It’s difficult to notice when something is bad when you don’t know what good looks like.

When it comes to managing a <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/what-we-do/services/cloud-services">complex virtual environment</a> with many inter dependencies, understanding the health, capacity and efficiency of each resource is nearly impossible. Luckily, VMware is helping IT professionals understand both the <em>good </em>and the <em>bad </em>by allowing them to be much more proactive with the release of <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/overview.html">vCenter Operations Manager</a> (vCOPS).

Just last week at VMworld 2012, VMware announced the <a href="http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vmworld-vcloud-suite-082712.html" target="_blank">VMware vCloud® Suite 5.1</a>, which allows customers to bundle the vCenter Operations Management Suite along with many other products at purchase time. Now we can easily find out what <em>good</em> looks like inside our virtual environments – no matter where they are in the cloud.

<strong>How It Works</strong>

Most of us understand that VMware vCenter Server manages resources like Clusters, Hosts, Virtual Machines and Datastores. Each resource has its own counters (performance metrics) that it sends to the vCenter Server. vCOPS takes the thousands of counters that vCenter receives every second and then analyses and transforms them into easy to understand metrics.  These metrics are then used by badges to score your environment on its Health, Risk, and Efficiency.

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<strong>The Transformation</strong>

Virtualization and the migration of workloads to the Cloud has not only changed the way we provision and service IT, it has changed the way we manage it. Traditional Tools create a manual, reactive approach and can only manage IT in their separate silos. vCOPS monitors your compute, storage and networking environment by analyzing the counters from each resource. This allows vSphere Admins to view their entire virtual infrastructure from a single pane.

Let’s take a look at a few common questions and scenarios and compare the traditional approach, the challenges faced, and then the vCOPS approach to managing a virtualized infrastructure.

<strong><em>We need to do more with what we have – How can we use the resources we have more efficiently? </em></strong>

<strong>The Reactive Approach </strong>

-          Calculate the consolidation ratio of VMs to Hosts - do the math, check back often, hope utilization doesn’t increase, and repeat. Maintain a spreadsheet or other documentation to keep track of things like CPU or RAM installed and try to correlate that with the performance of a resource in a VM.

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<strong>The Challenges</strong>

-          The more workloads you can consolidate on existing resources, the more money you can save. Understanding the current and possible consolidation ratios will drive the business decisions for the acquisition of resources in the future.

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-          Change is <em>encouraged</em> in today’s virtual environments. Try keeping a static inventory of your VMs in a shared pool of resources and you’ll always be one step behind with DRS and Storage DRS migrating those VMs from resource to resource.

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<strong>The Proactive Approach - with vCOPS</strong>

-          Have plenty of CPU but short on memory? Easily increase your consolidation ratios by quickly comparing your current consolidation ratio to a recommended ratio based on your specific resources and workload.

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-          Advanced reporting and analytics can identify starved and overprovisioned VMs, easily allowing you to make resource entitlements with accuracy and confidence.

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<strong><em>We just upgraded our infrastructure - When will our resources run out?</em></strong>

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<strong>The Reactive Approach </strong>

Using static alerts, you’ll have to wait for an alert to notify you when capacity reaches a threshold, or you can check in monthly, weekly, or daily on the specific resource you want to monitor.

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<strong>The Challenges</strong>

The threat of not having enough resources to support a workload could be just as devastating to an environment as an outage.

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Workloads change, new workloads are created, and old workloads are decommissioned. Keeping up with these changes in a virtual environment is a daunting task.

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<strong>The Proactive Approach - with vCOPS</strong>

Capacity planning is fully integrated with vCOPS.  Know how many days you have until a resource like CPU or memory will be depleted, and quickly understand what resource is holding you back from further growth.

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Mitigate the risk of change and simulate what will happen to capacity and performance if you add or remove physical or virtual resources like a host or datastore with the “what-if” scenario planner.

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<strong><em>An application owner is requesting additional resources - What’s a normal workload for this application, and how do I know if they need additional resources?</em></strong>

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<strong>The Reactive Approach </strong>

Check the performance history by going to each individual resource (VM, Host, Cluster and Storage).

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Set a static alert (or keep the default) to notify you when utilization of a resource reaches a specific threshold.  Respond to the alert after the threshold has been reached – and to the phone calls of frustrated customers.

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<strong>The Challenges</strong>

Static metrics and measurements create unnecessary administrative overhead. Set enough metrics and you’ll soon have a full-time job for one of your employees.

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Static metrics can only tell part of the story – they can’t tell you when CPU drops too low or tell you when you’re experiencing high utilization for an otherwise slow time like Saturday evening at 8 PM.

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<strong>The Proactive Approach - with vCOPS</strong>

Dynamic alerts learn your environment and know that Tuesday morning your reporting database will be pegged out for an hour from before the Staff Meeting and relatively quiet the rest of the week.

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vCOPS learns what normal usage is – it learns the highs and lows for a resource and alerts you to the anomalies of performance, and the stress in your environment.

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As you can see, vCOPS takes virtual infrastructure management to a whole new level of easy.  Whether your environment consists of 50 or 5000 virtual machines, or whether your infrastructure is on premise or hosted in the cloud, vCenter Operations Manager brings control back where it belongs and thrusts you into a leadership position of proactivity.

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