S t r a t e g y S e s s i o n
Tools to Tame Virtualization
IT needs a big toolbox to properly deploy, monitor and
manage a virtualized environment. We’ve got tools from 26
vendors you should know about that can handle hypervisors
from multiple vendors.
By Michael Healey3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
6 Building Your Virtualization Management Toolbox 6 Figure 1: Top Ranked Management Functions 7 Figure 2: Multiple VM Platforms the Norm 8 Legacy Management Solutions
9 Figure 3: Traditional Vendors for Virtualization Management 10 New End-to-End Players
11 Figure 4: Upstart Virtualization Management
12 Capacity Planning/Optimization/Performance Management 13 Rethink Your Monitoring
14 Auditing/Security
14 Consolidate Logging and Searching 15 Desktop Profile Management 15 Lab/Demo Setup 16 Moving Forward
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T A B L E O FABOUT US| InformationWeek Analytics’ experienced analysts arm business technology decision-makers with real-world perspective based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, business and technology assessment and planning tools, and technology adoption best practices gleaned from experience.
If you’d like to contact us, write to managing director Art Wittmann at [email protected],
executive editor Lorna Garey at [email protected] and research managing editor Heather Vallis
Michael Healey is the president of Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and research firm focused on maximizing technol-ogy investments for organizations. He has more than 23 years of experience in technology and software integration.
Prior to founding Yeoman, Michael served as the CTO of national network integrator GreenPages. He joined GreenPages as part of the acquisition of TENCorp, where he served as president for 14 years. Prior to founding TENCorp, Michael was an international project manager for Nixdorf Computer and a Notes consultant for Sandpoint Corp.
Michael has taught courses at MIT Lowell Institute and Northeastern University and has served on the educational board of advisers for several schools and universities throughout New England. He has a BA in opera-tions management from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MBA from Babson College.
Michael is a contributing editor for InformationWeek Analytics, focusing on
the business challenges related to implementing technology. His work includes analysis of the cloud market, the challenge of green IT, the
impact of converging technologies and operational readiness related to vir-tualized environments.
Michael Healey Yeoman Technology Group
It sounds like a modern Henny Youngman (or Rodney Dangerfield?) joke: “How many tools does it take to manage a network?”
Today, only a handful of products aimed at managing virtual environ-ments can also manage physical machines, and for good reason: Even the most modest of data centers will already have an array of tools for moni-toring and maintaining physical servers and other devices. To some, bundling physical management capabilities into a tool aimed at hypervi-sors seems almost silly—like bundling a turntable on top of an iPod. But maybe it’s not so silly. One of the upstart virtualization management vendors interviewed for this report made a bold statement: “We see our-selves at war with legacy IT management techniques.” It’s easy to write off comments like that as mere attempts to get attention.
But there’s also some truth to it. Server virtualization has upended the data center like no other technology in recent memory, and it’s easy to forecast that IT pros are going to be spending more time configuring, deploying and managing a virtual environment. Why make them step out of a virtualization console when it comes time to bring more metal-and-silicon systems online?
It’s entirely likely that within the next five years, the ability to handle physical systems will be required of every virtualization management vendor that wants a steady supply of customers.
Of course, the virtualization management vendors shouldn’t get smug. Our research shows a strong trend toward virtualized environments that run on hypervisor platforms from multiple vendors. VMware may have
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the lion’s share of the market today, but Citrix, Microsoft and others are clawing their way into the game. Software vendors that ignore this reali-ty risk obsolescence.
That’s why we are pleased to present you with a variety of software tools from 26 vendors that address a multi-hypervisor environment out of the box. A few can also handle physical systems, and even more have physi-cal management on their road maps.
We’ve seen this movie before, whether in Mac vs. PC or Microsoft vs. Linux. We already know how the latest version will end—with a mix of technologies that your organization has to support. Read on for useful insights into building a 21st century toolbox for the data center you have today, and the one you’ll probably have tomorrow.
