app-centric infrastructure performance management infrastructure performance management. overview...
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OverviewThe VirtualWisdom App-centric Infrastructure Performance Management (App-centric IPM) platform ensures the performance, availability, health, and utilization of enterprise IT infrastructure in service of increasingly complex and demanding business applications. The out-of-band solution intelligently collects machine and wire data across physical and virtual hosts, Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics, Software-defined, Converged, as well as SAN and NAS storage. Using cross domain correlation, VirtualWisdom’s App-centric Analytics transform the collected data into actionable insights that can be used to optimize the environment and proactively find and resolve issues before users are affected. This enables IT teams to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and guarantee performance-based service level agreements (SLAs), enhancing the value of the infrastructure. With new insights, IT teams are taking control of their environment and working collaboratively to drive positive business outcomes.
Business Drivers for VirtualWisdom App-centric IPM
Infrastructure is expensive, costly to maintain, and often difficult to scale. Larger IT organizations are now supporting thousands of application services over a shared infrastructure, with thousands of infrastructure services. While transitioning to virtualized and cloud environments can reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) on physical hardware, the challenges of visibility into the health, utilization, and performance of this dynamic infrastructure remains a tremendous people-intensive process.
Enterprise IT doesn’t have a uniform basis for understanding how the underlying infrastructure is performing. They are challenged to correlate disparate metrics across a heterogeneous data center that constantly changes. What is needed is a purpose-built solution that adapts and scales to this constant state of change and complexity—one that provides definitive answers to the most complex infrastructure questions in the context of key business-critical applications.
VirtualWisdom seamlessly brings all this disparate data together—correlating and analyzing it in real time—to provide an authoritative understanding of performance, health, and utilization. The actionable insight that VirtualWisdom provides to both infrastructure and application teams—from executive to specialist—enables them to assign performance-based guarantees to their mission-critical applications, regardless of whether they are operating in physical, virtual, or hybrid cloud computing environments.
We’ve seen both the economic and manageability improvements in our environment, and we’ve been able to achieve high utilization and performance…
Josh Morton
VP of IT Enterprise Services
The answers and insights from VirtualWisdom help teams proactively manage and optimize their infrastructures, independent of application, technology, and vendor—increasing efficiencies, mitigating risk of unplanned downtime, and delivering true ROI.
With VirtualWisdom deployed, your revenues are protected from slowdowns and outages. Unnecessary over-provisioning is eliminated, troubleshooting times are reduced by over 80%, and, perhaps most importantly, new application roll-outs to drive new business opportunities are dramatically accelerated.
The Industry’s Premier App-centric IPM PlatformOur award-winning platform is built from the ground up, with a focus on helping your applications and infrastructure perform optimally together.
The powerful analytics database and intuitive user interface (UI) deliver application-aware, entity-centric, real-time visualizations of thousands of metrics across the physical and virtual data center. VirtualWisdom is the industry’s first true infrastructure monitoring solution that delivers comprehensive visibility into your multi-tiered application infrastructure environment— a platform that understands how the infrastructure is performing for all of your critical applications. It knows which application services are running on which infrastructure components, as well as the relative importance of each application and how those applications are stressing the infrastructure.
The Value of App-centricityCompanies have been forced into the role of system integrator as a direct result of perpetually increasing complexity and abstraction in highly multi-vendor data centers. Increasingly, virtualization, cloud-computing, and software-defined are rendering device-based tools obsolete in enterprise IT.
To maximize value from your infrastructure investments, some key tenets should be applied. These include an understanding on where your applications live on the infrastructure, the business value of those applications, and the ability to monitor and manage the performance, utilization and health of the infrastructure services supporting the applications.
