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Cloud, Virtualization, Storage, DR, Security, Hardware Reviews, Book Reviews, and even some Music … all in their own BOX.

Archive for the month “July, 2010”

30 Jul 2010

Akorri BalancePoint: The Dynamic Data Center Optimization Tool – [ToolBOX]

BalancePoint: A fresh new tool for your IT arsenal! This product is a lifesaver for those trying to actively manage their ever growing cloud infrastructure.

 

Over the past few days our Varrow engineers have been involved with training surrounding a product that the company is extremely excited about! Our engineers have been through introductions with the company and its product BalancePoint. BalancePoint “is a third generation software product that is the only analytics based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments. Think of Akorri as the GPS of your IT infrastructure. Akorri supplies critical information and guidance versus a monitoring tool which just reports on a single infrastructure element (physical or virtual servers or storage or network).” What I really found interesting with the product is its ease of use. You are really able to get this product installed and configured rather quickly and when used for troubleshooting issues between virtualization, physical servers and storage there may not be another player in the market as strong currently. The reporting features of the product are pretty amazing and are readily for IT administrators and their management teams to show performance within the virtual environment.

The amount of work being placed on administrators these days is tremendous and only gets heavier from there. Most companies have the philosophy to do more with less. These are just a few reasons why a solution must be found to keep up with network sprawl which grows at a weeds pace. Everything in the data center is evolving and if things aren’t setup immediately for monitoring sometimes things get lost in the shuffle. “BalancePoint agent-less software collects statistics from the entire infrastructure, creates a dynamic model and then intelligently analyzes the information to understand how an application workload’s server, SAN and storage resources are utilized and interact. BalancePoint uniquely enables IT administrators to visualize their infrastructure, proactively identify and troubleshoot performance problems within minutes, plan future capacity requirements and measure infrastructure service levels to demonstrate efficient resource utilization to management.” Below are some of the benefits gained by using Akorri BalancePoint in your workplace, especially those who have committed to the private or public cloud and the management challenges that it provides.

BalancePoint™ deploys quickly, providing immediate benefits including:

  • Same-day non-intrusive implementation
  • Rapid cross-domain troubleshooting
  • Optimal IT performance delivery
  • Effective Infrastructure capacity planning
  • Justification for IT Virtualization and Consolidation projects

With BalancePoint™ in your environment you will:

  • Identify Performance Bottlenecks — Find problems and contention points before they impact operations
  • Troubleshoot Problems Faster — Identify root cause quickly so people can get back to work
  • Improve Storage Utilization — Use storage and server resources more efficiently and eliminate or defer new storage purchases
  • Manage VMware in Production — Improve VMware server and storage performance and utilization through “single pane of glass” management·
  • Optimize and Plan — Identify opportunities for improvement and plan for future growth requirements
  • Maintain Service Performance — Avoid application brownouts with cross-domain correlation of applications, servers, and storage
  • Guarantee Future Service — Enable performance-based capacity planning across applications, servers, and storage
  • Reduce Risk — Mitigate potential issues with what-if modeling for data-tier disaster recovery plans and data center optimization projects

The BalancePoint product has won many awards and if you are interested in the product, Varrow is a certified partner and reseller and can assist you with your project. Please feel free to contact us with any questions concerning the product.

*Quotes have been taken from www.akorri.com directly.

**BTW, I have also written about a quasi-similar product called AccelOps, and you can read about that product here in my blog.

Posted in ToolBOX and tagged , , ,
30 Jul 2010

AccelOps: The datacenter monitoring and management tool – [ToolBOX]

This is the first edition of ToolBOX featuring a fresh new tool for your IT arsenal that you may not know about.

 

Before arriving at Varrow, I had spent a lot of time at my former employer setting up a monitoring tool that had the ability to replace several tools that we were using at the time. This tool is ideal for shops with very few employees that need an overall view of their network and its health as well as large shops which tend to get a bit out of control. I had worked with AccelOps to find the best solution for my environment before a pricing structure was really fully developed. We decided on the SaaS model and pricing was reasonable. AccelOps offers two different kinds of install models.

  1. A SaaS model which provides a low total cost of ownership, nominal capital expenditure, and pay-per-use capacity features perfect for small to medium enterprises.
  2. A Virtual Appliance model for simplicity, built-for-purpose performance and immediate implementation benefits of an appliance, with the software means to readily extend performance capacity and distributed coverage.

Having a small environment at the time with few IT employees the SaaS model was the best fit for that company. Being an early adopter of AccelOps, I was fortunate enough to be published in a couple of magazines about the product. You can read the articles on TechTarget and Virtual Strategy Magazine about my experiences with the product if you are interested.

This product was created by a team which sprung out of a little company called Cisco. The personnel are great to work with and are very responsive. One of the nice and surprising facts about the company is that when something is not working correctly everyone really wants to get involved to get it resolved, even further, to find out what caused the issue intially. Upgrades for the product are handled by their support for now, and in the SaaS model is totally automated with plenty of heads up notification.

What does this product do? This product uses a clientless approach to data center monitoring, performance and availability, security and log management, virtualization and cloud management, compliance automation, a visual network representation with search, and many other features. It uses SMNP, and Windows logs to collect information from the monitored equipment and parses the data to spit out some very serious visual representation of errors, warnings and even network topography. Upon the last major update, the product was able to integrate and monitor the storage for NetApp. In subsequent updates to the product I have been informed that it will be able to do the same for EMC. Imagine having one pane of glass that gives you an insight for everything that is currently going on inside your network? Cisco ASA firewall warnings…no problem! High utilization traffic on a segment of your network…it’s there! Historical Active Directory data to form just about any report that you want…it’s done! WAN traffic between…well you get the point. Just take a look at all of the awards that the product has won.

Please visit the AccelOps site and by all means try a demo of the product. If you end of loving it like I did and would like to purchase it, please tell them I sent you!!

**BTW, I just got certified for a similar type of product that focuses more on VMWare virtualization management called Akorri BalancePoint. I will be writing a blog about this product very soon in the next ToolBOX edition.

Posted in ToolBOX and tagged , , , , ,
10 Jul 2010
1 Comment

Taking a deeper dive into VMware thick disks – vBOX

LazyZero vs. EagerZero thick disks – vBOX

We all should know the differences between Thin vs Thick disk when it comes to VMware, but what about the different types of thick disk. There is LazyZero vs. EagerZero when it comes to thick disks. I have had the pleasure of trying to create Windows 2008 R2 clustered servers within a VMware environment for the last week or so for a client using RDM (Raw Disk Mapping) and iSCSI. I have seemingly put together a good formula for a cluster using iSCSI, but RDM takes a bit more finesse to get working properly. This is my lead in to Lazy Zero vs. Eager Zero thick disk.

When clustering, the type of thick disk needed is eagerzero thick disks. When thick disks are created, by default, they are lazy zero type disk. These can be easily converted using the vmkfstools command on the appropriate .vmdk file(s).

Ex. vmkfstools -k /vmfs/volumes/path/to/target.vmdk

All blocks in “Lazy zero” are zeroed on first access. There are however configurations where “eagerzeroed” thick is a must. e.g. Fault Tolerance & MSCS

VMware thick disks, the default for virtual machines, zero a block’s data only on the first write to that block.  This lazy zeroing process means that the first write to each 1 MB block is much slower than every successive write.  Since thin disks allocate and zero the block at the same time, the SCSI reservation is set and released immediately before the zeroing.  Because the zeroing takes much longer, the impact of the reservation is insignificant. Eager zero means it pre-zeros out all of the blocks in the disk. This is rather than zeroing the block the first time its read, aka lazy zero which is the default. If you are wondering how to check your VM disk then read VMware KB1011170 on checking lazy zero vs. eagerzero disk status. This method allows you to check the disk status for options such as Fault Tolerance or Microsoft Cluster Services as disks for these must be in an Eagerzerothick format for these options to work.

Until VMwareFT can host a VM with more than one processor, companies that demand a certain amount of uptime and also want to virtualize that environment, will need to use clustering for that implementation. When performing either of these you will need to get familiar with these two types of thick disks.

Posted in vBOX and tagged , , ,

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