Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Drug Treatment Centers

2012-02-01T18:01:31Z

At every recovery center you will find detailed information on medical intervention programs, 12 Step Programs, rehabilitation facilities, alcohol treatment centers, Drug Treatment Centers and available programs. Call center experts provide additional, more detailed information about these programs. Addiction Recovery centers will invite you to meet with one of their clinicians for an assessment and development of an individualized treatment plan to help you or someone you care about, learn to manage, and in many cases overcome, a behavioral addiction.

Crystal Meth Addiction

2012-01-30T16:01:10Z

Choosing the correct Drug Rehabs for yourself or a loved person is one of the most important decisions you will ever make. It is important that you are well educated about addiction treatment options. Methamphetamine is a drug also known as meth, speed, crank, or crystal. It is a white powder with a bitter taste that can be easily dissolved in alcohol or water. Crystal Meth Addiction is a huge problem affecting people from all parts of the United States, but it is especially popular in the Midwest. This drug may be smoked, snorted, or injected. The feeling of euphoria crystal meth creates may last for several hours.

Thanks to Efficient File Recovery Software for Recovering Accidentally Deleted Doc File

2012-01-27T06:19:17Z

Accidental deletion of valuable file from our computer is not new. This problem is as old as computer itself is! And this mishap happened to me few days back when I accidentally deleted one of my most crucial doc files. However, thanks to efficient file recovery software for recovering my doc file well on time!

Being a content writer with a traveling company, I need to write web content for various web sites of organization and to do my job I use Microsoft Word 2003 as text editor. Recently, I had been assigned web content on an urgent basis. Thanks to God that I met the target just on time but before submitting it, I found that a large number of temp copies of that particular file were created there. Thus, due to the pressure to submit the target on time and to delete the temp copies, I accidentally pressed ‘Ctrl+A’ and ‘Shift+Delete’ button. Alas! I lost my precious doc file just in one go.

Furiously, rushed to my senior and explained the situation to him. He calmed me down and explained that recovery of lost or deleted files is possible through efficient file recovery software. However, for successful recovery of my valuable doc file, he asked me to stop using my computer immediately. The reason for saying so was that whenever we delete a file from the hard drive of computer, it is not actually deleted rather the pointer to this file gets deleted and the space occupied by this file is marked as free. However, this free space is inaccessible by operating system but reliable third-party recovery software can read the data without the pointer and thus can recover it. But, when a new file/data is saved on the hard drive of computer then it occupies this free space and then deleted the file may go beyond the recovery. Therefore, it is recommended to not to use the effected hard drive until the data is been recovered.

However, he suggested me to use Stellar Phoenix File Recovery Software for successful recovery. This efficient software can recover the files which are lost due to accidental deletion or formatting of the hard drive. The software supports recovery of 185 file types. Therefore, as per his recommendation, I used this software and in few simple recovery steps recovered my deleted doc file. Once again I would like to say thanks to this effective file recovery software.

Expert Chat on how HP ecosystem provides holistic support for VMware virtualized IT environments

2012-01-20T19:40:47Z

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation.

And while the technology to support and fix virtualized environments is essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success.

In a special BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast, created from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support, HP experts explain how they have made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware a top priority.

For example, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP, provides case studies for how managed escalation and multi-vendor support around the globe can reduce downtime by 70 percent, with large ROI benefits as well.

Other HP experts in the discussion include Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security,    performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across   the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out   are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing complexity when you get beyond the 20   percent or 30 percent level and expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So how to take advantage of the best things about virtualization? Part of that means allowing your IT team to have access to other experienced support teams, from HP and VMware, around the world, 24×7, to help keep systems up and running. Such support also allows your IT team to progress, to learn as they go, and to be able to take advantage of more virtualization benefits over time.

Expert panel

So    how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the    positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an    insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical.   In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the   technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set of folks who would actually look at not just the reactive support and even some of the proactive, but how actually your entire business is running according to the ITIL standard.

That    is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with   you on a type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our   critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP   that also include a lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more   focused on specific management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support.   That can notify HP that you're having a disk drive failure. Or we will call you and say that we know that disk drive is failing, or something on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can   even take that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating system.   We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about   the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding that automation to other operating systems. We have installation and startup services that we can actually go out and set up and configure the hardware and   software at a site.

So    we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run    the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select,    a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe    planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some consulting   time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and migration. You may need some performance or you may need some type of   environmental assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services, how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is out on our website.   They saw that the customers who have the mission-critical services,   reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem    management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due    to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment,    and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the study.   It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these   support processes can certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all with HP.

In   2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually became alliance   partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and thus began our   support partnership with them. It would only extend recent in 2005, we   also became an OEM. We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But    we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're    also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP also does education on these technologies as well. We’ve trained over   20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had   this very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have   support teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same   level of training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to   their facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further do this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made    available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend    a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and    as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware, we   are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In    addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the other   teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and   storage, and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate   with them and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the   customer's whole environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally,   you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so   many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as   Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with    them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end solution and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a problem,   they can either call in at their local region telephone number --   whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are    different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in    via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer.    They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their    cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first    they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool,    where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2    engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them   before they even get to a point of escalation.

