In our last post, Reducing virtual infrastructure costs while supercharging performance is possible, we discussed how IT professionals are often limited to either reducing cost, minimizing risk or improving service. But there are solutions that can help you take advantage of all three options. We delved deeper into how such a solution would help you reduce the costs of your virtual infrastructure. This time, we look deeper at how such a solution can help you improve VM performance.
As expectations from users and the business go up, improving service, or performance, is critical — especially when it comes to application availability and uptime. In fact, we estimate that organizations consider upwards of 80% of their applications to be mission-critical — meaning there will be a negative impact to the business in terms of lost revenue or service if an application goes down. Research we did recently with Forrester Research confirmed that 35% of servers have an SLA recovery time of just 15 minutes.
Increased visibility into the VMs in your environment
To achieve our goal of improving performance, you need complete visibility into all the VMs in your environment, as well as information on how each is performing. When you have a solution that notifies you when a VM is over-resourced, you’ll have the ability to provide more resources for it. Conversely, when you’re notified that a VM is under-utilized, you can re-allocate that resource to improve performance elsewhere.
Such a solution would serve you even better if it not only identified problems, but also could automatically take steps to remedy that action (based on configurations that you’ve set up in advance). Such a capability would help you sleep easy, knowing that you can not only accelerate the performance of your VMs now, but also in the future — automatically.
For example, if one particular machine is telling you that you have a peak utilization of 2.2GB of memory, and you’ve set up a recommendation of 2.8GB, you can enact that change manually or automatically. You can also schedule that change to occur outside of work hours, to limit any impact on other machines.
Identify zombie VMs
Another invaluable feature IT pros want is the ability to identify a zombie VM — one that has done little-to-nothing for a very long time. That VM may be booted up, and may be consuming resources, but it’s not actually doing anything to help performance. Such a detection capability would allow you to simply pare it off.
When you have the ability to see a snapshot of machines that are leveraging storage, or even virtual machine images that are just sitting there and haven’t been used, you can improve service simply by tweaking efficiency.
Learn more about how you can integrate some of these capabilities into your virtual environment by joining an upcoming technology overview. (Don't forget to bookmark this blog to catch our next installment on reducing risk when it comes to virtual data availability).