With an app-centric approach, you will:
• Proactively assure the performance
of your key applications
• Manage by applications, by service
level tier, and by importance to the
business (i.e., platinum, gold, silver)
• Avoid performance issues by continuously
optimizing capacity to meet the
needs of application workloads
• Resolve problems faster through
platform intelligence that identifies
and recommends solutions
VirtualWisdom App-Centric AnalyticsApp-centric Analytics focus on the critical findings that exist beyond your raw data. The App-centric Analytics module is delivered on a subscription basis, specific to the scope and scale of your unique VirtualWisdom implementation. This licensing model provides customers with all the standard analytics for troubleshooting and diagnostics, capacity management, and application service assurance.
Problem Avoidance and Resolution
Event Advisor - Get a prioritized list of potentially interesting events (spikes, relevant performance issues, anomalous behavior, etc.) that require attention, ranked by magnitude and duration.
Trend Matcher - Accepts a base trend for a target metric, compares it with every device in the database over a specified timeframe then provides a list of matching devices sorted by correlation.
Queue Solver - Recommends the resetting of an execution (or queue depth) throttle on the HBA card(s) of a specified host which enables you to optimize the read or write response time of that host.
Workload and Capacity Optimization
Balance Finder - Checks that the hosts in the environment have functioning path failover by comparing traffic patterns of all the ports associated with a single host to determine whether the multi- pathing software is functioning as intended.
VM Coordinator - Provides optimal placement for VMs across a cluster and recommends reconfiguration to reduce contention for CPU or memory resources.
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VM Deployment Advisor - Identifies the optimal cluster and host to which to deploy a VM based on available capacity and expected VM workload across CPU, memory, I/O, and network.
Workload Analysis - Transfers information from VirtualWisdom to Load DynamiX Enterprise, for building an optimized storage infrastructure.
Storage Port Balancer - Identifies overloaded storage ports and makes HBA/Host move suggestions that would rebalance the front-end ports of a Fibre Channel storage array.
Application Service Assurance
Seasonal Trend - Data informed prediction of resource needs within seasonal business patterns by hour, day, month, quarter or year.
Scalable Instrumentation: A Combination of Wire and Machine Data AcquisitionA monitoring and analytics platform is only as strong as its underlying data sources. The continued abstraction, scale and convergence of these data sources demands tightly integrated products designed to discover, ingest, correlate and export meaningful information, in real time. As these data sources and volumes continue to increase, it is the organizations that can leverage both wire and machine data from the widest variety of sources, correlating and analyzing them to deliver meaningful business analytics, who are getting the most value and insight from their data.
Virtual Instruments has partnered with leading system, switching and storage vendors to address this requirement for business success. By integrating with products from companies such as Cisco, Brocade, Gigamon, ServiceNow, Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and many more, VirtualWisdom delivers an analytics platform that makes it easy to bring together data from various sources and apply powerful analytics.
VirtualWisdom IntegrationsVirtual Instruments offers direct technology integration to a variety of infrastructure devices and third-party platforms. From Gigamon and Cisco to ServiceNow, companies share a common vision around the need for an App-centric approach to the management of data center infrastructure. Customers can choose the data sources and integrations that are most relevant to their business goals.
VirtualWisdom’s full-stack line-rate monitoring capabilities help you optimize the infrastructure that supports your most demanding applications. The Probes and integrations below are combined with the best of the Virtual Instruments award winning analytics capabilities to holistically monitor your virtual machines, hosts, network switches, and storage infrastructure.
Virtual Server Family
The ProbeVM Family of software-based probes collect and present hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from the associated physical server and hypervisor estate—including CPU utilization and status, memory utilization, disk I/O requests and capacity, as well as network requests and utilization.
The VirtualWisdom ProbeVM family supports VMware vSphere®, IBM PowerVM®, and Microsoft Hyper-V® environments, presenting hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from across the virtual estate.
Metrics are persisted and correlated with data from other VirtualWisdom probes and infrastructure data to build a complete picture of the end-to-end system for each virtual machine or physical server.
Fibre Channel Network Family
VirtualWisdom uses SMI-S and SNMP to collect extensive metrics from Fibre Channel switching infrastructure—from director class to top of rack FCoE, embedded gateway or other FC standard switching devices. Additionally, VirtualWisdom directly integrates with the Cisco MDS 9700 32G SAN Telemetry Streaming capability.