If    the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already   collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the   case. That saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of   server you have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the   problem there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as   we can continue to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the   hardware teams, too, so we can look at the server and make sure that   the environment is what we need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we   can also go to Level 3 with VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We   have a great relationship with the folks that we work alongside with   and would escalate calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into   Level 1 at VMware because we’ve already done all that work, and we are a service partner. They'll go right up to our peers over at VMware and then we work together, while always owning the solution that we provide back to the customer.

Another part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that we have a single customer database. I can give an example. A call came into our Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the   European folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French   engineer could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were    offline.

HP Virtual Room

So    we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the    case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and    another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we had   to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had    already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s    environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The    EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the    French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to   get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready   to home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we   placed a call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next   day. So our counterparts in European support teams picked that up and   worked with the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what   happened and prevent it in the future.

We have another process in HP that can   actually go with top organizations, our escalation manager process. I was lead source for a particular case where we had a field team assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware,    servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite    know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues   by trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware at   one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local   office to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and    network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource    (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our    escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not    only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the actual   escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track. We knew where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case, but we did finally find was that the customer was on the technological edge, and the "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Site visits

Pat Lampert is a technical account manager and does site visits. The   technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re aware of the   environment. We have the information of your environment documented into the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now what kind of server is this? What’s the firmware?"    We know this because we already have it documented. We could be   calling them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already   which know VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And    because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know    that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a new   build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's    specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further incidents,   because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically,    HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers. It   then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also adds   any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And   one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware image is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5.    As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would do   is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because starting   with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to understand what   the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and    download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done,    hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the   added value of getting support directly from HP. It was partly   addressed during the presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware   does have a fine support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP,    in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also   offers our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems   based on HP Blades.    The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the    performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you    will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware   product, but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in   the proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with running   vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that, we have a partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for support   through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we have to go to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One other   question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce    problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United    States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a    number of different types of servers already in those configurations,    and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a    problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server    model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able    to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death."    Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to   rule out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to   see if it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we   engage the hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and   fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail with Sumithra’s comment there, one of the questions I get frequently is what to do if you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs, and that seems to be almost more common than the Purple Screen of Death. Some customers are't aware that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in    VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a    hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and    isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with    the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead of time is what HP suggests as far as   getting a handle on our inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in   field testing some new tools from HP that will be available in January   and February regarding vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade   and Firmware Analysis that takes into account the VMware environment on   our Blade systems which we are working on having ready soon. We have   just completed field tests.

And the second is a really nifty   Inventory Report HP has just put together. We're just completing field   tests on that now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a   small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can    be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead of   time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold as a   service to customers.

The   report is really quite nice, with all sorts of charts and showing   availability of machines and availability of memory and also disk space.   It's a very nice report.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP. You may also be interested in:

The Importance of Having a Robust Backup and Recovery System

2012-01-19T07:37:39Z

Everyone should have a solid Backup and recovery system so that they are prepared if an outage occurs. It is easier to get back to normal operations when you have a backup plan set up properly. Not everyone is familiar with the process involved in coming up with a good recovery plan, but everyone understands the need to have a backup plan in case they ever lose their data. This understanding only becomes clearer after you have lost data. Numerous IT companies work to make sure this never happens to you and they will assist you in coming up with a plan. However, to get a clear overview of what has needed, let us look at the basic steps involved.

Disaster Backup and Recovery plans are only effective when data is fully backed up; there are many steps one can take in order to have a working system. One involves practicing the recovery process to see if it works well and then making sure to save crucial information like passwords and such on a document. This document should be kept safe, copied and stored in multiple locations. If you have ample staff, you may need to let key trustees know of these locations.

Data storage has always had its challenges and the most common is data corruption and loss due to viruses and external attacks. Internet security is needed when using Cloud Backup as many people do. For the Backup and Recovery process to work efficiently, the third party Cloud Backup service provider has to have sufficient security that will help protect the data and make automatic backups of the files you use most regularly and save them in multiple physical locations. This is most useful when you accidentally delete a file you commonly use.

Online backup is very common and it works by sending copies of your data to a server through a third party network. The network will charge for the storage of data depending on the size, bandwidth and the number of users. It works by uploading data from software that is programmed to collect files from the client every hour, compress them, encrypt them and then send them to a secure server. The process can cater to small files as well as large ones and uploads can be done once a week or a few times a day; it really depends on the volume of data.

