Top 10 Tips for Surviving in a Virtualized World

Top 10 Tips for Surviving
in a Virtualized World
5/14/2014
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

About the speaker
» Eric Siebert
 25+ years experience in the IT industry
 6 time VMware® vExpert
 Author of 2 books on virtualization
 Top virtualization blogger
» Follow me on Twitter® @ericsiebert
» Visit my website: http://vsphere-land.com
2

Survival agenda
1. Rule #1, It’s all about the apps, Rule #2, never forget Rule #1
2. Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups
3. Measure twice, cut once
4. Don’t rely on a Magic 8 Ball® to predict your future
5. What do VM management & birth control have in common
6. Lessons learned from the 3 Little Pigs
7. What to do if you don’t have a goose that lays golden eggs
8. Waste not, want not
9. Beware the Zombie Apocalypse
10. Don’t Panic!

1) Rule #1, It’s all about the apps, Rule #2,
never forget Rule #1
» Q: What is the fundamental reason that
computing exists?
» A: To run applications
» What good is a city without people?
» What good is computer hardware
without an operating system?
» What good is an operating system
without applications?
» Applications are at the bottom of the
computing stack but they’re the most
important part of it

1) Rule #1, It’s all about the apps, Rule #2,
never forget Rule #1
» Don’t fixate on the virtualization layer
» Effective monitoring should be end to end
» Every layer is important and has unique
monitoring needs
» Stats can become blurred between layers
» You get different viewpoints at different layers
» Virtualization can have hidden impacts on apps
» User experience is one of the best measuring
sticks for apps
» Good monitoring product will look at all layers
and be able to correlate between them
#1
App

2) Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups
» You know what they say about the word
assume
» Never taken anything for granted, it will
come back to haunt you eventually
» Don’t assume the sky is blue, look at it to
make sure you’re not about to get rained on
» Virtualization can mask underlying problems
» You may have bottlenecks and not know it
» You would probably notice 50%
performance degradation but would you
notice 20%?

2) Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups
» Nobody has ESP that can sense latency
» Relying on your users to report problems
won’t make you look good
» Be proactive and stomp out problems
when they are still small
» Stay vigilant, understand trends, always
monitor, always look
» Good monitoring solution will make sure
you’re constantly informed
» Dashboards are a great way to see at a
glance important info

3) Measure twice, cut once
» Sizing hardware for virtualization can be
very complicated
» If you under-estimate resource sizing it
will cost you
» If you over-estimate resource sizing it
will cost you
» If you have to cut twice it can be costly
» Never wing it and always make sure you
understand resource relationships
» Need to ensure your physical resources
are balanced properly

3) Measure twice, cut once
» Use tools to measure workloads before
you virtualize them
» Don’t estimate or use averages and never
assume
» Don’t forget to factor in spare capacity for
host failures
» Also factor in virtualization overhead and
resource controls
» Sizing storage can be tricky, need to
balance performance and capacity
» Need to think about future growth as well

4) Don’t rely on a Magic 8 Ball to predict your
future
» Virtual environments are always growing,
they rarely stay the same size or shrink
» Do you know when you will run out of
physical resources?
» Do you know what resources to add and
when you need to add them?
» Every company has budgets, you need to
plan ahead to get money
» Also need to justify capital expenses, your
CFO is going to ask why you need more
Will my virtual
environment have
enough resources
in 6 months?

4) Don’t rely on a Magic 8 Ball to predict your
future
» Before predicting future resource needs
right-size and optimize current resources
» Clean your house first before putting on
a new addition or buying a bigger one
» Capacity planning/chargeback tools will help you answer how
much, when, where and why
» Need to ensure that you are adding the right balance of each
type of resource
» Again factor in spare capacity for host failures
» Good monitoring tool will allow you to do capacity planning
what-if scenarios based on historical growth and trends

5) What do VM management & birth control
have in common?
» Answer: They both help control population
» VM Sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of VMs
» Not obvious and doesn’t occur over night
» It’s way to easy to create VM’s, requests for
new VMs typically meet little resistance
» Many consider VMs as “free” servers
» In non-virtualized environment if a new server is needed you
typically have to go through a process:
 Requirements, PO, Approval, Order, Wait, Assemble, Connect
» Start to finish can take weeks and cost many thousands of dollars
» Remember VMs do have a resource cost
» Virtual environments are expensive and have limited resources

