levels to support an enterprise resource management solution, but still have to deal with issues around scaling capacity under management and virtual infrastructure performance management. Our thanks to Mr. Zolla for starting this thread, and our hopes to be of some assistance to his team's efforts to help weave Data Protection Advisor into virtual infrastructure management tool suites.
- Michael Kestigian, January 2, 2012 at 11:09 am