The costs can greatly differ between service providers as they use different systems, protection levels, and storage capacity to backup your files in case of an accident or outage. It makes perfect sense to backup data, considering the average company in the United States loses between $100,000 and $1 million because of data loss. A company’s down time because of data loss can cost well over $50,000 an hour. Similarly, an individual stands to lose a lot if he or she ever lost the data on their computer. So, in order to prevent the chance of that ever happening, you have to put in place a system that will ensure all your files are protected and kept safe at all times.

Create a backup of a backup of a backup. One of the major approaches people have to data backup is copying all of their files to an external hard drive - music, pictures, movies, financial documents and any other valuable files they have. The problem is, simply copying the data to an external memory device does not guarantee the safety of those documents. For starters, you should know that if you do not have a system that stores your data in more than two different locations, then you do not have a backup system at all. What you need is a foolproof plan where you know there is not a chance in the world that your documents are going to get lost. Copying the data is the first step, but you need to make sure it is secured. You can keep two or three separate backup drives and make sure they are stored in different locations, but you will still need the services of a good IT company that offers storage services in an offsite sever. It does not have to cost much, but this will be the perfect way to ensure your data never gets lost.

There are enough inexpensive companies, which provide cloud backup should you need the service, but just make sure you deal with a renowned company. Recovery is much easier when you have everything stored securely. Furthermore, You do not really have to create the plan; you could hire an IT company that does that kind of job. It is not as expensive as losing your files; more than 90% of businesses that suffer severe data loss actually shutdown in the first five years of operation.

Performing Data Recovery After Registry Corruption

2012-01-12T04:13:58Z

A hierarchical database in Windows Operating System that stores configuration settings and options is termed as Windows Registry. Thus, the registry database mainly has configuration settings for applications, hardware devices, and users. However, at times the corruption or the damage in the Windows registry database occurs due to various reasons like improper system shutdown, virus infection, operating system malfunctioning, file system corruption, human errors, etc. The major issue that arises after Windows Registry corruption is unbootability of Windows-based system and so unavailability of valuable data. In such case, complete backup of your data works as a boon, but in the absence of proper backup or if the backup also fails to restore your data then reliable third-party data recovery software can do the needful.

Let us discuss it through a practical example. While trying to restart your Windows XP based computer, you may encounter one of the following error messages:

“Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM” OR
“Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE” OR
“Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate” OR
“System hive error”

Thus, after encountering any of the above mentioned error messages, your system becomes unbootable and in addition the data saved in it becomes inaccessible.

Resolution:

To fix the above error message, you may try the below mentioned steps:

Try to restore the system state before Windows registry damage.
Check all the firmware drives, BIOS (Basic Input/Output) settings, hardware, and disk.
However, if the problem still persists and you still are unable to get access to your data then formatting of hard drive is recommended. Formatting deletes all the data from the hard drive thus, to restore your valuable data you can use an updated backup. However, in unavailability of backup, opting for third-party data recovery software is a wise decision.

There are a large number of data recovery software available online but it is recommended to use only one which has good experience in the field of data recovery and has simple recovery steps. One such software is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. The efficient data recovery software safely recovers lost/deleted data and also the data which is lost due to formatting or corruption of hard drive. This software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, 2000, and NT (SP4). So, what are you waiting for get your Windows data recovery software now!!!

The Virtual CPU Dilemma - Overprovisioning vCPU to pCPU ratios

2012-01-12T02:23:01Z

2011 was a year where despite the economic constraints everything Big was seemingly good; Big Data, Big Clouds, Big VMs etc. Caught in the industry’s lust for this excess, 2011 was also the year I lost count of how many overprovisioned resources to ‘Big’ Production VMs I witnessed. More often than not this was a typical reaction from System Admins trying to alleviate their fears of potential performance problems to important VMs. It was the year where I began to hear justifications such as “yes we are overprovisioning our production VMs..but apart from the cost savings, overallocating our available underlying resources to a VM isn’t a bad thing, in fact it allows it to be scalable”. Despite this 2011 was also the year where I lost count of the amount of times I had to point out that sometimes overprovisioning a VM does lead to performance problems - specifically when dealing with Virtual CPUs.

VMware refers to CPU as pCPU and vCPU. pCPU or ‘physical’ CPU in its simplest terms refers to a physical CPU core i.e. a physical hardware execution context (HEC) if hyper-threading is unavailable or disabled. If hyperthreading has been enabled then a pCPU would consitute a logical CPU. This is because hyperthreading enables a single processor core to act like two processors i.e. logical processors. So for example, if an ESX 8-core server has hyper-threading enabled it would have 16 threads that appear as 16 logical processors and that would constitute 16 pCPUs.

As for a virtual CPU (vCPU) this refers to a virtual machine’s virtual processor and can be thought of in the same vein as the CPU in a traditional physical server. vCPUs run on pCPUs and by default, virtual machines are allocated one vCPU each. However, VMware have an add-on software module named Virtual SMP (symmetric multi-processing) that allows virtual machines to have access to more than one CPU and hence be allocated more than one vCPU. The great advantage of this is that virtualized multi-threaded applications can now be deployed on multi vCPU VMs to support their numerous processes. So instead of being constrained to a single vCPU, SMP enables an application to use multiple processors to execute multiple tasks concurrently, consequently increasing throughput. So with such a feature and all the excitement of being ‘Big’ it was easily assumed by many that taking advantage of such a feature by provisioning additional vCPUs could only ever be beneficial – but if only it was that simple.

