vmSight Application Profiler

http://www.vmsight.com

A detailed product review with some screen shots is available here. (An online product brief is not currently available, as the website is being restructured due to a recent acquisition by Liquidware Labs)

vmSight is priced at $50/user, list price.

Evaluation licensing is for a single host.

You have to register with their website in order to gain access to the download, which will come in the form of a link in an email. What you end up downloading is a certified virtual appliance, with minimal configuration needed. You should also be able to download directly into vCenter, but my hosts are behind restrictive firewalls so I was unable to do so. The appliance expects two network connections – one to the normal network, and one that sits on a vswitch configured in promiscuous mode to sniff the traffic. Because of this, each ESX host in the environment must have one of these appliances, which come in two flavors. There is a primary ‘vmSight Center’ that is the management server, where all licensing is, and then all other hosts get a ‘Monitoring Station’ that reports back to the primary. There is an additional component, their patented “Connector ID” technology that goes as far towards the end-users as you like. It can go into the VDI desktops, and down to the thin-client or physical desktop level. This gives you end-to-end monitoring from a user perspective. All management, aside from initial installation, is browser-based. If performance monitoring was all that you needed, I think this is a slick end-to-end product, and could be very powerful in maintaining the user experience. However, with the exception of some highly-customized reporting, it does not have any specific trending or capacity planning functions. Next up, Quest vFoglight.

-Bruce Heavner, GlassHouse Senior Consultant

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Many organizations already have developed a cost per unit of storage (typically dollar per allocated GB of configured storage). Many organizations also have developed a cost per unit for the server environment and this is typically represented as dollar per CPU or dollar per Ghz of computing power. If these costs are not already in place you may need to work with the finance team to develop a simple go forward model based on current cost for the next refresh of storage and server platforms. Other key costs to capture include software licensing, and maintenance costs for both hardware and software as well as network connections, network hardware and network software costs. Networking costs are typically allocated on a per port basis.

Because the hardware and software has been associated or assigned to a specific tier of service with its own distinct recovery attributes, the model can now calculate the hardware, software and maintenance costs associated with providing that tier of service.

Technology costs often decrease every year roughly following Moore ’s law. Each year it seems we can double disk storage capacity and double CPU Ghz for roughly the same price. This is not true for administrative costs. Administrative costs tend to go up each year as seniority, merit, market, overhead, and inflationary factors impact the cost per employee. It is therefore critical to build into the model the cost of the operationally focused employees allocated to storage, the servers, and the network.

Finally accommodation costs for the data center/s and the employee accommodations should be added to the model. This is often known by the organization’s facilities department and typically is expressed in a dollar per sq foot metric. The dollar per sq footage is made up of power, cooling, and floor space costs.

The model now provides an empirical basis for understanding the actual costs involved in providing each disaster recovery service offering. Charge back is always a contentious issue, however just making the costs of each service visible by publication in your service catalog and by publishing usage as key performance indicators starts the culture change required for rational and prudent service selection. This new approach to service selection is founded on two key factors; the business impact that may result from a disaster, and the cost of protecting the business against that disaster. Rational planning to meet rationalized needs.

By Dick Benton, Principal Consultant

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by Dick Benton, Principal Consultant

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Recovery Service Objectives (RSO) are the publicly visible service commitments that dictate the infrastructure needed to deliver the DR Service Offerings.

The next service objective is the RPV (Recovery Production Volume). The relative volume capability projected following a disaster event. Many organizations do not address this critical component of recovery. How much data will be processed during the period after recovery? Will it be business as usual, or business as usual plus an extra day’s entry from lost data. Perhaps the nature of the business will result in a serious drop off in transaction volume. The nature of the business might equally result in a sudden increase in transactions immediately following a disaster. Again the business community is the appropriate body to weigh the factors and make this decision, and in making this decision they are determining just how much hardware is going to be needed for recovery based on these projected volumes; another decision having a significant impact on costs. RPV is typically expressed as a percentage. e.g. 80% indicates an expectation that business volumes in the post disaster period will approximate 80% of the business as usual figure. 120% would indicate an expectation of an increase of 20% in volume over business as usual.

Closely tied to RPV is, the recovered production efficiency or RPE. This service objective identifies the relative performance capability that will be provided in the period following a disaster. Many organizations identify development and test infrastructure to be repurposed for use in production following a disaster. Many organizations do not have the budget to provide 100% infrastructure equivalence in a lights out “just in case” recovery center. Under these circumstances it is critical to ensure the business user community is aware of any change in the performance they can expect in a post disaster period where recovery compute platforms might be initially recovered at a lower level of GHz availability. This is done by setting and publishing an RPE for each period after a disaster until capabilities return top pre disaster.

In a virtualized server environment, it is possible to bring back virtual servers on a limited physical infrastructure, albeit at reduced performance. In the days and weeks following a disaster, additional hardware can be added to the physical environment improving the performance of virtual servers to the point that they now equate with pre disaster capabilities. In this scenario we might find a post disaster RPE of 50% with 75% within 30 days and 90% within 60 days and 100% within 90 days of the disaster event.

