VMWorld Highlight: Virtual Infrastructure Optimization

The Solutions Exchange at VMWorld Europe confirms that many vendors are tapping into a key customer concern for 2009: the optimization of existing, growing virtual server estates and the integration of storage performance data into the administrator's dashboard. While many customers I've spoken to have made progress toward managing virtual machine sprawl, they struggle to identify, correlate, and diagnose performance problems for I/O-intensive production applications, problems that often span server to storage.

From the application through the I/O adapters and switches, to the arrays themselves, there's a lack of visibility into the I/O path for root cause analysis -- in real-time and at production scale. This is in addition to the problem of right-sizing: resource optimization at provisioning/set-up times. Both activities require deeper insight into the impact of virtualization on storage performance.

Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom, announced here this week, aims to provide this end-to-end runtime visibility and cut through the finger-pointing between server and storage vendors when performance issues arise in production. Their solution is worth a look, to augment in-place or other vendor solutions (there are plenty of excellent ones here to explore) that may provide insight only during the initial capacity planning and provisioning phases. It's clear that even the best-planned virtual environment often behaves differently at production scale; VirtualWisdom can tell you why.