The typical examples I faced entailed performance problems that were either being blamed on the Storage or the SAN and not CPU constraints especially as overall CPU utilization for the ESX server that hosted the VMs would be reported as low. Using Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom I was able to quickly conclude that the problem was not at all related to the SAN or Storage but the hosts themselves. By being able to historically trend and correlate the vCenter, SAN and Storage metrics of the problematic VMs on a single dashboard it was apparent that the high number of vCPUs to each VM was the cause. This was indicated by a high reading of what is termed the 'CPU Ready' metric.

To elaborate, CPU Ready is a metric that measures the amount of time a VM is ready to run against the pCPU i.e. how long a vCPU has to wait for an available core when it has work to perform. So while it’s possible that CPU utilization may not be reported as high, if the CPU Ready metric is high then your performance problem is most likely related to CPU. In the instances that I saw, this was caused by customers assigning four vCPUs and in some cases eight to each Virtual Machine. So why was this happening?

Well firstly the hardware and its physical CPU resource is still shared. Coupled with this the ESX Server itself also requires CPU to process storage requests and network traffic etc. Then add the situation that sadly most organizations still suffer from the ‘silo syndrome’ and hence there still isn’t a clear dialogue between the System Admin and the Application owner. The consequence being that while multiple vCPUs are great for workloads that support parallelization but this is not the case for applications that don’t have built in multi-threaded structures. So while a VM with 4 vCPUs will require the ESX server to wait for 4 pCPUs to become available, on a particularly busy ESX server with other VMs this could take significantly longer than if the VM in question only had a single vCPU.

To explain this further let’s take an example of a four pCPU host that has four VMs, three with 1 vCPU and one with 4 vCPUs. At best only the three single vCPU VMs can be scheduled concurrently. In such an instance the 4 vCPU VM would have to wait for all four pCPUs to be idle. In this example the excess vCPUs actually impose scheduling constraints and consequently degrade the VM’s overall performance, typically indicated by low CPU utilization but a high CPU Ready figure. With the ESX server scheduling and prioritising workloads according to what it deems most efficient to run, the consequence is that smaller VMs will tend to run on the pCPUs more frequently than the larger overprovisioned ones. So in this instance overprovisioning was in fact proving to be detrimental to performance as opposed to beneficial. Now in more recent versions of vSphere the scheduling of different vCPUs and de-scheduling of idle vCPUs is not as contentious as it used to be. Despite this, the VMKernel still has to manage every vCPU, a complete waste if the VM’s application doesn’t use them!

To ensure your vCPU to pCPU ratio is at its optimal level and that you reap the benefits of this great feature there are some straightforward considerations to make. Firstly there needs to be dialogue between the silos to fully understand the application’s workload prior to VM resource allocation. In the case of applications where the workload may not be known, it’s key to not overprovision virtual CPUs but rather start with a single vCPU and scale out as and when is necessary. Having a monitoring platform that can historically trend the performance and workloads of such VMs is also highly beneficial in determining such factors. As mentioned earlier CPU Ready is a key metric to consider as well as CPU utilization. Correlating this with Memory and Network statistics, as well as SAN I/O and Disk I/O metrics enables you to proactively avoid any bottlenecks and correctly size your VMs and hence avoid overprovisioning. This can also be extended in considering how many VMs you allocate to an ESX Server and in ensuring that its physical CPU resources are sufficient to meet the needs of your VMs. As businesses’ key applications become virtualized it’s an imperative that whether they are old legacy single threaded workloads or new multi threaded workloads the correct vCPU to pCPU ratio is allocated. In this instance size isn’t always everything it’s what you do with your CPU that counts.

Benefits of Flat Rate IT Support?

2012-01-06T18:48:31Z

More Benefits of Flat Rate IT Support?

Swiftness and Expertise: Outsource all your IT needs to a company who specialize in the field. Seba Systems has the specific equipment and technical expertise to handle any IT related problem. Thus allowing you to recover faster and prevent future computer outages.

Reduced Operational Costs: Outsourcing eliminates the need to hire individuals in-house; hence hiring and operational costs are greatly reduced. This is one of the prime advantages of outsourcing your IT needs to Seba Systems.

Example Scenario:

Tax & Accounting Service Company Located in Los Angeles, CA

10 Employees

All Workstations Running Windows 7, MS Office 2010 Suite, Accounting software, etc..

Tax Preparation Software hosted from Central Server

Office is open Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm

Network Printer, Company E-mail, Daily Server backups, Anti-virus, and DSL Internet

To Support this network and users, an experienced IT professional is required.

