Business Transaction Management Blog

Virtualized in Vancouver

February 22, 2010 at 2:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment

By Russell Rothstein

February 22, 2010

We’re fascinated by what’s going on in Vancouver this month. Sure, there’s a lot of drama, action and suspense going on over at the Winter Olympics (such as the valiant efforts of the Jamaican Freestyle Skier to be the first to restore the pride of winter sports to his homeland since the 1988 Jamaican Bobsled team) but we’re even more intrigued by the less mesomorphic young singles cross-town in Vancouver engaging their social skills in a flittering party –  flirting virtually with one another through the twitter platform.

For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).

We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:

• Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
• Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
• Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.

Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies.  And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.

Go Jamaica!

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: APM, Application Performance Management, BSM, BTM, Business Service Management, Business Transaction Management, capacity planning, flitter, olympics, OpTier, virtualization, virtualization management, vm management, VMotion, VMware.