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Building Your Virtualization Management Toolbox
Everybody loves a circus, but not when it’s running wild in your data center. As IT shops embrace virtualization, they may find themselves in a three-ring management nightmare. The major virtualization vendors all offer a suite of tools to help control their own environments, but they lack robust cross-hypervisor support and completely ignore the physical devices you still need to manage. At the same time, IT is deploying multiple species of hypervisors. Yes, VMware is still king of the jungle, cited as the primary platform for 65% of respondents in our latest InformationWeek Analytics survey on virtualization management. Microsoft grabbed 19%, followed by Citrix/Xen at 4%.
The big surprise centers around current and planned hypervisors running per site. In fact, 65% of organizations are either already running multiple engines or plan to do so as part of their
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Interoperability with existing enterprise management tools
Application performance monitoring
Virtual security management
Automated physical-to-virtual server conversion tools
Life-cycle management tools for VMs
Storage management and SAN visibility
Regulatory, compliance, and audit capabilities
Cross-vendor capability/heterogeneous VM management
Rank
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Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2009 Virtualization Management Survey of 391 business technology professionals
Top-Ranked Management Functions
Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2009 Virtualization Management Survey of 391 business technology professionals
VMware (Server, ESX, vSphere)
Microsoft (Hyper-V on Windows 2008)
No use
Multiple VM Platforms the Norm
To what extent do you plan to run these server virtualization hosting platforms in production through December 2011?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 89 Limited use Extensive use
Other Microsoft (Virtual Server 200x)
Citrix XenSever
Oracle
Mainframe-based x86 virtualization
Red Hat
Novell SUSE or Xen
Parallels or Virtuozzo Virtual Iron 17%19% 64% 44% 40% 16% 67% 27% 6% 69% 25% 6% 79% 16% 5% 87% 10% 3% 77% 20% 3% 87% 11% 2% 89% 10% 1% 94% 5% 1% Figure 2
expansion. Microsoft is most commonly cited as the second hypervisor in use by VMware shops, but we also see usage and plans for Citrix, Oracle and Red Hat. In addition, several companies reminded us they have an extensive virtualization environment running Linux on their mainframes. And you still have to keep your legacy network running. In fact, interoper-ability with existing systems is the No. 1 concern cited in our survey. The fact is, if you can’t tame these beasts, they’re going to eat you alive.
Fortunately, the marketplace is full of offerings to help you crack the whip on backup, provi-sioning, security, availability and management of your virtualized environment. This article analyzes the tools that support multiple hypervisors and also have the functionality to manage physical devices. We highlight a variety of vendors whose products cover everything from monitoring and logging to desktop profiles to full systems management. All of them support at least three of these options: VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat/KVM, mainframes and physical servers. This means perennial favorites such as Veeam and Embotics won’t make the list, nor will any of the hypervisor vendors themselves.
Third parties that extend their product depth to support different platforms demonstrate a compelling technical depth and are the wave of the future.
Legacy Management Solutions
Symantec/Altiris, CA, IBM/Tivoli, HP, BMC and Microsoft have offered products to manage your network long before virtualization took off. These products have always covered the full range of life cycle options, from initial server and storage provisioning, to software updates and change management to system retirement. This group was surprisingly caught off guard by the virtualization wave, with most only fully extending their product lines last year.
But they’re catching on quickly, expanding their support for VMware first, but also Microsoft. IBM leads for hypervisor agnosticism with its Systems Director suite. It not only supports x86-based VMware, Citrix, KVM and Microsoft virtualization, but also IBM’s midrange PowerVM and mainframe z/VM with its VMControl product, part of IBM Systems Director. The system provides a single interface for discovery, monitoring, updates and management for any type of virtual machine.
require upwards integration into the Tivoli product line. The system also has integration options for CA, HP and Microsoft.
However, the big catch is that Systems Director only provides this functionality for IBM hard-ware including x86 servers and IBM storage. It’s a tough trade-off; you now get your choice of virtualization software platform, but no choice for hardware.