Average Annual Salary: $38,000

Salary does not include Social Security Tax, Payroll Tax, Health Insurance, Sick Leave and Vacation Time Off. Employee work hours - 40-50 hours per week.

Benefits of Moving to Seba Flat Rate IT Support:

Our staff consists of 10 experienced IT professionals ready to help tackle any computer problem you face.

We have 24x7 staff that provides proactive network monitoring to our clients.
Onsite staff is always available when needed even after regular work hours.
We provide unlimited support for any Server or Network related issues.

Ten (10) hours per month is included for workstation related issues.
All our technicians are covered with $2M Professional Liability Insurance policy.
We offer assistance with any new office expansion, relocation or other projects outside the scope at nominal costs.
We require NO Social Security Tax, Payroll Tax, Health Insurance, Sick Leave or Vacation Time Off.

Your Total Montly IT Support Cost : $1050 Per Month.

Package Details:

Supersonic: $1050 per month for (10) Workstation, (1) Server, Email Support, Network Support, Daily Server backups, Anti-virus & Voip Phone Support. Includes 10 free onsite visits per month. Click Here For More Info

Windows Vista is Non-Bootable Due to Missing BCD File – Here is the Solution

2012-01-05T06:19:59Z

Windows Vista uses Boot Configuration Data (BCD) in place of Boot.ini file which is used in earlier versions of Windows. BCD basically contains configuration data which is responsible for successful booting of Windows Vista based computer. Thus, any corruption or damage in BCD can halt the boot process of your Windows Vista based computer. This situation not only makes your system non-bootable but it also leads to inaccessibility of data stored on the hard disk of your computer. This situation of data inaccessibility can easily be handled from the updated backup. But, in the unavailability of backup, third-party hard drive recovery software can do the needful.

Let us exemplify the above situation. Suppose, you start your Windows Vista based computer but instead of Welcome screen, you encounter the following error message:
“File: \Boot\BCD Status: 0xc0000034 Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information” To rectify this issue we must first understand the causes behind it.

Causes:

We receive this error when either of the below mentioned conditions is true:

The Boot or BCD file is missing or damaged on the active partition.
The Boot Manager (Bootmgr) entry is missing from BCD store.

Resolution:

To resolve this problem, use the following methods in the same order as they are present below:

Method1: Repair BCD store through ‘Startup Repair’ option

Method2: Rebuild the BCD store by using the ‘Bootrec.exe’ tool

Method3: Manually rebuild the BCD store by using ‘Bcdedit.exe’ tool

Mostly, these steps rectify the issue and make all your data accessible but if they fail then reinstallation of Windows Vista remains the only way to solve the problem. Though, reinstallation of operating system deletes all the data stored on the hard disk but you can always recover that data from the valid backup. However, if you do not have the backup then using third-party hard drive recovery software can work as boon. One of the reliable and highly recommended data recovery software is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery.

This is one of the user-friendly hard drive data recovery tools which recover lost, deleted, or inaccessible data from Windows Operating System based hard disks or other secondary storage media. The software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server2003, XP, 2000, and NT4 (SP6) and supports recovery of 185 different file types.

Case study: How SEGA Europe uses VMware to standardize cloud environment for globally distributed game development

2011-12-20T19:37:53Z

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Our   next VMworld case study interview focuses on how a major game developer in Europe has successfully leveraged the hybrid cloud model.

We’ll learn how SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud    provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to    test and develop multimedia games, one that dynamically scales   productively to the many performance requirements at hand.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference in Copenhagen. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.   [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here    to tell us more about how the hybrid approach to multiple,    complementary cloud instances is meeting SEGA’s critical development    requirements in a new way is Francis Hart, Systems Architect at SEGA Europe, in London. The case study interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Clearly one of the requirements in game development is the need to   ramp up a lot of servers to do the builds, but then they sit there essentially unproductive    between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the    requirements around the workload support?

Hart: Typically, in the early stages of   development, there is a fair amount of testing going on, and it tends   to be quite small -- the number of staff involved in it and the number   of build iterations.

Going on, when the game reaches to the end of its   product life-cycle, we’re talking multiple game iterations a day and the game size has gotten very large at that point. The number of people   involved in the testing to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped   on date is into the hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Gardner: How has virtualization and moving your workloads into different locations evolved over the years?

Hart: We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these    systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at    certain times. Historically, we always had an on-premise VMware platform to do this. Very recently, we’ve been looking at ways to use that resource within a cloud to cut down from some of Capex loading but also remain a little bit more agile with some of the larger titles, especially online games that are coming around.

Gardner: We’re all very familiar with the amazing video games that are being created nowadays. And SEGA of course is particularly well-known for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise going back a number of years. What are some of the other critical requirements that   you have from a systems architecture perspective when developing these games?

Hart: We have a lot of development studios across the world. We're working on multiple projects.   We need to ensure that we supply them with a highly scalable and   reliable solution in order to test, develop, and produce the game and   the code in time. ... We’re probably   looking at thousands of individual developers across the world.

