Optimize VMware Performance
Optimize VMware Performance
Monitor VMware I/O to Optimize Performance
Today’s IT staff are reluctant to virtualize their most mission-critical applications, and with good reason. The performance impact of virtualization is still more of a guessing game than a science. And though there are dozens of established tools to optimize server configurations, the biggest performance unknown is and has always been the impact on VMware I/O of the VMware SAN storage infrastructure.
Even the performance gurus at VMware report that, in the instances where they are brought in to fix performance, over 90% of problems wind up being due to the storage network. Yes, most VMware performance problems are I/O related, yet nearly all monitoring tools are blind to ESX/ESXi I/O, focusing instead on CPU and memory.
VirtualWisdom is the only solution that directly measures the I/O performance effect (latency, bandwidth, re-tries, errors, etc.) on vSphere performance. The VMware, application, and SAN teams will immediately see the performance effect on the application of capacity additions, configuration changes, component/device changes, failing devices, or even application changes. With VirtualWisdom, performance problems can be immediately identified and resolved, increasing overall application response times and end-user customer satisfaction.
By using VirtualWisdom to establish a baseline and monitoring VMware storage traffic in real-time, IT staff can immediately detect utilization that exceeds performance thresholds and can trigger a recommendation to move VM workloads, with VMotion, to less I/O intensive servers.
The risk of over-burdening physical servers means that the promise of greater CPU utilization is only partially met in most data centers. VirtualWisdom’s User Definable Context (UDC) capabilities enable virtualization administrators to play "what if" scenarios to test different layouts, including finding VMware I/O peaks and trends. With this information, virtualization administrators can more confidently provision higher-value applications to virtualized systems, or they can achieve significantly higher consolidation ratios by removing underutilized ESX/ESXi servers from clusters and optimally balancing VMs across servers based on all dimensions of performance (CPU, memory, I/O).
Product Datasheets
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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.
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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
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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.
Whitepapers and Technology Briefs
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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.
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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.
Case Study
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Government Case Study | Learn how a U.S. Federal agency uses VirtualWisdom® and a Health Audit service to optimize their VMware vSphere environment.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Improving Efficiency in the Virtualized Datacenter: — IDC and Virtual Instruments Webinar on Demand
Videos and Podcasts
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VMware and SAN Administrators Working Together | See how a VMware admin and a SAN admin work together to solve their common infrastructure problems.
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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.
