Srinivas Ramanathan

With virtual infrastructures becoming prevalent in production environments and often supporting critical business services, the second phase of virtualization is here. In Virtualization 2.0, it's all about manageability. The shifting emphasis to business service management rather than just virtual machine management means that it is no longer sufficient to simply monitor the uptime or resource usage of virtual machines and servers and believe that the entire IT infrastructure is working well. This article highlights the key challenges that virtualization administrators and architects face in Virtualization 2.0, and defines the core functionality that any Virtualization 2.0 monitoring and management solution must possess. The first phase of virtualization, Virtualization 1.0, involved the use of virtual infrastructures primarily in staging and development environments. ... (more)

Performance Management in Virtualized Environments

Virtualization technologies have changed the ground rules on monitoring and managing your IT services. Most of us in the IT operations world tend to focus on the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure - our key concerns are: How hot are my Linux servers? How many IOPS are happening to the disks? Is Active Directory working? Is DNS working, etc.? On the other hand, end users are focused on the business services that they are accessing. After all, that's what they see and care about to get their jobs done. So a user complaint always relates to the service - bill payment is not work... (more)