Virtualization Management Challenges

However, XenApp virtualization introduces new and dynamic inter-dependencies because multiple applications are running on virtual machines that share the same hardware. This increased complexity makes managing performance and user experience of virtualized XenApp infrastructures more challenging, costly, and time-consuming.

Many companies fly blind without complete performance visibility into the components of their XenApp environment and the dynamic inter-dependencies. Yesterday’s reactive, manual and fragmented approach to performance management severely limits performance visibility and diagnosis of performance issues. It is no longer sufficient for today’s dynamic IT environments.

eG Innovations Performance Assurance

eG Innovations solves this big challenge by radically simplifying XenApp performance management. Only eG delivers pre-emptive, automated and integrated performance assurance for today’s dynamic, mission-critical Citrix XenApp environments. This unique approach enables companies to ensure XenApp virtualization success by delivering on the promise of exceptional performance, flexibility, and ROI.

Having won numerous awards for our Citrix and Virtualization performance management and monitoring solutions, eG Innovations is the clear choice for organizations wanting a best-of-breed solution to manage their combined virtualized infrastructures:

• Get complete performance visibility and automated performance correlation across all virtual and physical components – network, storage, virtualization, application and database
• Automate and accelerate discovery, diagnosis and resolution of XenApp service performance issues
• Pre-emptively detect and resolve performance issues before users notice
• Identify bottlenecks and right-size your XenApp infrastructure with powerful reporting and analytics for maximum ROI
• Automatically correlate all performance events from both the physical and virtual tiers of your XenApp Service and auto-diagnose the cause of any performance problem
• Discover trends and details of user sessions and user/application resource consumption for effective workload planning and infrastructure management to reduce cost

Join our live solution tour to learn more:

Live Demo -
Performance Management in Virtualized Citrix XenApp Environments

Date & Time: May 3, 2012 @ 2:00 pm ET | 11:00 am PT | 7:00 pm UK | 8:00 pm CET

Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/202378672

For additional demo presentations, visit http://www.eginnovations.com/demo

We look forward to seeing you online!

Attempts at fixing these performance problems by using traditional virtual desktop planning tools and by throwing more hardware at the problem quickly cause cost overruns, kill ROI and typically don’t resolve the performance issue.

We are proud to announce a new groundbreaking VDI performance assessment service, eG Perform™, to help companies pre-empt and overcome virtual desktop performance issues so they can deliver on the desktop virtualization promise of flexibility, scalability and end-user satisfaction. eG Perform fills a huge gap in the market by identifying VDI bottlenecks and helping companies restore performance and deliver on the promise of desktop virtualization.

In the early stages of VDI deployment, focus was on desktop virtualization viability. Pre-deployment assessments were used to determine the virtualization readiness of physical desktops. As the technology matured, the focus is shifting to performance assurance, right sizing and optimization of large scale deployments. Consequently, performance assessment has had to evolve from just focusing on physical desktops to a complete analysis of the virtual desktop infrastructure.

VDI Performance Assessment Overview

eG’s new VDI performance assessment service leverages eG Innovations’ patented and award-winning cloud-based performance assurance platform that delivers pre-emptive, automated, and integrated performance assurance for dynamic IT environments. eG Perform deploys a unique methodology and patented technology to provide VDI project managers with:

• Actionable insight and guidance to quickly diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, and deliver on the promise of exceptional performance, user productivity, and ROI;
• Complete end-to-end performance visibility and diagnosis across every tier, every layer of the virtual desktop service – Citrix, VMware, Network, Active Directory, Storage, Applications – so you know what’s working and what’s not; and,
• Detailed reports and powerful analytics to right-size and optimize the virtual desktop infrastructure and increase ROI, complete with actionable insight into hardware bottlenecks, top users, top apps, critical dependencies, etc.

Integrated with eG’s on-demand cloud-based performance assurance platform eG-on-Tap, the eG Perform assessment service allows enterprises to baseline their current VDI performance, understand critical bottlenecks, and identify how they can optimize their virtual desktop infrastructure for peak performance and cost efficiency.

Free Assessment Offer

Enterprises interested in trying out the service risk-free can get a complete eG Perform analysis for up to five servers free of charge for a three-week period. The service will deliver a comprehensive report documenting the current performance of the virtual desktop infrastructure complete with identified performance bottlenecks and areas for optimization.

Additional Resources

• To sign up for your free VDI performance assessment, visit: http://www.eginnovations.com/vdi-assessment
• Join eG Innovations for a short, 30-minute webinar on May 24 @ 2:00 pm ET | 11:00am PT | 7:00 pm UK | 8:00 pm CET that will outline the service: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/385410057
  

Trying to manually investigate the cause of any performance problem across the network, physical and virtual servers, and within the application components themselves is time consuming, wastes valuable technical resources, and leads to dissatisfaction among users who expected Desktop Transformation to improve their experience, not make it worse.