Mainframe veterans CA and BMC have begun expanding their cross-platform management tools, but haven’t gotten to this same level of integration yet. BMC’s offering is part of its Business Service Management Suite. Its Atrium CMDB supports discovery of multiple devices, including support for VMware, Solaris, Hyper-V and Z/VM, but the management tools them-selves are VMware-centric with no support for XenServer. Mainframe management is currently a separate set of products with no announced plans for virtualization integration yet. CA’s Spectrum supports a full range of x86 devices but hasn’t integrated any of its legacy mainframe management products yet. CA has indicated it will push towards a more common interface, but it has stopped short of promising a single pane of glass.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 89 BMC CA Citrix HP Microsoft Symantec/Altiris Tivoli/IBM VMware Physical Devices
Vendor VMware Citrix Microsoft Hyper-V Others
Midrange, mainframe Planned Midrange, mainframe Limited Additional HP-centric products Limited
Limited Limited High availability, DR, and
storage mgt. w/ Veritas IBM midrange and mainframe integration Limited
Traditional Vendors for Virtualization Management
In fact, the only traditional player that hasn’t added full support for VMware yet is Microsoft. That’s a big shocker. However, you can use Veeam’s Nworks management pack plug-in to get some basic functionality in System Center Operations Manager. Veeam plans additional integra-tion with Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager in the future.
VMware is fairly open in acknowledging it won’t be adding support for other hypervisors soon. “We won’t be able to create the full set of tools for every environment out there. We want to provide the best possible management relative to the product we provide,” says Erik Wrobel, director of product management for VMware.
Citrix’s approach is squarely in the middle. Tom Bailey, director of product management for Citrix says, “It’s no secret that Essentials for Hyper-V is a tip of the hat to the relationship with Microsoft.” Essentials for Hyper-V can provision virtual machines and support site-to-site disas-ter recovery for Hyper-V workloads. Bailey was mum about long-disas-term support for VMware but says, “Its inning two in a nine-inning game.”
New End-to-End Players
While the traditional vendors mulled their expansion plans for virtualization management, a group of upstarts emerged to fill the void. DynamicOps, Vizioncore, Fortisphere and Platespin all support multiple hypervisors. DymanicOps plans to go a step further by adding support for physical devices. They all take a common approach by defining workflows and policies first, then integrating into the different platforms as needed.
DynamicOps: This company started as a part of Credit Suisse, which had developed its own tools for virtualization management and decided to spin out the technology as a separate com-pany in 2008. The product communicates with the different platforms through each vendor’s native management tools and collects and records all activities, events and changes in its own database.
The company says it will add physical device support later this year. “Adding support for phys-ical servers was a natural progression,” says Rich Bourdeau, VP of marketing for DynamicOps. “Since we provide the overall governance and control, customers have naturally asked to expand the framework to incorporate everything they manage.”
Vizioncore: The DynamicOps approach is echoed by the oldest member of the next-generation vendors, Vizioncore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest Software. Vizioncore released its first product, esxRanger, way back in 2002. Today, the product is known as vRanger Pro. Vizioncore made the commitment in 2008 to support multiple hypervisors across all products.
Vizioncore’s vControl software made our list for its straightforward workflow, easy setup and support for VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V and Sun. “We’re seeing about one-third of our clients supporting multi-hypervisors today,” says Tyler Jewell, VP of products at Quest. Jewell also notes that the mix isn’t necessarily within a single production environment but between different IT groups such as development, testing, remote access and so on.
The roadmap for Vizioncore includes broader support for other x86 virtualization platforms as well as a convergence of the different point products into an enterprisewide suite that includes physical devices.
“The methodologies of virtualization—including provisioning, optimization and imaging—can be applied to all of IT operations,” Jewell says. “We see ourselves at war with legacy IT manage-ment techniques.” Vizioncore says it aims to tackle backup, replication, monitoring, basic pro-visioning and capacity planning for physical devices, but did not provide a detailed timeline. Platespin: This company is the most curious of the group. The rising star was acquired in 2008 by Novell. The company had struggled with its own virtualization vision, even ditching a planned hypervisor in 2008. It now focuses on supporting multiple hypervisors, including the
1 5 6 7 89 Dynamic Ops Fortisphere Platespin Orchestrate Vizioncore vControl Physical Devices
Vendor VMware Citrix Microsoft Hyper-V Other Software Platforms
Planned
Planned Sun
Upstart Virtualization Management Vendors
open source KVM. Platespin has become its flagship product with tools for management, back-up and DR.
