Conversation about Virtualization and Storage over a Rubber Chicken Lunch

One of the things I look forward to at conferences like Gartner Data Center is the opportunity to talk to real users about their infrastructure management challenges and what's important to them. Today, over a rather bizarre and very green chicken meal, I met Mike, IT Manager for Corporate Infrastructure and Data Center Services for a large aerospace and defense company. His goals for the conference included learning more about practical considerations and vendors/tools for virtualization and storage management to take back to his team.

His infrastructure, tools and why he chose them:
About 450 virtual machines, all VMware. No plans for the present to use Hyper-V despite being a big Windows shop. The reasoning- Microsoft was late to the game and simply doesn't have the advanced feature set let alone management tools around their hypervisor/virtualization environment.

Using EMC and fiber channel on the storage side. Looking forward to using a new EMC tool that will help him with disk tiering for more efficient access to data in a virtualized world. He also lamented the lack of management functionality around reporting for allocated vs utilized storage resources. An interesting comment - he thinks the data is in VirtualCenter but not easily accessible in any meaningful way.

He purposely does not make a distinction between physical and virtual servers in this new world it's unnecessary and unproductive. Good news for vendors like ScienceLogic, who monitor both physical and virtual in a single console. Beyond VirtualCenter, I've often wondered about the virtual-only management tools out there and how useful they can really be without being integrated with the physical side. ESX and VMs run on physical machines.

Beyond the correlation aspects, you can't understand capacity planning and performance without this total picture. And maybe the point is they exist for the same reason all those point tools exist faster and often best-of-breed way to solve specific management problems. But you have to wonder about their survival rate in light of VMware and comprehensive management vendors like the Big 4 finally moving rapidly up the management stack.

What was very interesting is his response when I asked him about virtualization management and if his current tools did the job for him. He shot back that it was not so much that there are tools that show config and measure resource allocations/utilizations/performance what did that matter if you first don't ask the question about what metrics are important. This is a very interesting point and something we've definitely seen. In the new virtual world, how do IT orgs know what (beyond the same kind of physical world metrics already being reported) is important for them to get in front of until an outage actually occurs? Food for thought.

Asked him if he saw value in having a self-service portal for his users to provision new servers (physical or virtual). The funny response that would mean that planning is actually done by users and they know what they want ahead of time. The more serious response virtualization and consolidating servers frees up server resources for unplanned usage by the business but its the storage side that is the chokepoint now, too much wasted storage capacity allocated and just sitting there unused. Thats why he was very interested in looking at thin provisioning to see how, similar to virtualization technologies, that could create a more intelligent, on-demand storage utilization model for his org that could free up storage resources.

And finally, we discussed the excellent food available in Vegas as we pushed the green chicken around our plates then finally settled on bread and butter. Dessert, I am happy to say, was simply outrageous ice cream on a stick dipped in chocolate that hardened in a few seconds then dipped in more calorie-laden toppings. Maybe next time, dessert should come first.

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