Having won numerous awards for both its Citrix and Virtualization performance management and monitoring solutions Monitors, eG Innovations is the clear choice for organizations wanting a best-of-breed solution to manage the combined virtualized infrastructure.

Join eG’s Live Product Tour and see for yourself how eG:

• Provides deep insights into the performance of your Citrix XenApp servers and the virtual platform they are running on,
• Automatically correlates all performance events from both the physical and virtual tiers of your XenApp Service and automatically (!) diagnoses the cause of any performance problem,
• Can automatically learn how your infrastructure performs over time to baseline KPI’s and pro-actively warn of problems before any service impact,
• Will give you details of user sessions and user/application resource consumption for effective workload planning and infrastructure management to reduce cost.

If you are tired of the fingerpointing at Citrix (or now virtualization!) then register for this event series:

+ AMERICAS
April 11, 2012 @ 11:00 AM PT (San Francisco) | 2:00 PM ET (New York) | 7:00 PM UK (London) | 8:00 PM CET (Berlin)
Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/324034560

+ EUROPE
April 19, 2012 @ 2:00 PM UK (London) | 3:00 PM CET (Paris, Berlin)
Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/330745249

+ ASIA-PACIFIC
April 25, 2012 @ 1:00 PM (Indonesia) | 2:00 PM SGT (China, Singapore) | 3:00 PM JST (Tokyo) | 4:00 PM AST (Syndey)
Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/531474145

We look forward to seeing you online!

Does this sound familiar? Then join the webinar “Virtual Desktop & Application Delivery Made Easy” on April 18 and find out how to make virtual desktops & application deliver easy & cost effective.

Desktop virtualization experts Scott Sims from 2X Software and Srinivas Ramanathan from eG Innovations will discuss how to:

• Virtualize your desktops and deliver applications for a fraction of the cost,
• Reduce management cost while promoting employee mobility,
• Ensure user satisfaction and productivity through built-in performance assurance.

WEBINAR DETAILS

DATE & TIME: April 18, 2012 @ 12:00 pm ET (New York) | 9:00 am PT (San Francisco) | 5:00 pm UK (London)

PRESENTERS: Scott Sims (2X Software) | Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations)

REGISTRATION: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/274561136

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

Visit our booth #513 to learn about Citrix performance assurance and how eG Innovations can help you:

• Deliver better user satisfaction, exceptional performance, and scalable growth for your Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop deployment,
• Build automated performance assurance into the desktop transformation architecture to ensure successful deployments,
• Dramatically accelerate diagnosis and resolution of user experience issues anywhere in the desktop service environment – before they impact customer satisfaction,
• Right-size your environment for maximum ROI and performance assurance,
• Deliver on the ROI and user experience promise of desktop transformation and make your Citrix deployment a big success.

For more details, please watch the Citrix-organized webinar “Citrix Performance Assurance – The Key to Citrix Desktop Transformation Success and ROI” – http://www.eginnovations.com/webinar/citrix/joint – or visit our website: http://www.eginnovations.com

We look forward to seeing you at booth #513 to show you Citrix performance assurance in action!

As organizations move from VDI test and pilot stages to production, they are realizing that the “traditional” approach of treating performance as an afterthought and addressing it in a reactive fashion does not scale. Too often, performance issues surprise VDI project owners during and after rollout, when everything worked just fine during the (often over-provisioned and less complex) pilot.

Focus on the Desktop Often Neglects Backend Infrastructure
Very often, when an enterprise starts on the virtual desktop journey, the focus is on the user desktop. This is only natural; after all, it is the desktop that is moving ‒ from being on a physical system to a virtual machine. Therefore, once a decision to try out VDI is made, the primary focus is to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model their usage, predict the virtualized user experience and, based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can’t. This is what many people refer to as VDI assessment.

One of the fundamental changes with VDI is that the desktops no longer have dedicated resources. They share the resources of the physical machine on which they are hosted and they may even be using a common storage subsystem. While resource sharing provides several benefits, it also introduces new complications. A single malfunctioning desktop can drain resources to the point that it impacts the performance of all the other desktops.

Whereas in the physical world, the impact of a failure or a slowdown was minimal (if a physical desktop failed, it would impact only one user), the impact of failure or slowdown in the virtual world is much more severe (one failure can impact hundreds of desktops). Therefore, even in the VDI assessment phase, it is important to take performance considerations into account and to assess and optimize the entire backend infrastructure supporting virtual desktops.

Consider Performance Assurance Early
In fact, performance has to be considered at every stage of the VDI lifecycle because it is fundamental to the success or failure of the VDI rollout. The new types of inter-desktop dependencies that exist in VDI have to be accounted for at every stage. For example, in many of the early VDI deployments, administrators found that when they just migrated the physical desktops to VDI, backups or antivirus software became a problem. These software components were scheduled to run at the same time on all the desktops. When the desktops were physical, it didn’t matter, because each desktop had dedicated hardware. With VDI, the synchronized demand for resources from all the desktops severely impacted the performance of the virtual desktops. This was not something that was anticipated because the focus of most designs and plans was on the individual desktops.

