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IT Systems Management - Virtualisation

One of the recurring themes that our customers talk to us about is the growth of the virtual environment.

The main issues appear to be a desire to reduce the total cost of ownership, a lack of space, power and cooling and the need to increase flexibility. One data centre manager we met with recently mentioned that his application developers increasingly expect him to provide them with servers on demand. In addition, he had no way of managing the provision of virtual servers and not knowing whether a server had failed, which was causing him real pain.

BMC has recognised the requirement and developed tools to monitor and manage the virtual environment:

BMC Performance Assurance Suite for Virtual Servers

BMC Performance Assurance Suite for Virtual Servers provides key functionality for effective capacity management of VMware ESX servers. It gives you the ability to understand how business applications are performing within the VMware ESX Virtual Machines (VMs) as well as facilitating performance optimisation of VMs through a complete view of overall system utilisation. Hot spots of abnormal or unusual activity can be identified and corrected long before they might impact the business service.

The key features & benefits are:

• Helps determine candidate servers for virtualisation and size initial requirements by performance profiling and modelling
• Identify resource contention among virtual machines in live environments
• Allows you to assess production performance issues and trends through advanced mathematical analysis
• Delivers a complete picture of the health of your systems and applications from a resource requirements perspective through flexible reporting options
• Provides insight into problems, causes and solutions with graphical analysis tools
• Demonstrates aggregate system and individual partition performance views by identifying inside and outside VM resource use
• Allays end user concerns about responsiveness of virtualised services through daily reporting of performance information

BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers

BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers provides real-time monitoring of the virtual environment, generating events when critical availability and performance thresholds are exceeded.

In a VMware deployment, BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers discovers all virtual machines and maps those virtual machines to their associated VMware ESX/GSX servers and/or VMwareGroups. With robust availability, performance and capacity metrics, and enterprise reporting, customers can proactively manage a complex VMware deployment to effectively maximise availability and performance of your environment.

The key features & benefits are:

• Single management interface
• Discovery of all virtual machines across the enterprise
• Manage critical availability, performance, and capacity thresholds
• Map virtualised resources to physical resources
• Provide business context to the virtualised environment
• Ability to answer the resource questions: How much do I have? How much is allocated? How much am I using? Who is using it? How much is left?
• Enterprise level reporting

Further Reading

BMC Performance Assurance Suite for Virtual Servers datasheet

BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers datasheet

Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership in Your Virtual Data Centre whitepaper

Implementing BMC Performance Assurance in a VMware Environment whitepaper

Total Economic Impact of BMC Performance Assurance Solutions whitepaper

Performance Assurance for Contingency Planning article

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