Ensuring Virtualization Performance with eG Innovations eG VM Monitor
- Extracted from Enterprise Management AssociatesTM Advisory Note: Virtualization and Management – Trends, Forecasts, and Recommendations
James is a Senior Technical Engineer for a global consumer products company with around 5000 employees and a million independent sales agents delivering over $2 billion in sales worldwide. With data centers in the US, UK, and Asia, they are running 25-30 VMware ESX servers, supporting around 400 virtual machines, running domain controllers, production Web servers, Microsoft Project servers, Citrix licensing servers, antivirus servers, and virtual desktops. They have just 7 staff to manage all their IT infrastructure – hardware, operating systems, and applications – and just 1 person to manage their virtual environment.
In 2003 they started to deploy VMware, and like many environments started with just the basic VirtualCenter management toolset. However, James says, “VirtualCenter is not very detailed – when you try to look at multiple VMs together, there’s no way to do that; if I want to look at 10 VMs together to see how they are performing, it doesn’t give me that kind of insight.”
James was spending hours every month on management reporting, “pulling data out of Virtual Center, putting it into charts, making it look right – and I had to customize it every time there was a little change.” Despite his effort, without accurate, real-time metrics, they were “flying blindly,” deploying a maximum of 4 VMs per core regardless of actual utilization. “We were not saving as much as we could,” says James, “because we needed that low ratio to be sure we maintained performance and service levels.” When they started to expand their virtualization deployment internationally, this rough methodology was not reliable, scalable, or cost-effective – and it made senior global VPs very uncomfort-able. James needed accurate capacity monitoring and planning, with realtime alerting, driven by policy-based thresholds for specific metrics.
After a formal evaluation of eight different solutions, James selected the eG Monitor solution from eG Innovations. In just 3 months, the results have already been just what needed.
It provides the real-time monitoring, alerts, threshold triggered actions, and automatic problem ticket generation that James was looking for. “Other solutions felt very limited by comparison,” he says. They now have “better server-to-VM ratios that are based in reality, not just a ‘best guess’,” allowing them to “load up multi-CPU systems with multiple virtual systems,” increasing hardware utilization and cost savings. They spend less time on routine work, because VMs are now “easier and faster to manage and administer,” says James. “I can spend less time to get the information that I need. On a monthly basis, this will save me about 5-6 hours.” And with a “very nice reporting function – which was especially important to the management team,” global VPs get the availability – and the reassurance – that they need.
Through better server utilization, improved resource efficiency, greater cost savings, and more accurate metrics – not to mention saving almost a day of James’ time every month on report generation alone, and the peace-of-mind it gives the worldwide VPs – the eG Innovations solution has certainly delivered the results James needed. |
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