Virtualized IT infrastructures present major challenges to capacity planning as well as resource utilization and optimization. These shared infrastructures combine virtualization, resource aggregation, logical allocation, dynamic workload relocation, and settings reconfiguration, which introduce significant complexity to resource management and capacity planning.

Measuring utilization in a virtual infrastructure is impossible with traditional management tools and requires new technology and approaches. The layer of abstraction that accompanies clusters, resource pools, and hosts cloud visibility, and the fluidity created by new capabilities such as resource reservations, DRS, and HA, present significant management complexity. Resource utilization data in a virtual infrastructure can be obtained using new, virtual-aware techniques, but this data alone is insufficient to manage, optimize, and plan the virtual infrastructure.

ManageIQ EVM – Insight, Control and Automation

ManageIQ’s Enterprise Virtualization Management Suite (EVM) provides IT administrators and managers with a comprehensive solution to monitor and optimize their virtual infrastructures with advanced capacity planning and sophisticated resource management capabilities including intelligent placement, monitoring, analytics, trending and alerting. EVM provides great visibility into resource utilization, performance and configuration information, including reports, alerts, dashboards, RSS feeds and analytics.

Beyond Monitoring and Reporting – Control and Automation

EVM goes far beyond monitoring and reporting tools and enables policy-based control and automation. This allows IT organizations to eliminate the labor-intensive, error-prone process of exception reporting, manual analysis and operator remediation. EVM enforces resource management policies and can automatically prevent, remediate or alert when polices are violated. EVM can detect and enforce polices based on allocation, size, placement, alignment, workload content, age, waste, snapshots, resource type, tier, cost, quota and leverages SmartTags™ and customizable time profiles for context.

Quantitative, Qualitative and Analytics

EVM uniquely classifies or “tags” resources and workloads using patent-pending SmartTags™ to provide contextual awareness and enable qualitative analysis regarding resource performance and utilization based on business, IT and workload classifications. EVM provides analytics leveraging quantitative resource metrics captured from monitoring the environment and automatically generates normal operating range metrics, trends and future bottlenecks. EVM also combines and correlates extensive configuration and change information, operational event data with utilization and performance statistics to uniquely address both the quantitative and the qualitative management requirements enterprises need to get the most out of their infrastructure resource investment with the lowest management costs.

Leveraging quantitative and qualitative resource and configuration information combine with contextual classifications EVM can help answer complex questions like:

• Resource Utilization - What is driving utilization higher? What changes were responsible for the increase in demand or decrease in capacity? Were VMs added? Did hardware change?
• Resource Trending - Why is SAN utilization dramatically increasing? Which users or groups are responsible for the increase? What is on the SAN and who owns it? How can I see trends during my peak times or business hours?
• Optimization, Waste and Rightsizing - How many VMs are overallocated on virtual cpus, memory or storage? What should they be set to? Do I have too many snapshots? Are my virtual disks aligned ?
• Performance - Why are some VMs performing well and others poorly when they were all derived from the same source? What’s different? When did something change? What services and VMs are being affected by storage problems?
• Bottlenecks and Alerting - What resource problems do I have? How can I get events and alerts based on business service and workload characteristics?
• Future Bottlenecks - How can I find out ahead of time where my resource challenges will be? How can I get more proactive about resource management?
• Capacity Planning - Where do I have available capacity for new services? How many more VMs can the infrastructure support? How many VMs are being retired? How many are underutilizing their resource reservations?
• Placement - Where should new workloads go? Where do I have capacity for this type of workload?