... The first part was dealing with the end of the   process, and that was the testing and the game release process. Now,   we’re going to be working back from that. The next big area that we’re   actively involved in is getting our developers to develop online games   within the hybrid environment.

So they’re designing the game and   the game’s back-end servers to be optimal within the VMware environment. And then, also pushing from staging to live is a very simple process using the Cloud Connector.

We're restructuring and   redesigning the IT systems within SEGA to be more of a development   operations team to provide a service to the developers and to the   company.

Gardner: How did you start approaching that from your IT environment, to build the right infrastructure?

Targeting testing

Hart: One of the first areas we targeted very early on was the last process    in those steps, the testing, arguably one of the most time-consuming    processes within the development cycle.    It happens pretty much all the way through as well to ensure that the    game itself behaves as it should, it’s tested, and the customer gets   the end-user experience they require.

The biggest technical goal   that we had for this is being able to move large amounts of data,    un-compiled code, from different testing offices around the world to the   staff. Historically we had some major issues in securely moving that   data around, and this is what we started looking into cloud solutions   for this.

For very, very large game builds, and we're talking game builds above 10 gigabytes, it ended up being couriered within the country and then overnight file transfer outside of the country. So, very old school methods.

We    needed both to secure that up to make sure we understood where the   game builds were, and also to understand exactly which version each of   the testing offices was using. So it’s gaining control, but also   providing more security.

Gardner: So we’re seeing a lot more of the role-play games (RPG) types of games, games themselves in the cloud. That must influence   what you're doing in terms of thinking about your future direction.

Hart: Absolutely. We’ve been looking at things like the hybrid cloud model with VMware as a development platform for our developers. That's really what we're   working on now. We've got a number of games in the pipeline that have   been developed on the hybrid cloud platform. It gives the developers a   platform that is exactly the same and mirrored to what it would   eventually be in the online space through ISPs like Colt, which should be hosting the virtual cloud platform.

Gaining cost benefits

And one of the benefits we're seeing in the VMware offering is that regardless of what data center in the world is the standard platform, it also allows us to leverage    multiple ISPs, and hopefully gain some cost benefits from that.

Very   early on we were in discussions with Colt and also VMware to understand   what technology stack they were bringing into the cloud. We started   doing a proof of concept with VMware and a professional services company, and together we were    able to come over a proof of concept to distribute our game testing    code, which previously was a very old-school distribution system. So    anything better would improve the process.

There wasn't too much    risk to the company. So we saw the opportunity to have a hybrid cloud    set up to allow us to have an internal cloud system to distribute the    codes to the majority of UK game testers and to leverage high bandwidth   between all of our sites.

For the game testing studios around Europe and the world, we could use a hosted version of the same service which was up on the Colt Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) platform to supply this to trusted testing studios.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, what about managing that?   What about having a view into what’s going on so that you know what   aspects of the activity and requirements are being met and where?

Hart: The virtual cloud environment of vCloud Director has a web portal that allows you to manage a lot of this configuration in a central way. We’re also using VMware Cloud Connector,    which is a product that allows you to move the apps between different    cloud data centers. And doing this allows us to manage it at one    location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

In    that regard, the configuration very much was in a single place for us    in the way that we designed the proof of concept. It actually helped    things, and the previous process wasn’t ideal anyway. So it was a    dramatic improvement.

One of the immediate benefits was around the design process. It's very   obvious that we were tightening up security within our build delivery to the testing studios. Nothing was with a courier on a bike anymore, but within a secured transaction between the two offices.

Risk greatly reduced

Also    from a security perspective, we understood exactly what game assets   and builds were in each location. So it really helped the product    development teams to understand what was where and who was using what,    and so from a risk point of view it’s greatly reduced.

In terms of stats and the amount of data throughput, it’s pretty large, and we’ve been moving terabytes pretty much weekly nowadays. Now we’re going completely live with the distribution network.

So    it’s been a massive success. All of the UK testing studios are using    the build delivery system day to day, and for the European ones we’ve    got about half the testing studios on board that build delivery system    now, and it’s transparent to them.

VMware was very good at allowing us to understand the technology and that's one of the benefits of working with a professional services reseller. In terms of gotchas, there weren't too many. There were a lot of good surprises that came up and allowed us to open the door to a lot of other VMware technologies.

Now, we're also looking at alternating a lot of processes within vCenter Orchestrator and other VMware products. They really gave us a good stepping stone into the VMware catalogue, rather than just vSphere, which we were using previously. That was very handy for us.

Gardner: I’d like to just pause here for a second. Your use of vSphere 4.1 must have been an important   stepping stone to be able to have the dynamic ability to ramp up and   down your environments, your support infrastructure, but also skills.

