Over the past several years, virtualization has emerged as a “priority” IT initiative as deployments yield cost savings through improved operational and business agility in addition to hardware consolidation. Infrastructure and operations administrators drive toward increased cost savings by improving system management efficiency and IT productivity. Often we examine the administrator-to-virtual machine (VM) ratio, which measures the number of VMs each administrator can manage, to access efficiency. Administrators that inject automation into virtual environment management can increase efficiency by reducing time associated with VM configuration and control. Automation at various points in the virtual machine lifecycle will save time and eliminate manual and repetitive tasks that often introduce errors. However, while the right automation can significantly reduce your administrator to VM ratio, it is important to establish policies and carefully examine your approach to automation to avoid over-utilization or the creation of unnecessary VMs resulting in VM sprawl and more management work.

1. Top 10 Virtualization
Automation Tips for
Infrastructure and Operations
Administrators
Visualize, Analyze, and Optimize with Foglight for
Virtualization

2. The Rise of the Machines
• Legacy
– An administrator personally attends to every aspect of the
environment
– Responds to issues as they arise
– Provisions new user accounts
– Resets user passwords
– Builds new virtual hosts
– Individually deploys each and every new virtual machine
– Slow
– Inefficient
– Only scalable by adding bodies
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3. The Rise of the Machines
• Automation
– Map processes
– Identify opportunities for improvement
– Determine automation options
– Build!
• Outcomes
– Staff time focused on the business
– Lowered costs
– Reduced error rates
– More scalable IT
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4. Tip #1: Understand Your Cost Structure
• Understand your cost structure
– If you don’t know where expenses lie, you can’t prioritize tasks
– Expenses can be hard costs or soft costs
– Some organizations choose to ignore the soft costs, which is a mistake
– Understand the concept of “opportunity cost”
• Perform return on investment calculations for each item to be
automated
– If the labor and potential expense is worth it, do it
– Even if not, there may still be reason to undertake the project
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5. Tip #2: Change the Definition of Success
• What’s better?
– The IT staff person that displays visible sweat and tears and that goes to
what seems to be Herculean efforts to get each and every job done
– The IT staffer that arrives at 9 AM and leaves at 5 PM, but has outcomes
that are as good as, if not better than, the other guy
• Too often, the first person is rewarded because he’s more
“visible”
• Make sure you’re not rewarding inputs
• Reward based on outputs
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6. Tip #3: Use Workload Placement and Balancing
Tools
• Initial virtual machine placement services
– Determines most suitable host for a new VM
• Ongoing load balancing and availability services
– Automatically shuffles VMs around to meet a variety of rules
– Affinity, anti-affinity, sensitivity, etc.
– Maintenance
• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
– Available in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus
• Hyper-V with VMM
– Available in all editions
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7. Tip #4: Implement Automated Monitoring, Alerting,
and Remediation Systems
• Too many organizations go without any kind of monitoring systems
or they fail to tune those systems
• These systems are critical even without automation, but become
more important as tasks are automated
– With less hands on, admins may not notice anomalies without monitoring
• Automated remediation opportunities exist in some systems as
well
– As alerts are raised, the system can attempt to take corrective action
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8. Tip #5: Learn PowerCLI and PowerShell
• PowerShell has become Microsoft’s go-to scripting language and
can do practically anything
• PowerCLI is VMware’s implementation of PowerShell with its own
cmdlets and modules
• Some resources
– Back to Basics: Connecting to vCenter or a vSphere host
– http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2013/03/back-to-basics-connectingto-vcenter-or-a-vsphere-host.html
– VMware vSphere PowerCLI video training (11 hours)
– http://www.trainsignal.com/course/64/vmware-vsphere-powercli
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9. Tip #6: Investigate the Use of Existing Workflow and
Automation Tools
• This is where real automation happens
• Many tools from which to choose
– vCenter Operations Management Suite
– System Center Orchestrator
– Puppet Labs
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10. Tip #7: Seek Out Existing Templates and Modules
• Even with big systems, don’t take a go it alone approach
• Leverage the work of others
• There are tons of resources already available
– Using Runbooks in System Center 2012 – Orchestrator
– http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh403791.aspx
– Free eBook: Microsoft System Center – Designing Orchestrator Runbooks
– http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/09/28/free-ebookmicrosoft-system-center-designing-orchestrator-runbooks.aspx
• Puppet Modules
– More than 600 ready-to-use community modules
– http://forge.puppetlabs.com/
– Document: Provision and configure vSphere VMs with Puppet Enterprise
– http://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/2.7/cloudprovisioner_vmware.html
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11. Tip #8: Use Tools Built into the Hypervisor
• Auto Deploy
• Host Profiles
• Update Manager
• Templates
• WSUS
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12. Tip #9: Schedule Tasks to Run During Maintenance
Windows
• vCenter task scheduler
– vCenter Orchestrator, too
• Windows task scheduler
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13. Tip #10: Embrace the Emerging Rise of Software
• The rise of software is real and isn’t just hype
– Software defined servers are here and real and have been for ten years
– Software defined networking is becoming a major battlefront
– Software defined storage is here and is a growing threat to established
players
• Automation will be baked into the infrastructure
– Get a jump start
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14. Example of automation within Infrastructure
management:
Foglight™ for Virtualization
Enterprise Edition
Visualize. Analyze. Optimize.
September 2013

15. Real-time Visualization
• The one solution that does it all
– Real-Time and Historical Analysis
– Single –pane-of-glass for enterprise wide virtual monitoring
– Go from real-time to any-point-in-time performance and resource analysis
Enterprise View
Real-Time View
Historical
View
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16. Visualize End to “Everything”
• The one solution that does it all
– Increased visibility
– Host, VM, Guest OS, Database, Application
Host
VM
Guest OS
Database
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17. Proactive, Actionable Insights
• The one solution that does it all
– Expert Advice – Find Performance Problems in Seconds
– Pinpoint the problem for immediate resolution
– Proactively identify potential future problems
Exception Alarms
+ Expert Advice
Proactive Insights
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18. Automation you can Trust
• The one solution that does it all
– Flexible Automation
– Automate remediation to alarms & common tasks
– Integration with VMware, Hyper-v
– PowerShell scripting for extensive customization
Automation
Custom
Workflows
Proactive
Optimization
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19. Beyond performance monitoring
Visualize, analyze and optimize your IT infrastructure with Foglight for Virtualizatio
Heterogeneous virtualization management delivers operational efficiency
•
•
•
•
•
Visualize virtual infrastructure health with predictive VM performance monitoring
Deploy expert optimization techniques across heterogeneous virtualization platforms to reduce
Maximize resource utilization with advanced capacity management and CAPEX scenario modeling
Control dynamic virtual environments with detailed change audit trails and management
Simplify VM configuration tasks with user-controlled, intelligent virtualization automate
Download free 30-day trial of Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition:
http://software.dell.com/products/foglight-for-virtualization-enterprise-editio
http://software.dell.com/products/foglight-for-virtualization-standard-edition/
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20. Thank you for your participation
More conversations on line
Michele Ballinger
@ballingertweets
Visit us on the Web:
www.software.dell.com
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