VIRTUALWISDOM SAN AND VMWARE OPTIMIZATION AND TROUBLESHOOTING

As the successor to NetWisdom™, the VirtualWisdom® family of SAN I/O performance monitoring and SAN troubleshooting products provides a new level of troubleshooting and storage performance optimization on complex, heterogeneous Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks and VMware environments.  IT administrators can implement all or portions of the VirtualWisdom family of monitoring products to improve SAN performance, speed SAN troubleshooting, and increase the usage of VMware virtualized servers.

SAN Problem Diagnosis and Prevention

IT organizations that manage high levels of complexity in their Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructures require a sophisticated set of capabilities for diagnosing and preventing SAN slowdowns. These slowdowns are usually reported as a slow response time for applications. Your SAN complexity is driven by the heterogeneity of your storage subsystems, host bus adapters (HBAs), operating systems, fabric switches, multi-site replication, storage/tape virtualization, and the continued growth of your data and bandwidth utilization. The consolidation of your infrastructure and SAN services complicates your SAN management efforts and ability to do effective SAN troubleshooting.

Standard Storage Resource Management (SRM) products cannot provide the sophisticated diagnosis and prevention capabilities necessary to maintain such complex, heterogeneous, fast-changing SANs. Acute storage performance problems and outages must be diagnosed swiftly, without vendor finger-pointing or time wasted in waiting for the appropriate SAN monitoring tools. Simultaneously, intermittent and chronic problems must be proactively detected and resolved before they become acute. To prevent chronic problems, on-going IT practices must include baseline comparisons of Input/Output (I/O) performance, bandwidth utilization, and average I/O completion times to verify that changes in your hardware, firmware, or configuration do not adversely impact your business-critical applications.  And they must monitor at the physical layer to catch events like CRC errors and class3 discards, predictors of future performance problems.

VMware Performance Optimization

VirtualWisdom provides comprehensive, real-time instrumentation and measurement that allows IT managers to optimize the performance, utilization, and availability of their virtualized IT infrastructure, including storage virtualization and VMware server virtualization. VirtualWisdom adds SAN I/O intelligence for VMware performance monitoring and troubleshooting, enabling administrators to better balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements and feedback of I/O performance. By indentifying VMware performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom results in significantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization and helps administrators deliver the virtualization promise of reduced capital and operational costs promised by data center virtualization.

Virtual Instruments Family of Products

VirtualWisdom consists of a family of software products complemented by SANInsight™ hardware products that can be used to achieve different levels of sophistication in performance monitoring. The VirtualWisdom architecture maximizes the SAN and VMware administrator’s ability to implement varying VirtualWisdom configurations, based on the needs of the application, and to add product components incrementally as budget and time allow.