“We saw Platespin more as a base on which to build our own system,” says Kelly Beardmore, CTO of Tenzing. As a hosting provider, Tenzing doesn’t necessarily have a choice of what hypervisors to use. “We have our preference, but clients often dictate the environment,” he says. Tenzing uses Platspine’s APIs to build out a new model for inventory and management from scratch. “There’s no plug-and-play single pane of glass. We took a huge step back and went to a full SOA model, building out from the Platespin base. Every technology choice was made based on its interconnectivity,” says Beardmore.
The process took over a year to complete, but Beardmore feels it was worth it. None of the original tools they used prior to the initiative are in use today. They simply wouldn’t run in the new model. “It took us longer,” he says, “but going forward we can do new things now that we never could have done. For example, I can pull out my monitoring systems and bring in a new component as needed. With 600 active clients running on every major hypervisor, we needed this flexibility for the long term.”
Capacity Planning/Optimization/Performance Management
Many of the aforementioned vendors have options within their suites for capacity planning or performance optimization. However, there are a few solutions that provide automation and optimization features worth investigating:
Vkernel’s Capacity Analyzer: The company started in 2007 with its virtual chargeback appli-ance for VMware shops. This original product is still VMware-focused, but VKernel is best known among VMware jocks for their Capacity Analyzer. It provides an inexpensive way to stay on top of your VMware server performance.
Its latest version, announced in December 2009, adds support for Hyper-V. Long term, the company plans on expanding Hyper-V support to its Optimization Pack, which adds inventory, reporting and recommendation reporting. The pricing starts at just $139 per socket, making it a nice fit for all sizes of organizations.
supports VMware as well as physical servers and a host of storage devices, including EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM, Dell/Equallogic and Hitachi. Support for Microsoft and Citrix is planned for this year. System licensing starts at $7,500.
Toutvirtual’s VirtualIQPro: Clearly the leader in supporting multi-hypervisor optimization, VirtualIQ Pro supports VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Oracle today and combines graphical representations of the environment with correlation statistics based on what you’re looking at. It’s also got the ability to compare and choose between different hypervisor platforms when evaluating a new or existing virtual machine. Pricing starts at $2,000 for a 50-virtual-machine license.
Rethink Your Monitoring
It’s a mistake to assume you can use your existing monitoring tools in a virtualized environ-ment. Not only do you need to add core monitoring components for your hypervisors, you must also modify your monitoring parameters and thresholds for newly virtualized servers. Remember, a virtualized server doesn’t use CPU cycles in the traditional sense, nor can you use the same threshold for available memory and disk space. Legacy Monitoring vendors such as Solarwinds and Ipswitch (maker of WhatsUp Gold) have kept up by updating their core moni-toring systems and templates to support virtual servers and desktops.
Newer players such as EGInnovations made early inroads with virtualization teams by offering VMware monitoring in 2007 and Citrix Xen support in 2008. They also offer monitoring of physical devices and databases.
Most monitoring systems are based on a combination of status monitoring (Up/Down), SNMP alerts or WMI data. We suggest that vendors that use Netflow or other data flow monitoring gain greater detail. “We found the traditional status and utilization monitors weren’t enough for our virtual environment,” says Paul Holt, director of network services at Memorial Health Systems. “It can be particularly hectic when severe performance problems at random times throughout the day involve back and forth finger pointing to the resources I manage.” Holt uses Xangati, a data flow monitoring application to address the issue. Xangati provides DVR-like recording capabilities of traffic flow to show data links between physical and virtual devices. Xangati supports multiple combinations of traffic flow, including Cisco Netflow,
Juniper jFlow, Alcatel cFlow or the industry standard IPFIX. Both Solarwinds and Ipswitch offer flow-centric monitoring options at higher price points.