5) What do VM management & birth control
have in common?
» Use same justifications and processes that you would use
when new physical servers are requested
» Ways to prevent VM Sprawl
 Limit access for creating VMs, don’t be afraid to say no!
 Be stingy when assigning resources to a new VM
 Actively monitor VM resource usage, workloads can change over time
 Document the who, what, why and when of a new VM
 Use resource pools to segregate a host’s resources
 Implement a formal process for requesting new VMs
that requires justification & approvals
 Use a good reporting & chargeback tool so you can
help the business understand the cost of VMs

6) Lessons learned from the 3 Little Pigs
» Which house would you want to live in when a
storm is coming?
» Virtual environment is only as strong as its
weakest component
» Storage is typically the weakest link, why?
 Only remote resource
 Only shared resource
 Slowest resource
» Storage failures & bottlenecks have big impacts
» Storage can be the biggest barrier to success
with virtualization

6) Lessons learned from the 3 Little Pigs
» Having a good foundation is critical!
» Your storage will dictate how strong
your virtual environment is
» Storage bandwidth is important but
storage architecture is more important
» Make sure you foundation stays strong
and doesn’t start cracking
» Look at high availability solutions to eliminate storage as a SPOF
» Keep a close watch on latency, the silent killer of performance
» Monitor MB/s and IOPS to see your storage stress level
» Use proper monitoring tools and know what you’re looking at

7) What to do if you don’t have a goose that
lays golden eggs
» Virtualization can easily become a money pit
» Remember we’re virtualizing to save money
» Need to spend wisely and don’t spend unless you have to
» You may have fewer servers but a virtual infrastructure isn’t
cheap
» Servers are more $ because they have to be bigger and
stronger
» Storage arrays are not cheap either
» To get the most value out of virtualization
you must try and keep costs down

7) What to do if you don’t have a goose that
lays golden eggs
» How can you save money on virtualization?
 Clean-up your environment
 Use resource controls
 Use thin provisioning
 Use power conservation features
 Implement process for creating VMs
 Use VM lifecycle management
 Maximize resource usage
 Reclaim disk space
 Use licensing to your advantage
 Leverage budget friendly 3rd party tools

8) Waste not, want not
» Virtualization is all about efficiency, wasted
resources reduce ROI and decrease efficiency
» Don’t get lazy on efficiency after you virtualize
» You can be virtualized and not maximizing your
efficiency (I guarantee you aren’t)
» Over-allocation of resources to VMs defeats
the purpose of virtualization
» VMs need to be right-sized to avoid wasting
resources
» Problem is knowing what right-sized is for each
and every VM

8) Waste not, want not
» Key to right-sizing is to have enough resources to handle
demand without overspending on resources that just sit idle
» Careful not to cut too deep, watch for under-sized VMs also
» Push back on application owners, it’s easy to add more
resources to a VM if needed
» Actively monitor VM resource usage, workloads can change
over time
» To be effective you also need to look inside VMs
» For CPUs, most VMs will work well with just 1
» For memory, watch VM swap file usage
» For storage, always use thin provisioning

9) Beware the Zombie Apocalypse
» Do you really know what every VM in your environment does?
» Just because a VM is powered on doesn’t
mean it’s actively being used
» A powered on VM that has no purpose
anymore is a Zombie VM
» Zombie VMs suck away resources from
hungry VMs that need it
» Here’s a handy formula:
 Powered on VM = resource consumption = $$$
» More Zombie VMs you have, the more resources are being
flushed down the drain

9) Beware the Zombie Apocalypse
» How do you hunt Zombie VMs and destroy them?
» Hint: A shotgun or chainsaw might ruin your data center
» Use a tool that can look for the Zombie VM characteristics
 No recent logins
 Very low resource usage (mostly idle)
 Files not modified
 Out of disk space
 Not recently powered on
» Don’t forget Zombie snapshots!
» Eliminating Zombie VMs will free up
resources for VMs that need them

10) Don’t Panic!
» Surviving in a virtualized world is easy with the right tools
» SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager has dashboards to track
alerts, key metrics and dozens of built-in trend reports
See key information
at a glance with
customizable
dashboards

10) Don’t Panic!
» Calculate how much money is being wasted by the over-
allocation of resources
» Quickly tell where you have wasted resources and VMs that
are no longer needed
See idle VMs
(Zombies), Oversized
VMs and Undersized
VMs

10) Don’t Panic!
Simulate “What-If”
scenarios for
capacity planning
Keep a close eye on
critical storage
resources

10) Don’t Panic!
» Couple this with Storage Manager and Server and Application
Monitor for a cost-effective, complete end-to-end solution
» SolarWinds has all the tools you need to survive in a
virtualized world

Thank You!
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