Finally, RPL or recovered production life defines, or sets as a policy, the expected life of operation at the DR site. Thus if RPL is set at 6 months, then everyone involved is aware that a plan to transfer back to newly built or refurbished permanent production facilities must be developed and executed in the RPL time frame. This is particularly important where the DR site is provided by a 3 rd party under contract. The absence of an officially acknowledged RPL can result in lack of restoration planning and consequent punitive costs as expensive facilities intended for short term use are retained beyond contractual commitments.

For your DR Plan to be successful, your Recovery Service Objectives must be set with the business community, set using an empirical basis, and last but not least, the RSOs must be made visible and published to the business community so everyone :knows” the rules of the game..

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Recovery Service Objectives (RSO) are the publicly visible service commitments that dictate the infrastructure needed to deliver the DR Service Offerings.

In previous blogs we covered the empirically based Business Impact Analysis or BIA. The BIA process provides us with the tangible cost to the organization should a business unit be unable to operate. Now we need to develop recovery service objectives (RSO) that are based on our knowledge of the financial impact of disaster. RSOs spell out the attributes that govern disaster recovery operations; e.g. how quickly recovery will be executed, how much data will be recovered, and the volume and performance expectations of the recovered applications. RSOs are a key driver of the costs of disaster recovery protection.

RSOs consist of five key components; RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPV (Recovered Production Volume), RPE (Recovered Production Efficiency) and RPL (Recovered Production Life)

RPO is the attribute that calls out the maximum data loss that can be tolerated without unacceptable impact. This is typically measured in hours or days. An RPO of one hour means that the data must be protected such that any loss of data is constrained to the last hour before the disaster. RPOs can also be subjective judgments made by the business unit manager or the business unit liaison staff based on their knowledge of the Business Impact Analysis and a good feel for the operational nature of the business function. A more scientific basis for RPO development is to specifically link data loss to dollars. For example, if $523,000 in orders arrive over the web every hour, it is easy to understand the impact of data loss from one minute to one day. This may already have been accounted for in a typical BIA. It is always best to set the RPO in a formal team workshop that includes the business unit users, application development, and the data base design team.. Typically this team will know how data arrives and is processed as well as being close enough to the business to understand the impact of one day’s data loss compared to one hour.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum tolerable time that a business unit can be without its applications, or, to frame it another way, the maximum amount of time permitted to recover an application after a disaster event. RTO is also typically expressed in hours or days. Now this RSO too can be subjective. We should know from the BIA the loss of dollars that may occur from permanently lost new customers, a percentage estimate loss of major accounts, and a percentage loss of formally loyal smaller customers. Consider too the business volumes. In some organizations, the business volumes are so significant that catching up after an outage can be not only difficult but very expensive. If additional staff needs to be brought in and trained to handle the backlog a significant recovery cost can be anticipated and calculated accurately on a per hour basis. Again it is critical to involve your business user community in the decisions that determine the RTO, and it is critical that the cost of this decision is made apparent during the discussions. Not only should solid information from the BIA be available, but you will also need the mitigating data on cost per GB of storage and cost per CPU of the processing infrastructure needed to support the RTO decision. A subjective choice of RTO without the cold water effect of the cost of that decision can lead to recovery costs out of alignment with real business impact.

By Dick Benton, Principal Consultant

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EMC’s VPLEX can integrate with VBlocks and leverage VMware, Cisco, and EMC packages which provide a solution for computing, network, storage, and management.

VPLEX is a pay as you grow module, starts small and grow as you need. The VPLEX comes in two configurations:

• VPLEX Local – allows data mobility across arrays in a local data center in a non-disruptive fashion

• VPLEX Metro – enables data access across two locations (within 60 Miles)

EMC plans to introduce two more configurations of VPLEX:

• VPLEX Geo – will support data access across different geographical locations (over 60 Miles)

• VPLEX Global – will allow data access across multiple global locations, this will allow companies to reduce processing costs as it can take advantage of lower energy costs during the day and night

EMC has managed to overcome remote data mobility challenges such as: performance latency, bandwidth limitations, and data inconsistency. EMC will address these issues with a global distributed cache coherency design using VPLEX engines.

If this is successful, the approach could have some truly valuable use cases in both local and global configurations, an example is vMotion over distance (more information can be found at: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021215 ).

I’m looking forward to see how this product will be implemented and answer some business and technological challenges.

by Ronny Frony, GlassHouse consultant

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One thing you might have noticed is how service can be delivered differently by companies that seem to have the same target market in mind.

I spent some time recently in Starbucks.  Pretty special for someone from New England who has grown up on Dunkin Donuts.  Here are two very interesting and very different approaches to the same product: Coffee. Now both places offer an extended menu beyond breakfast pastries – sandwiches and frozen beverages, for example.  But they deliver their products in very different ways.

Dunkin Donuts is about quick service. Place order, pay, get coffee. Very much a high-speed operation.  Prices are reasonable at only a couple bucks for a cup of coffee.  Perfect business for a drive-thru.  Quality varies – seems like I’m always getting burnt coffee at the airport here.  Each Dunkin Donut location is franchised. But the experience is generally the same – get in, order, pay, get out.

Starbucks.  Wow!  Almost forgot I was there for just “coffee”.  Sure the coffee menu is a little more complex and the coffee is a little different.  But, it’s the entire experience that wraps it.  The staff warmly greets you and prepares each coffee especially for you (with your name on the cup!).  The coffee costs ‘significantly’ more.  Getting in and out takes much longer.  There is music playing, there’s a ‘question of the day’ and crossword puzzle on the counter for anyone to play, and the customers sink into overstuffed chairs and sofas to drink their coffee.  Starbucks owns and controls each location.

Walk into one of each and experience the difference in the style and level of service.  Same product (coffee), but very different customer service events.  Depending on your day, your mood and your own particular personality, one might be a better ‘coffee fit’ for you.  But if you’re looking at just the customer service experience and rapid development of brand loyalty, well… There have been books written about Starbucks.  You can see why.

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I showed up at the EMC World event with nothing more than my jacket and trusty analog recording device (pen). Not wanting to drag a laptop bag around all day or be distracted by any games installed I figured this was the best way to sample the break out sessions. Arriving at each and grabbing a second evaluation form to write on while sitting in the front did not disappoint me. The presentations, as you would guess based on topic and speaker did vary a bit through the day. After about 17 years in the IT industry I like to spend time down in the weeds and not seeing an overview. That stated you have to appreciate when someone does present a review of a topic you feel comfortable with and there’s still something there you don’t often consider. My first session had to do with storage security with virtualization and cloud computing. Scary topic if you were not already aware of how many ways there are to access data, but a good overview of how threats have evolved over the years.

The next session had to do with something I had not heard a lot about, EMC’s new concept of Federations. As the speaker openly admitted the obvious connection with the Star Trek series, the idea of taking many different applications and the sharing of the storage resources that support them over multiple sites was a unique approach. A number of technical hurdles are still out there so while the premise is exciting we’ll have to wait and see how things work out. You’re probably thinking that I’m just using a bunch of buzz words and not a lot of technical detail. You’re right. The technology is still in the design phase and worth the look if you’d like to search on the web for more information.

By Richard Witherow, GlassHouse Senior Consultant

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I’ve seen where organizations have set levels of DR performance capability to a reduced percentage of production, but can’t explain exactly how that percentage was determined. Can performance only be measured in processors or memory on a 1-to-1 basis? Quite often that answer is no, and rather there’s an exponential relationship between application performance and the level of degradation in hardware support. That exponential relationship is most certainly more damaging than not. A DR facility with 50% compute power may indeed be less costly to maintain in a budgeting effort, but during an actual disaster may be unable to support necessary business functions. How long could business centric applications function at 50% capacity? Can business transactions be completed in a timely manner before a customer goes to a competitor? A majority of organizations lack this kind of insight, or the resources available to undertake such a discovery. In organizations with many and large applications, each with their own minimum operating standard and actual operating requirements, it can be difficult to determine an exact percentage to maintain at a DR site. DR is not meant to be a cost saving endeavor.

Having a DR plan is meant to protect a business from significant loss in the case of a disaster. The time and resources spent on discovering the equilibrium for minimized cost could end up equaling that very savings and take away time better spent putting DR in place. The determinant should be the business units’ ability to do business, and if it operates in production the odds are it will operate in a 100% like DR environment.

by Brian Sakovitch, GlassHouse Consultant

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One of the solutions is EMC Data Domain. Data Domain offers a matured target deduplication solution. Technically this is an appliance which receives backup data, performs real time deduplication (recognizes data blocks which already reside in the repository and prevents rewriting them) and writes to internal disk system. Because the fact that backup data is very repetitive (especially full backups) the deduplication ratio can be very high (1:10 and higher).

Every appliance can be connected via Ethernet (NFS, CIFS, OST protocols) or FC (VTL). The CPU performs inline checksum, comparison, compression and prefetching. The data is arranged in containers in an optimized dedicated filesystem and written on internal SATA drives.

For DR purpose there is a replication mechanism which replicates deduped data to another appliance. This lowers WAN costs and improves SLAs. The replication can be arranged as many to one, thus consolidating backups from many branches or different data centers.

The whole line of Data Domain appliances ranges from several terabytes of backed up data to petabytes and this covers needs of most enterprises.

For more information and details please don’t hesitate to contact Mark Directly at: markfr@glasshouse.com

By Mark Friedman, GlassHouse Israel’s CTO of Storage and Backup

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