Hart: Absolutely. We already have a fair footprint in Amazon Web Services (AWS),    and it was a massive skill jump that we needed to train members of the   staff in order to use that environment. With the VMware environment, as you said, we already have a large amount of skill set using vSphere. We have a large team that supports our corporate infrastructure and we've actually got VMware in our co-located public environment as well. So it was very, very assuring that the skills were immediately transferable.

Gardner: Now that you've done this, any words   of wisdom, 20/20 hindsight, that you might share with others who are   considering moving more aggressively into private cloud, hybrid cloud,   and ultimately perhaps the full PaaS value?

Hart: Just get some hands-on experience and play with the cloud stack from VMware. It’s inexpensive to have a go and just get to know the technology stack.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

You may also be interested in:

SAP runs VMware to provision private clouds that support complex and critical training applications

2011-12-20T19:07:01Z

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

This BriefingsDirect podcast discussion centers on how worldwide enterprise applications leader SAP has designed and implemented a private cloud infrastructure models that supports an internal consulting and training program.

By standardizing on a VMware cloud platform, SAP has been able to slash provisioning times for multiple instances of its flagship application suite in the training setting, as well as set the stage for wider adoption of cloud models.

Here to tell us about the technical and productivity benefits of private clouds is Dr. Wolfgang Krips, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure at SAP in Walldorf, Germany. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of Briefings Direct podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What is it about private cloud that made the most sense for SAP?

Krips: Expanding a bit on the use case, there is a specific challenge here. In the training business,   people book their courses, and we know only on Friday evening who is   attending the course on Monday. So we have only a very short amount of time over the weekend to set up the systems. That was one of the big   challenges that we had to solve.

The second challenge is that, at the same time, these systems become more and more mission critical.   Customers are saying, "If the system isn't available during the course,   I'm not willing to pay." Maybe the customer will rebook the course.   Sometimes he doesn’t. That means that if the systems aren't available,   we have an immediate revenue impact.

You can imagine that if we   have to set up a couple of hundred, or potentially a couple of thousand,   systems over the weekend, we need a high degree of automation to do   that. In the past, we had homegrown scripts,    and there was a lot of copying and stuff like that going on. We were    looking into other technologies and opportunities to make life easier    for us.

A couple of challenges were that the scripts and the    automation that we had before were dependent on the specific hardware    that we used, and we can't use the same hardware for each of the    courses. We have different hardware platforms and we had to adopt all    the scripts to various hardware platforms.

When we virtualized and used virtualization technology, we could make use of linked cloning technology, which    allowed us to set up the systems much faster than the original copying    that we did.

The second thing was that by introducing the    virtualization layer, we became almost hardware independent, and that    cut the effort in constructing or doing the specific automation    significantly.

Gardner: What did you need to put in place, and how difficult was it?

The important piece

Krips: Luckily, we already had some experience. The big thing in setting up the cloud is not getting, say, vSphere in place and the basic virtualization technology. It's the    administration and making it available in self-service or the automation    of the provisioning. That is the important piece, as most would have    guessed.

We had some experience with the Lifecycle Manager and the Lab Manager before. So we said at that time because we did this last year, we set    up a Lab Manager installation and worked with that to realize this kind   of private cloud.

In this specific cloud, typically we have between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand VMs running. Overall, at SAP we're running more than 20,000 virtual machines (VMs). And, in fact, I have about 25 private cloud installations.

... As I mentioned, this cloud has to work. If this goes down, it’s not like some kind of irrelevant test system is down -- or test system pool -- and we can take up another one. Potentially a lot of training   courses are not happening. With respect to mission criticality, this   cloud was essential.

Gardner: We often hear similar requirements being applied to a test and development environment. Are some of your clouds involved with the test and development as well?

Krips: As I mentioned before, we have 25 private-cloud installations,   and in fact, most of them are with development. We also have cloud    installations in the demo area. So if sales people are providing demos,    there are certain landscapes or resource pools where we are    instantiating demo systems.

SAP wants to shorten the innovation   cycles. Internally, we've moved internally to a development model, where every six weeks development provides potentially a shippable release. It doesn’t mean that the release gets shipped, but we’re running through the whole process of developing something, testing it,   and validating it. There is a demonstrable release available every six weeks.

In    the past, with a traditional model, if we were provisioning physical    hardware, it took us about 30 days or so to provision a development    system. Now, if you think about a development cycle of six weeks and    you’re taking about nearly the same amount of time for provisioning the    development system, you’ll see that there is a bit of a mismatch.

Moving to the private cloud and doing this in self-service, today we can provision development systems within hours.

Gardner: That’s what I hear from a number of organizations,   and it's very impressive. When you had a choice of different   suppliers, vendors, and professional services organizations, was there   everything that led you specifically to VMware, and how has that worked out?

Krips: I can give you a fairly straightforward answer. At the time we started working with private cloud and private-cloud installations, VMware was the most advanced provider of that technology, and I'd argue that it is still today.

Gardner: How about security and management benefits?

