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November 26, 2008
VKernel Keeps Hershey 'In the Know' on Virtualization
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You could call it Marvin Gaye Impulse, the need to know “what’s goin’ on.” At the IT command center that runs world-famous Hershey Park and other units of Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, they call it being “in the know.”
“We want to do what we can to make the datacenter team in the know,” says Jon Blomeier, datacenter analyst for the Pennsylvania-based company.
Blomeier’s broad purview includes “everything virtual,” and when the team was given the directive of becoming more “in the know” about the virtualized infrastructure, he needed to find some new tools. They’re running VMware ESX on IBM System x3650 servers and were using VMware’s VirtualCenter for management, but “VirtualCenter doesn’t let us look at all the things we want to see,” he says. “We wanted to monitor proactively, and be able to find out why things were happening. We needed something that was gathering data on critical processes like CPU and I/O and memory and reporting in a way that would allow us to react before there’s bad impact on the environment.”
After checking out a few options, Blomeier went with a pair of virtual appliances from VKernel, whose founder, Alex Bakman, says virtual appliances “will prove to be the best approach to simplifying systems management in the datacenter.”
The Hershey team adopted VKernel’s Capacity Analyzer to monitor shared CPU, memory, network, storage and disk I/O utilization trends across its VMware environment, and Chargeback, which provides details about who is using which resources and the costs. VKernel is strictly for VMware at this point, but HyperV is next, Bakman says.
“We’re for the user who needs visibility into their deployment as far as capacity is concerned,” Bakman explains. “How much capacity is left? Where is capacity unused or wasted? We let them go in and see where they can add virtual machines, identify areas of overallocation, see who’s using what resources, and then use that information to make intelligent decisions about how capacity can be better used.”
One of the most useful things about Capacity Analyzer is “it can alert us to problems before they can happen,” Blomeier says. VKernel refers to the appliance’s “predictive analytics” capabilities, serving up data that can be used to adjust resources for maximum performance. Blomeier checks the reports from Capacity Analyzer everyday to get his intelligence briefing on how things are running and where there might be fires smoldering. “I’m constantly looking to see how many days to warning levels on things like CPU and memory resources,” he says. “VKernel makes this information really easy to have.”
“One thing we’re doing with Capacity Analyzer is a summary report that gets e-mailed to our staff every day, a snapshot that shows what’s happening with our entire environment,” illustrates Blomeier. “We can see the current top five capacity bottlenecks, and the top five future ones. It can basically tell us if we don’t do something in 10 days, we’ll run into an issue. We can see all the constrained resources, how many more virtual machines we can fit, the top three data stores that are running out of disk, and the top resource consumer in each category. You can drill down further, to see things like which CPUs are most available.”
Having a firm handle on utilization is a big deal. As Bakman points out, that information can help customers allocate resources judiciously to avoid performance degradation and downtime, avoid buying infrastructure that’s not really needed, and safely increase the number of VMs. “Capacity is very expensive,” he says. “One myth about virtualization is it’s always cheaper, which it is in the long run, but in the short term it’s not. If you can reclaim 20 percent of your capacity -- even if you’re talking about a $100,000 investment -- that is real money.”
Beside the deep visibility and alerting capabilities, Blomeier says ease of deployment and affordability also sold him on the VKernel appliances.
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