Another option for organizations that need to monitor a virtual environment is FactFinder from BlueStripe. The company focuses on application monitoring and benchmarking for physical, virtual and cloud applications.
Auditing/Security
No virtualization ringmaster would be worthy of his top hat without at least one security option for a virtualized data center. There are many point products that specialize on different components of your virtualized environment. Tripwire stands out for its depth in physical auditing and security tools as well as its support for Microsoft and VMware hosts. Its core product provides a robust change auditing and configuration assessment platform.
Most VMware engineers know Tripwire because of its popular opscheck and configcheck tools. Configcheck quickly compares your VMware (ESX 3.0 and 3.5) configuration to VMware’s security guidelines. Opscheck reviews your infrastructure and alerts you if your VMotion con-figuration is functional. Tripwire Enterprise starts at $3,000 with a per-device charge based on type of device. Tripwire hasn’t yet announced support for vSphere.
Reflex Systems is a startup that offers virtualization management and security. It doesn’t sup-port physical servers, but added supsup-port for Cisco’s Nexus switches and a new Cloud API late last year. The company’s Virtualization Management Center (VMC) supports VMware, Xen and Hyper-V and runs as a virtual machine. VMC offers compliance and auditing capabilities, and includes automatic discovery and base monitoring as part of its application. VMC is made up of several components that can operate independently or work together. The complete suite starts at $25,000 and scales based on the size of your overall infrastructure.
Consolidate Logging and Searching
There’s one thing virtualization will definitely give you—more data to log and review. One tool you can add regardless of your platform selection is Splunk. Founded in 2004, the company focuses on indexing and searching all the different IT logs, alerts, SNMP traps, config files, message queues and reams of other junk IT has to sort through.
The product quickly drops into any environment and starts crawling and gathering data imme-diately. A suite of plug-ins has been added to the Enterprise edition to provide additional search, alerting and reporting functionality for VMware, Citrix and Windows environments. The 4.0 version increases the speed and scale of the product as well as adds new custom dash-board functions. If you stick with the free version, you won’t be able to use the plug-ins men-tioned above. The good news is the trial starts with the Enterprise Edition for 60 days, letting you test out the full functionality. At a starting point of $5,000, it can be a real life-saver, espe-cially as you add more virtualized infrastructure.
A host of other log and event management players are also on the market, including LogLogic, LogRhythm and ArcSight, to name a few. If you’re building a short list to bring a vendor in house, be certain that support for logs generated by virtual sources—and virtualization man-agement tools—is on your list of requirements.
Desktop Profile Management
Last year really wasn’t the break-out year for desktop virtualization that vendors had hoped for. The drag on spending was not helped by session broker limitations, relatively new platform versions and a somewhat elusive ROI model. However, three vendors stand out by providing key tools to jumpstart a virtual desktop project. All three offer automated desktop configura-tion and user profile portability. This type of funcconfigura-tionality is a godsend for user management. The three work around the same basic concept—separating the user workspace and profile from the desktop OS and delivering it based on a standard set of policies and guidelines. The three, Liquidware Labs, AppSense and RESSoftware, offer multi-hypervisor support. Liquidware is focused on VDI transitions, while AppSense includes support for traditional Windows Terminal Server sessions. AppSense includes this plus support for physical desktops and laptops, providing a unified framework for desktop user management.
Lab/Demo Setup
The lab is one spot where you can expect hypervisor creep. The core IT team may insist on VMware for the production systems, but development, testing or training environments, and tight budgets may push you to Citrix or others. If so, we suggest VMLogix LabManager. The company was founded in 2004 and makes the only lab management software that supports
on-demand creation of software testing, training, demo or other types of multi-user labs on
VMware, Citrix or Microsoft platforms. The company has even added a cloud connector option specifically designed for Amazon Web Services.
Moving Forward
There’s little debate about the acceptance of virtualization as a core element of a server architec-ture. In the long term, virtualization will make its way into other environments as well. A set of tools that covers multiple vendors ensures you’ll be prepared to meet any challenges that arise in the reality of a heterogeneous world. In fact, the right set of tools can be the difference between a tame data center and a three-ring circus that devours you.