Very reluctant

Krips: From   our perspective, we wanted to have the advantages of cloud with   respect to flexibility, provisioning speed, but we didn’t want to have   more security headaches than we already had. That’s why we said, "Let's get our arms first around a private cloud."

Gardner: Is there something about a standardized approach to your cloud stack   that makes that hybrid potential, when you’re ready to do it, when it's the right payload, something that you'll be pursuing?

Krips: That’s one of our biggest problems that we're having. Clearly, if one had a standard cloud interface like a vCloud interface, and it was the industry norm, that would be extremely    helpful. The issue is that, as you can imagine, there are a couple of    workloads that we also want to test in some other well known clouds. I'm having a bit of a headache over how to connect to multiple   clouds.

... Now, if a couple of interesting providers had a standardized   cloud interface, it would be very nice for me.

Gardner: Any thoughts about what your experience and benefits with cloud might mean for your future vision around client devices and mobility?

Krips: Dana, the thing is pretty clear. If you look at the strategy that SAP pursues, mobility is an integral part.   We also think that not only that business process mobility is more   important, but what we’re also seeing, and I mentioned that before,   with the agility and development. So for instance, there are people who   are working every couple of months in new teams. For us, it's very   important that we separate the user data and the desktop from the   device. We’re definitely pushing very strongly into the topic of desktop virtualization (VDI).

SaaS application

The    big challenge that we’re currently having is that when you’re moving   to VDI, you take everything that’s on the user's desktop today, then   you make out of that more or less a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. As you can imagine, if you’re doing that to development,    and they are doing some complex development for the user interfaces or   stuff like that, this puts certain challenges on the latency that you can have to the data center or the processing power that you need to have in the back-end.

From    our side, we’re interested in technologies similar to that view, and    where you can check out machines and still run on a VDI client, but    leverage the administrative and provisioning advantages that you have    through the cloud provisioning for virtual desktops. So it's a pretty    interesting challenge.

We understand what kind of benefits we’re    getting from the cloud operations, as I said, the center provisioning,    application patching, improved license management, there are a lot of things that are very, very important to us and that we want to leverage.

Particularly for us, the VDI, the benefits, are very much in the kind of   centralized provisioning. Just to give you an example, imagine how   easy it would be if you’re doing desktop virtualization, to move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. You could basically flip a switch.

On    the other hand, we have to solve the issue that we’re not blowing the    business case, because the processing power and the storage that you    have at the end point is relatively cheap. That’s why we were so interested in VDI technologies. That would allow us also to take care of    all of our mobile users.

But we’re confident that we can get the business case to work.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

You may also be interested in:

Overview of VMware Vcloud Director 1.5

2011-12-16T09:37:59Z

Hi All,

This is my First blog about VMware vcloud Director...I hope it's usefull to you for better understanding about VMware vCloud Director...

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is defined as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned

and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Cloud Computing is a revolution that will define IT beginning in the second decade of the 21st Century. This new form of computing is perfectly poised to provide solutions to a host of business problems within organizations large and small. Cloud Computing will be the catalyst for the long predicted notion of "ubiquitous computing." So just what "is" Cloud Computing, and why it is so different from what has come before? The following pages will detail four main areas in which Cloud Computing allows businesses to break from the past:

Virtualization – The ability to increase computing efficiency.

Democratization of Computing – Bringing enterprise scale infrastructure to small and mid-size businesses.

Scalability and Fast Provisioning – Bringing web scale IT at a rapid pace.

Commoditization of Infrastructure – Enabling IT to focus on the strategic aspects of its role.

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of three service models and four deployment models.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In this environment, the capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

2. Software as a Service (SaaS), in which the consumer is given access to software running in the provider’s environment.

3Platform as a Service (PaaS), in which the consumer can use the provider’s hardware to run applications created with the specific programming languages and tools supported by that provider.

Cloud environments may be separated into four categories based on the consumers they serve:

Private cloud—The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Community cloud—The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizatio or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Public cloud—The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Hybrid cloud—The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private,community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds).

Many enterprises and IT service providers are developing cloud service offerings for public and private environments.

All above given information related to Cloud Computing it's essential for better understand to VMware vCloud Director 1.5...

VMware vCloud Director: The VMware vCloud solution is a suite of products designed to enable an IT organization to build a private cloud on top of a vSphere environment. The product suite consists of vCloud Director 1.5, VMware vShield Edge 5.0 and VMware vCenter chargeback1.6.2.

vCloud Director a single instance of vCloud Director is known as a “cell.” A cell consists of the vCloud Director components installed on a supported system. In larger implementations, multiple cells can be deployed with a front-end IP load balancer to direct end-user traffic to the correct cell.

vCloud Director stores information about managed objects, users and other metadata in a database. The current release of vCloud Director supports Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server for database platforms. In most environments, the vCloud Director and database components are installed on separate virtual machines for proper load handling.

vCenter Server :

Each vCloud Director cell can connect to one or more vCenter Server instances to access resources for running workloads. