Alive Optimizes Your Virtualization Management Initiative

The rapid adoption of data center virtualization, while providing the clear cost savings of server consolidation, creates a much more difficult environment for the management of performance and availability of virtualized applications and application components. Your current system management tools, which require massive amounts of manual effort to resolve performance problems, simply cannot scale in a dynamic, virtualized environment. In fact, the cost savings of server consolidation can be quickly consumed by increased labor costs for performance management.

Virtualization Management Issues Are Clear

Virtualization increases the complexity of your IT infrastructure in multiple ways. Of course, you now have additional components to manage. You'll need to understand the behavior of the host O/S and the hypervisor in addition to the guest O/S and applications running in the VMs (that used to reside on physical servers). By definition, you'll be managing more metrics and associated alerts (probably on the order of 20% more).

You're also looking at a more complex set of interactions between the various components. When a performance problem manifests itself in a virtualized application or application component, you'll have to figure out where it originated.

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You'll also need to proactively manage your environment in real time to optimize resource allocations. Consider these questions you'll need to answer:

How does a change in load on an application running in one VM affect other applications running in other VMs?
How do changing loads affect the hypervisor performance?
What impact does this have on the host O/S and physical server performance?
What happens if I move a VM to another physical server or reallocate resource among VMs on a physical server?

Clearly managing performance of applications in a virtualized environment is considerably more complex (and potentially costly) than in the physical environment. As your business ebbs and flows, virtualized application components in a multi-tier business service that initially performed quite well may begin to degrade. As many companies discover in their initial forays into virtualization-based consolidation in production environments, the complex interactions of multiple VMs and the new components introduced by virtualization software can make performance problems difficult to diagnose and address.

Your static threshold-based monitoring solutions simply will not provide the insights necessary in this highly dynamic virtual environment. To do this effectively, you'll need to take a different approach to managing the performance and availability of your mission critical business services. One that provides real time analytics for your virtualized, physical, or hybrid environment. What you need is Integrien Alive™.

How Alive Helps You Manage Your Virtual Environment

In order to allow you to reap the full ROI from virtualization, Integrien Alive:

optimizes the entire lifecycle of your virtualization initiative from determining initial candidates to proactively managing your virtualized production environment
accesses accurate rate-based metrics from VMs
learns the normal behavior of virtual components and alerts only to abnormal behaviors that are true precursors to problems
automatically adapts its algorithms to handle moving virtual machines
correlates the complex interdependencies of your virtual environment so you can dynamically optimize resource allocations
helps isolate problems to a probable root cause
proactively notifies of pending problems in your virtual environment so they can be solved before they occur
operates seamlessly in a hybrid virtual/physical environment
provides a business-focused approach to performance management.

Support for Leading Virtualization Solutions

Integrien Alive integrates with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), Hyperic HQ, and nworks for accurate rate-based metric collection for virtual environments. If you are exclusively using VMware for virtualization and are not using either the ITM or Hyperic HQ monitoring tools, the nworks Collector provides all the metric collection capability you'll need for Alive to manage your virtual environment.

Alive provides the ability to manage the following virtual environments when used in conjunction with Hyperic HQ:

VMware
Citrix Metaframe

Alive provides the ability to manage the following virtual environments when used in conjunction with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM):

VMware
Microsoft Virtual Server
Citrix XenServer
IBM AIX/IBM System P
Sun Solaris Containers

Alive provides the ability to manage the following virtual environments when used in conjunction with the nworks or HP:

VMware