Software Defined Storage Family
Understanding the performance of SDS and Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions is accomplished with deep integration into VMware’s vCenter and Dell EMC’s ScaleIO architectures.
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Virtual Machines
Network
Hyper Converged
SAN Fabric
Servers
Storage
Uncompromising visibility is gained with application to LUN SDS visibility coupled with network traffic flows via our ProbeNetFlow integrations. This lock-step integration technique provides complete SDS correlation, health and performance insights.
Application Discovery
Auto-discover and visualize key application services using standard interfaces, including ServiceNow CMDB integration, NetFlow analysis, host integration using SSH or WMI, and a shared context / topology with AppDynamics. Robust flexibility allows infrastructure owners to use one or more of these application discovery integrations to support specific customer environments.
ServiceNow
Adding to VirtualWisdom’s ITSM ticketing integration, the new ServiceNow® CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. VirtualWisdom, paired with the ServiceNow Service Mapping, allows you to gain full visibility of your infrastructure and the application services running on that infrastructure, leading to more control of your environment and better decisions.
NetFlow
Accessing NetFlow flow records allows VirtualWisdom to obtain data related to bandwidth utilization and to discover and optimize application performance. Tightly monitored routers and vSphere distributed switches (vDS) are mapped into the VirtualWisdom appliance through policy-based configuration options. ProbeNetFlow supports IP network visibility through NetFlow, jFlow, IPFIX, and SFlow integrations.
NetApp Family
VirtualWisdom NTAP Storage Probes help provide additional visibility into how the FAS storage array impacts the end-to-end system performance. ProbeNTAP is an API-based NAS storage software probe that collects and correlates health and utilization data from the underlying NAS arrays (NetApp ONTAP8 and 9 Clustered Systems).
SAN and NAS Performance Probes
Our family of hardware-based SAN and NAS Performance Probes are the most advanced, high capacity line-rate data inspection and analysis devices available. They inspect, process and analyze every frame and packet header in real-time. They capture the true, unaltered, I/O profile of the actual
application traffic, detecting application performance slowdowns and transmission errors by measuring every I/O transaction from start to finish.
The SAN Performance Probe family consists of a high-density (8Gb) 48-port edition, and (16Gb) 12 and 24-port models. The ProbeNAS is a (10Gb) 16-port device and supports both NFSv3 and SMB v2/v3 protocols. This product family delivers the full range of cost and density options customers require.
TAP Patch Panel System
Traffic Access Points (TAPs) provide a passive, failsafe
access point to Fibre Channel network traffic on
the TAPped link. This makes the light available for
real- time performance monitoring, deep problem
diagnosis and protocol layer analysis. TAPs are
non-powered, non-mechanical devices that reflect
a small portion of the signal through the TAP to
another port, which provides a copy of the light
to upstream, out of band probes. The passive TAP
does not introduce any latency or overhead, has no
impact on application or SAN/NAS performance,
and is integrated with several industry leading
Patch Panel Systems for simple deployment.
TAP Patch Panel System
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ProbeFC8-HD48
ProbeFC-16G-12
ProbeFC-16G-24
ProbeNAS-10G-16
VirtualServerProbe
VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance
Traditional Servers & VMs
ProbeNetFlow(Ethernet Switches)
ProbeSW(FC Switches)
Integrated Host
VirtualWisdom Overview
Application Servers
ProbeSDS for ScaleIO VirtualWisdom
Platform Appliance 4220
PWR
SYS
LOC
USE
DEVCH1
SWCH2
DEVCH1
SWCH2
L1L25
L2L26
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L5L29
L6L30
L7L31
L8L32
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L15L39
L16L40
L17L41
L18L42
L19L43
L20L44
L21L45
L22L46
L23L47
L24L48
VSAN Cluster
ProbeSDS
Cisco MDS 9700
for VSAN
FC Storage ArraysNAS Storage Arrays
TAP PatchPanels
NAS or SANPerformance Probes
LASER
RADIATION
LIVE
TAPALLOUT
LIVE
TAPALLOUT
LIVE
TAPALLOUT
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TAPALLOUT
LASER
RADIATION
LIVE
TAPALLOUT
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VirtualWisdom Platform ArchitectureThe VirtualWisdom Platform is composed of a
fully integrated combination of VirtualWisdom
software and hardware probes and the purpose-
built VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance. This
powerful combination of hardware and software,
all fully developed, integrated, and tested in-house
at Virtual Instruments, ensures the highest levels
of performance, scalability, and serviceability.
VirtualWisdom’s unique combination of software and
hardware probes persists, correlates and analyzes
an unparalleled breadth and depth of data, including
wire data collected from throughout the end-to-end
infrastructure. This highly accurate and comprehensive
solution enables customers to start managing
performance, stop reactive troubleshooting, and
achieve cost optimization across their infrastructure.
How Virtual Instruments is Unique
1) Full stack, application-centric view of your infrastructure. We help you to understand physical
& virtual infrastructure interrelationships, to map
applications to the underlying shared infrastructure
across servers/VMs, networks and storage.
2) Highly granular, heterogenous, agentless monitoring. You can non-intrusively track
every transaction and I/O request to see
how application behavior and infrastructure
changes affect response times.
3) Massive ingest capability of both machine and wire data. We uniquely capture continuous, real-time
wire and machine data metrics via comprehensive
instrumentation across all infrastructure elements
with unsurpassed data ingest capabilities.
4) Cross-silo correlation and machine-learning-based analytics. VirtualWisdom App-centric Analytics
correlate and analyze wire and machine data in the
context of the application to help you proactively
find and resolve performance problems and optimize
utilization without your users even knowing.
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With VirtualWisdom Intuitive Persona-driven Dashboards multi-team collaboration becomes a reality to fine-tune system-wide performance.
VirtualWisdom Responsive User Interface
The intuitive VirtualWisdom graphical user interface
broadens the value of the VirtualWisdom solution
to the entire organization. Customized views
designed for IT engineering, IT operations, IT
executives, application owners, and business unit
managers make it easy to understand the health,
performance and utilization of the infrastructure
that supports the key business applications.
VirtualWisdom users can effectively perform
comprehensive analysis, collaborate across silos,
and make informed decisions based on definitive
insights about how applications and infrastructure
are performing. The dynamic user interface enables
multiple teams to quickly and confidently answer
questions—and deliver the right information at
the right time. This means regardless of function
(application, server, storage, virtualization, etc.),
you can collaboratively resolve problems and fine-
tune infrastructure performance based on business,
application, workload and SLA requirements.
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Solutions: Problems that Virtual Instruments Solves
How to Implement, Measure, and Report on Performance Based SLAs
In today’s highly virtualized and cloud-based environments, delivering highly responsive applications and data is about more than just availability—it’s about guaranteeing performance. What is even more important, is to be able to definitively measure and report on the specific performance being delivered, based on the application, line of business or tier of service. The visibility required to develop and deliver performance-based SLAs cannot be provided by individual device-specific data or polling-based “averages of averages”—it must be based on a comprehensive view of the end-to-end system and granular measurement of actual infrastructure response times. VirtualWisdom is the only App-centric IPM platform that provides precise data on system-wide performance by measuring every transaction, in real time, on the wire. This enables you to establish accurate baselines and measure changes over time, based on the actual workload and associated response times. With VirtualWisdom you can confidently deliver and report on SLA performance, providing visibility and accountability at all levels of the organization.
The VirtualWisdom dynamic GUI enables each cross-functional team to collaborate and customize their views of infrastructure health, performance and utilization.
VirtualWisdom is the only IPM platform that helps you proactively identify and resolve issues with app-centric analytics before they impact performance and availability.
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Move from Reactive Troubleshooting to Proactive Problem Avoidance
Regardless of how well architected and implemented
today’s physical, virtual and cloud-based
infrastructures are, it is inevitable that at some point
you will have to react to performance or availability
issues that catch you off-guard and are challenging to
identify and resolve. This ‘after the fact’ approach to
troubleshooting usually requires the involvement of
multiple teams, many with different sets of data and
information. In most cases, root cause is inferred or
never definitively proven. VirtualWisdom is the only
App-centric IPM platform that helps you proactively
identify and resolve issues before they impact
performance and availability. The unparalleled
breadth and depth of system-wide metrics, combined
with the power of entity and application-centric
reporting, alerting and analytics, enables you to
absolutely know the answer—before there is an
impact, before you get a call from the application
user. Don’t guess, know—and avoid the problem
before it keeps you and your team up all night!
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VirtualWisdom enables you to visualize key infrastructure metrics in the context of the applications that it supports.
VirtualWisdom ServicesVirtual Instruments offers a variety of services
that help customers augment their existing
IT staff with highly trained infrastructure
performance management specialists.
Deployment Options
Silver, Gold, Platinum
Our deployment options provide VI
Professional Services expertise for maximum
productivity and fastest time-to-value.
Our Silver option provides VI experts to
configure your solution, ensure data collection,
and train your staff in basic product use.
Our Gold deployment includes all of the services
provided in our Silver deployment, plus help to set up
your solution to proactively manage your infrastructure.
Our Platinum deployment includes our most
comprehensive installation, configuration, and
training package. We install and configure your
solution, then perform a baseline assessment
and provide 3 months of follow up assistance.
Infrastructure Performance Assessment (IPA)
The IPA service includes delivery of best practices,
baseline reporting, advanced analysis and alert
investigation. In many cases, this service is delivered
in direct support of large scale migration and
consolidation projects. This service can be delivered as
a stand-alone solution that is inclusive of a dedicated,
targeted deployment of the VirtualWisdom Platform,
or as auxiliary services in a currently installed account.
Virtual Instruments Managed Service (VIMS)
Managed Services deliver monthly health,
utilization and performance reports, track progress
against key KPIs and help customers proactively
manage their VirtualWisdom environments.
They are focused on improving the performance
and availability of customers’ mission-critical
applications by augmenting their existing staff.
Storage Performance Validation and Testing
The Storage Performance Validation and Testing
Service delivers a custom report detailing and
comparing the performance of different storage
systems and configurations, to enable more
intelligent purchase and deployment decisions.
How VirtualWisdom Complements Your Current Management SolutionsToday’s most common management solutions—such as
Enterprise Management Frameworks, Storage Resource
Managers, Virtual Server Monitors, Application
Performance Monitors, and SAN Fabric Managers—all
lack continuous real-time monitoring of application
workload across the end-to-end infrastructure. These
legacy management products typically poll devices
and average the metrics over 5 to 20-minute periods,
which render them incapable of managing performance
and insufficient for identifying and resolving problems.
The VirtualWisdom platform is the only solution
that can non-intrusively optimize the performance
and availability of applications by measuring and
correlating actual workload I/O profile data from the
VM, Physical Server, Switch Fabric and Storage.
The VirtualWisdom platform enhances your
current management solutions with:
• A comprehensive view of the entire open
systems stack to find problems undetectable
by software- only monitoring
• Highly accurate and detailed continuous real-time,
unbiased monitoring—for definitive insights
• Deterministic pinpointing of root
causes and impacts on infrastructure
and application performance
• Trending and analysis for proactively identifying
emergent issues before they impact performance
• Performance trending to identify hardware
degradation, to enable preemptive
component replacement before failure
• Storage network statistics such as pending
exchanges, to tune queue depths for
maximum application performance
• The ability to determine if configuration changes
are affecting application and infrastructure
performance by examining systemic latency
• Heterogeneous support of all devices, including
storage switches, arrays, Software Defined,
HCI, and NAS and Fibre Channel component
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