Manage virtualization issues like the Sorcerer Supreme you want to be [new e-book]

 “Why do I have to manage virtualization?” you ask yourself. “After all, I put all that effort into virtualizing our environment so that I could manage less: less hardware, less storage and less physical infrastructure. I want all my virtualization issues to just go away.”

Not even Dr. Strange could take care of that for you, I’m afraid. But you might find a few things in his comic books and new movie that will help you better understand the process of managing virtualization holistically by gaining the insight to see deep into your environment.

(Spoiler alert: My neighbor Bill hasn’t talked to me in two years because he says I spoiled “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” for him. All I told him was that Mark Hamill’s acting had gotten so much better since “Return of the Jedi.” Some people. Anyway, I don’t want to alienate you, so I’m not going to deliberately mention anything about the plot of the movie in this blog post. But if you’re as touchy as Bill and you haven’t yet seen “Dr. Strange,” you may want to just grab our e-book, Holistically Manage and Solve Virtualization Issues, and bail out now.)

Astral Plane – Think of your virtual environment as the Astral Plane, another dimension whose resources you can tap into but not touch. There’s a kind of goo in the astral plane of your virtual machines, and sorcerers like you can put themselves in the middle of it and use the resources for enablement and abstraction. They can also use it to make IT infrastructure highly effective by enabling more functions and tasks.

Dark Dimension – Not your happy place. You feel as though you’re in the Dark Dimension when, say, you’ve aggregated physical servers by consolidating them into virtual servers, then realize you’ve consolidated too many of them. You’re suddenly in a bleak, mind-numbing dimension of workload bottlenecks, with so many variables and layers compounding themselves that you’ll never be able peel everything apart and get your servers to operate harmoniously.

Dormammu – In the comics, this was Doctor Strange’s archenemy; in your virtual environment, this is the evil force causing conflicts among workloads down in the layers: application, database, middleware, file system and OS layers. Its flaming head is well deserved.

Kaecilius – Yet another villain, this hanger-on of Dr. Strange’s rival, Baron Mordo, hadn’t been heard from since the mid-1980s. Good riddance, except he comes back in your virtual environment in the form of legacy assets. No matter how ancient they are, they still require optimized servers, storage, I/O, networks, hardware, software and services to run efficiently and ensure a positive user experience. They represent more unwelcome demands on your resources.

Mirror Dimension – In this safe place, sorcerers practice magic that gets them into too much trouble in the real world. Remember how keen you were to tinker and experiment when you first discovered your virtualization agility and flexibility? How many sandboxes did you create? Where are they now? Can you easily find and manage everything in your mirror dimension?

Eye of Agamotto – This is the essence of insight. Doctor Strange uses it to see through illusions, read minds and even manipulate time. Your goals are a little less super-heroic: You simply want to be successful in virtualization by gaining deep insight into your environment. The Eye of Agamotto tells you to look at what’s happening not just in the hypervisor, the operating system or the application, but in the ways they work together.

Cloak of Levitation – Once you have that insight and can identify bottlenecks, the cloak is your tool for dealing with them. It lets you defy gravity and work at levels of your virtual infrastructure that you could not otherwise reach. It’s the essence of effective virtualization management, the insight into how resources are being utilized to deliver high-quality service. And if you can get it to protect you from weapons and magic, the way Dr. Strange’s cloak does, then all the better.

Book of the Vishanti – We don’t have a volume of Vishanti magic spells for you, but we do have an e-book called Holistically Manage and Solve Virtualization Issues. It will remind you that your original intention for virtualization was to remove complexity from your environment and show you ways to gain insight into the applications and workloads running there.

Shamballa – For this one, we’re going to make you go out and see the movie. Or at least the trailer. We’re not savages.