Vic Nyman

Managing the Virtualized Puzzle | An Application-Centric Approach to Virtualization

While virtualization continues to receive enormous buzz, most people today associate it with storage, hardware, and infrastructure.  But that’s only a piece of the puzzle.  The other piece is about business-critical applications – the complex applications directly aligned with running a successful business.

Applications: The Last Piece of the ‘Virtualized Puzzle’

Research firm Gartner states that virtualization will be the highest-impact trend affecting infrastructure and operations through 2012, yet few organizations today are deploying business-critical applications in virtualized environments.  The reason is simple: no management tools today enable IT staff to guarantee the performance and reliability demanded by these applications.  The result: progress of virtualization has undesirably stalled at a point where mainly simple, non-transactional applications are virtualized.

Today’s dynamic data centers require a holistic, integrated solution that provides visibility into the entire application ecosystem allowing for improved management and performance.  To generate an impact on the business, converting servers with complex applications that represent integrated, more business-critical applications, is next on VM administrators’ lists.

But application owners can’t risk their application being converted if it means less manageability or degraded performance.  To manage the application, they need complete application visibility, down to the process-level, to ensure it is functioning properly and operating at full capacity.  What’s needed is an application-centric approach to virtualization – one that focuses on the application rather than the virtual machine.

Manage the Application, Not the Machine

With virtual application performance being abstracted from the physical server hosting the virtual machine (VM), support organizations need to follow the application to quickly determine and isolate where an application is bogging down. Once identified, diving down the stack to additional performance indicators makes for an easy approach to isolating and resolving the issue.

Many management tools look only at the virtual machine, the server, or the network – a continued silo approach – to solve problems.  These fail to show where the application goes, the shape of its infrastructure – virtual and physical – and only provide a fraction of the performance details desired. With the one-to-one relationship of server to application broken, companies can no longer rely simply upon machine performance indicators to determine the health of their applications.

With an application-centric approach, and the proper tools to see the interdependencies of the application, application owners and IT support teams can keep complex critical applications performing well, and if issues arise, respond quickly to isolate problems. This approach provides the performance details of service-level processes depicting machine performance, and application details of resource use, bytes sent and received, response times, processes maintained dropped or stalled – details not available by any machine measurement.

By following the application across servers, operating systems – where ever it goes, whatever it interacts with – only then can it be determined where performance issues arise.  Only by interacting at the application service level, where full details into the performance and behavior of the application are available, can it be seen where the application is impacted, and what is impacting its performance. Once it is understood where the application is impacted, application support staff can dive into the server stack to determine if there are bad connections, an overloaded VM, server-hosting conflict or any number of server-related issues.

With dynamic data centers constantly changing the shape of the application ecosystem, only by following the application can it be truly managed.  Added processes being can be seen, VM changes can be monitored, and detailed performance data is available for every monitored connection, so application visibility is maintained, regardless of the latest data center change.

Recently, a users’ application was effectively non-responsive. After two days of work, they realized a server they were dependent upon had been converted and their application was still making calls to it. With an application-centric approach, they could have quickly followed the application, isolated the problem and saved themselves days and tens of thousands of dollars.

The Hidden Costs of Application Availability and Performance Issues

Most executives understand that application downtime or poor performance can be extremely costly—virtualized or not.  According to Aberdeen Research, 9% of revenues can be lost due to poor application management.

It’s clear that application availability and performance are critical to business success and that organizations have hesitated in moving critical applications to virtualized environments due to these concerns.

Today, a new generation of application service management (ASM) tools is capable of providing real application data – a first for the virtualized data center environment.  This gives application owners the confidence to virtualize complex applications, knowing they will perform as expected.

Solutions now use collectors, a small service that runs in the operating systems of a few servers in the environment, to passively collect data by monitoring the application request layers. The collector sends detailed statistics on the operating systems by using WMI when necessary and ESX Server by connecting to VMware VirtualCenter management APIs. This data helps the application administrator understand the application performance and track its movement to more easily detect potential bottlenecks and failures.

Application Service Management: A Better Approach to Managing Dynamic Data Centers

Application service management (ASM) provides application support and infrastructure owners with a solution that delivers visibility to manage the performance and availability of applications deployed in virtualized data centers.  The ASM approach includes three critical elements:
 

• Application Discovery & Mapping: Automatic discovery and mapping of application connections, processes, and interdependencies allowing for visibility into both physical and virtual environments.
•  Application-level Health Measurement: Performance intelligence detailing connections, usage, and application access times, depicting the relative health of complex applications.
• Automatic Triage of Application & Server Problems: Performance indicators highlight areas of concern, showing where to focus efforts to solve problems and optimize the IT environment. 

Since ASM stresses a business approach, application support and infrastructure owners can align service-level objectives around overarching business priorities.  This application-centric approach helps clarify the goals across organizations and improve responsiveness.

As a result, application and infrastructure support can focus on the availability, performance, and mutually defined business processes; and specify the processes through service-level agreements.  Essentially, ASM gives IT a common language to share objectives and provides visibility into actual application performance and availability, enabling them to control and improve service delivery to the customer.

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