Understanding the performance requirements of desktops may also help plan the virtual desktop infrastructure more efficiently. For example, known heavy CPU-using desktop users can be load balanced across servers. Likewise, by planning to assign a good mix of CPU intensive and memory intensive user desktops to a physical server, it is possible to get optimal usage of the existing hardware resources.

Lessons from Server Virtualization
Taking this discussion one step further, it is interesting to draw a parallel with how server virtualization evolved and to see what lessons we can learn as far as VDI is concerned. A lot of the emphasis in the early days was on determining which applications could be virtualized and which ones could not. Today, server virtualization technology has evolved to a point where there are more virtual machines being deployed in a year than physical machines, and almost every application server (except very old legacy ones) are virtualized fairly well. You no longer hear anyone asking whether an application server can be virtualized or not. From focusing on the hypervisor, virtualization vendors have realized that performance and manageability are key to the success of server virtualization deployments.

Table above: Lessons that enterprises deploying VDI can learn from the server virtualization experience of the past

VDI deployments could be done more rapidly and more successfully if we learn our lessons from how server virtualization evolved. VDI assessment needs to expand its focus from the desktop alone to the entire infrastructure. Attention during VDI rollouts has to be paid to performance management and assurance. To avoid a lot of rework and problem remediation down the line, performance assurance must be considered early on in the process and at every stage. This is key to getting VDI deployed on a bigger scale and faster, with great return on investment (ROI).

Managing VDI Performance Issues – Best Practices
When VDI performance issues show up, how do you solve them without just throwing more hardware at the problem, killing budgets as well as return on investment (ROI)? When a user calls IT about slow applications, how do you pinpoint the true service performance bottleneck? Is it the network? The profile server? The web? The desktop virtualization platform? Storage?

Some of these issues can be addressed if we look at the lessons learned from server virtualization. Below are some best practices, insight and predictions for VDI deployment success:

Avoid costly issues and remediation downstream – Performance assurance processes affecting the VDI infrastructure need to be built in early in order to avoid costly issues and re-mediation downstream, and to mitigate the risk of VDI failure during deployment. When deploying VDI on a large scale, it is key to avoid slow, manual ad-hoc processes that impact performance. It is imperative that IT considers inter-desktop dependencies from the very beginning.

Move beyond the silo - Today, service delivery is more demanding than ever. Companies require 360-degree VDI service visibility with virtualization-aware performance correlation across every layer and every tier ‒ from desktops to applications and from network to storage. Administrators need deep insights into the causes of VDI service performance issues in order to detect and fix root-cause problems. It is no longer useful to monitor individual silos because of the complexity of today’s infrastructures. There are just too many opportunities for problems.

Engage in Best Practices - Monitor VDI performance, not silos; right-size for ROI; engage in preemptive detection and alerting; monitor users, not only VMs; and have deep visibility into sessions. It is best to approach VDI from this perspective in order to get more return out of VDI investments.

The key to a successful VDI deployment is the ability to automate monitoring and management of the entire VDI service across every tier of the infrastructure stack – from the underlying hardware, network and storage, to the virtualization platform and self service front-end applications. If that end-to-end automated approach is taken, user performance issues can be diagnosed and fixed more rapidly with fewer resources – and even proactively, before users notice.

For more information on how to ensure VDI performance, visit http://www.eginnovations.com

Join our Live Webinar “The Desktop Evolution – Delivering user satisfaction and productivity in hybrid desktop environments“ on March 21, 2012 and learn from desktop transformation experts Jeff Fisher (RES Software) and Rick Ruskin (eG Innovations) how to:

• Deliver predictable and reliable user experiences
• Provide secure, personalized and compliant desktops across multiple devices, locations and roles
• Proactively manage desktop performance across physical, virtual and cloud environments
• Accelerate the scope of your hybrid desktop deployment

WEBINAR DETAILS

Date: March 21

Time: 2:00 pm (ET) | 11:00 am (PT) | 8:00 pm (CET)

Presenters: Jeff Fisher (RES Software) and Rick Ruskin (eG Innovations)

Register Now (hurry – seats are limited): http://bit.ly/DesktopEvolution

We look forward to seeing you online!

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor.

Isn’t hitting the “Like” button on Facebook easy? Wouldn’t it be great if there were an “Easy” button when it comes to, oh, application performance monitoring?

Srinivas Ramanathan, founder and CEO of eG Innovations, recently pointed out that while it’s obvious whenever there is a problem with IT operations in a company, it’s far less obvious where and what exactly the problem is.

Bottom line is, business users just want their equipment and networks to work. They don’t want to get bogged down in discussions of “Well, it’s a middleware issue, that’s not really our department.”

Ramanathan outlines the problem, which is now being exacerbated by virtualization. As he explains, IT operations teams are organized and managed along tiers. So, databases, services and apps all have their own tiers, as well as a unique administrator and tools for administration and monitoring. For example, when a sales rep calls in complaining about how slow his computer is, the first step is to find whose tier has the issue.

This is usually where you want that “Easy” button. As Ramanthan says, “Often, troubleshooting is the most time-consuming and expensive step in the incident management process.”

A problem in one tier will affect performance across all tiers. Virtualization makes it more difficult, since now you have what Ramanathan calls “a new type of dependency,” and “a single malfunctioning VM can impact the performance experienced by all the other VMs.”

“Traditional static approaches to performance monitoring and management are blind to this new reality,” Ramanathan says, adding that “while management of business services that spanned multiple physical tiers was already a challenge, the introduction of virtualization has made the problem much, much harder.”

To address the problem, Ramanathan recommends automated performance management. It can monitor “every layer of every tier,” provide root-cause diagnosis and help determine baselines, so it can tell you when something is out of the ordinary.

Done correctly, Ramanathan says, automated management lets you know where to invest in your infrastructure, mainly by showing you where the existing bottlenecks are.

So really, it’s as close to an “Easy” button as you can get in IT today.

[This article was written by David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor and originally appeared on TMCnet online.]

When pooled together, these two solutions relieve challenges associated with multi-location performance, improve IT efficiency and reduce costs of managing today’s complex hybrid desktop environments that often include a mix of devices and delivery platforms.

By combining technology from RES Software and eG Innovations, enterprises will benefit from:

• A more predictable, reliable and secure user experience
• Maximum user productivity due to consistent performance of VDI environments
• Improved management of dynamic desktop environments
• Personalized and compliant desktops for users across multiple devices, providing more flexibility for mobile workers
• A framework to quickly resolve VDI issues that impact both performance and usability

“As enterprises investigate VDI as a viable technology for their organization, the impact on the user experience and overall performance are two key critical elements considered,” said Tony Falsone, virtualization practice director at FusionStorm, a leading IT services provider. “Many times, introducing new technologies creates a hybrid desktop environment that can be even more challenging for IT to manage. Together, RES Software and eG Innovations give enterprises the confidence to know that users won’t experience disruption by the move to virtual desktops, and they can fully take advantage of the flexibility and mobility offered by VDI. We see tremendous value in this joint offering, and our customers stand to benefit greatly from pairing these two technologies as they initiate upcoming desktop transformation projects.”

EMA’s recently released Radar Report™ entitled: “Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services” ranks eG Innovations as a cloud performance management leader based on its product architecture, deep integration, ease of administration, deployment and cost advantages. Specifically, eG Innovations has been recognized as the management software vendor with the “Best Private Cloud Coverage” for its superior private cloud management capabilities and very strong support for virtualized environments. eG Innovations also earned EMA’s “Value Leader” distinction among 11 management software vendors providing a multi-component APM solution.

“We are truly impressed with eG Innovations cloud performance management solution,” said Julie Craig, EMA research director. “eG beats out most of the competition in terms of coverage for diverse virtual server environments as well as for its distinctive ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ real-time analytics. The eG Enterprise Suite includes multiple features that one would expect from more expensive solutions; their comprehensive support for virtual environments positions eG Innovations as a leader in terms of monitoring private cloud and public infrastructure as a service environments.”

This award is based on multiple functional capabilities, including:

Comprehensive Virtualization Coverage: eG Innovations supports monitoring, diagnosis and reporting for VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Solaris LDOMs, Solaris Containers, AIX LPARs, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Oracle VirtualBox.

Patented Virtualization / Cloud-aware Correlation & Root Cause Diagnosis: Automatically correlates across metrics from different tiers to identify and fix issues before users call. eG Innovations’ correlation supports the dynamic inter-dependencies, such as VMware vMotions, that come with private clouds and provides deep visibility where traditional tools have limitations.

Universal Agent Technology: Contributes to cost and administration efficiency and delivers maximum deployment flexibility. A single agent is capable of monitoring over 150 applications, 10 different operating systems, and 9 different virtualization platforms.

“In-N-Out” Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring: Delivers both depth and breadth of insight into virtual application performance, a critical criterion for rapid and accurate diagnosis of performance problems. It is the only solution that provides both an outside view of a VM indicating the hypervisor’s physical resources used by a VM and an inside view of the VM indicating which application(s) and user(s) of the VM are causing the resource usage.

To read more about eG Innovations and download the summary of the “EMA Radar™ for Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services: Q1 2012 (eG Innovations profile)”, visit http://www.eginnovations.com/cloud.