Deploy Faster and Reduce Application Risk

Understand the I/O Performance Implications of New Application Deployment

One of the key benefits of server virtualization is the ability to rapidly move applications from one server to another. Unfortunately, this new flexibility can introduce application risk. With multiple applications all vying for the same shared network and storage resources, unforeseen contention problems can easily arise leading to poor I/O performance and application slowdowns. There is a similar challenge when deploying new virtualized applications. Without implementing real-time monitoring solutions such as VirtualWisdom, there is no way to truly understand the I/O performance implications of new application deployments and application migrations.

When deploying new virtualized applications, one of the biggest questions is whether response time will meet the performance required by the users. In many IT organizations there are strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined by the business units that must be met by the IT team to ensure performance and availability.

The best way to de-risk these new application deployments is to comprehensively monitor the performance characteristics and physical transmissions related to the new deployment. With VirtualWisdom monitoring software and hardware, in most cases, you can see potential problems before they impact your business. You can proactively find problems while you are testing and validating the new application before it enters production deployment. During the initial stages of production, when usage is highly unpredictable, you can monitor infrastructure performance in real-time from the virtual machine to the storage array and see problems as they arise. You can them fix them before they significantly affect your end users.

With VirtualWisdom deployed, application cycle times can dramatically improved by shortening the problem identification and resolution times to minutes instead of days.

Product Datasheets

VirtualWisdom^® Overview | VirtualWisdom provides comprehensive instrumentation and I/O measurement capabilities that reduce application response time, increase availability, and improve resource utilization. VirtualWisdom is the only product that can non-intrusively improve the performance of applications and increase the benefits of cloud-driven virtualization in real time by analyzing actual I/O traffic data.
Virtual Server Probe | The Virtual Server Probe enables comprehensive, cross-domain real-time measurement capabilities that allow IT managers to optimize the performance, utilization, and availability of their VMware based infrastructure.

Partner Brief

VMware & Virtual Instruments Partnership | VirtualWisdom enables the IT Manager to have complete confidence to deploy I/O intensive business-critical applications on vSphere. Due to its unique cross-domain realtime monitoring capabilities, VirtualWisdom can feed essential performance and utilization data back into vCenter to trigger a vMotion transfer and re-balance the virtualmachines across the server cluster. This results in significantly improved virtualized application performance, substantially increased server and SAN utilization, and higher overall availability.

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Whitepapers and Technology Briefs

Whitepaper: Eliminating VMware / Storage Related Performance Challenges with VirtualWisdom | Good I/O performance is the most critical component to superior application performance in a virtual server environment. The key is deploying instrumentation that directly measures what is going on at a deep level in the transaction workflow, from the virtual machine all the way to the LUN.
Technology Brief: UDCs for What-If Analysis | This Brief offers examples of how VirtualWisdom’s User Defined Contexts enable “what if” analysis, using existing metrics to help predict problems before they occur.

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Case Study

Government Case Study | Learn how a U.S. Federal agency uses VirtualWisdom® and a Health Audit service to optimize their VMware vSphere environment.
Financial Services Case Study | Learn how this financial services firm uses VirtualWisdom to help balance virtual machine loads in a VMware ESX/ESXi environment.

Analyst Reports

APM Experts White Paper - Infrastructure Performance Management for Virtualized Systems | March 2011 | This paper describes the key role that VirtualWisdom plays in enabling enterprises to move from 30% to 80% virtualized server penetration. Infrastructure Performance Management for Virtualized Systems.
Storage Switzerland White Paper - What is a Virtualization Performance Specialist? | March 2011 | Server virtualization is certainly widespread, but while the initial results have been promising, most IT personnel feel that the benefits of virtualization could be increased. For many, they're not seeing the performance, consolidation, and resource utilization levels they had expected.

Storage Switzerland White Paper - Optimizing Storage I/O Latency to Maximize VMware Performance | July 2010 | Storage Switzerland was briefed recently on the VirtualWisdom family of products from Virtual Instruments. In virtual server environments, storage I/O requirements are dynamic and problems can be especially difficult to resolve, especially with the monitoring tools commonly in use today. The VirtualWisdom suite takes a different technological approach to addressing many of the issues encountered when trying to optimize a SAN infrastructure.
IT Brand Pulse White Paper - Virtual Instruments: Early Incumbents in the VIO Market | August 2010 | Privately held Virtual Instruments is a 2008 spin-out of Finisar Corporation that has established early incumbency in the nascent market for Virtual Infrastructure Optimization (VIO), the next big wave in management of information technology.
Taneja Group White Paper - Optimizing the Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom | May 2009 | As virtualization is deployed in production, experienced users are demanding production-quality performance management and optimization solutions to maintain service levels. Taneja Group has identified a new category of powerful solutions now emerging to address these demands, which we have labeled Virtual Infrastructure Optimization, or VIO.

Webinars

Solving the SAN Storage/VMware Performance Puzzle "Understanding the benefits of VMware's new Storage related features" | It’s falsely assumed that VMware is the source of many performance problems since it is relatively new in the datacenter. Others will claim it’s not VMware but the underlying storage. In this webinar Archie Hendryx, Senior Solutions Consultant for Virtual Instruments, addresses key issues and provides insight as to how a comprehensive view, from the VM to the LUN, is imperative for further consolidation and safe Physical to Virtual migrations of your Tier 1 applications.
Beyond VMware Resource and Availability Monitoring – Reducing the Impact of SAN Bottlenecks on your vSphere Environment with Bernd Harzog, a Senior Analyst for The Virtualization Practice, and CEO and founder of APM Experts
Virtual Infrastructure Optimization: What you can’t see can hurt you! — Learn How to Prevent Virtualization from Wreaking Havoc on Your SAN: Virtual Instruments/Taneja Group Webinar on Demand
Improving Efficiency in the Virtualized Datacenter: — IDC and Virtual Instruments Webinar on Demand

Videos and Podcasts

VMware and SAN Administrators Working Together | See how a VMware admin and a SAN admin work together to solve their common infrastructure problems.
Diagnosing VMware performance problems | these short videos demonstrate how vSphere administrators can more confidently provision higher-value applications to virtualized systems by significantly reducing the risk of performance-related problems, and by finding and solving problems when they occur.

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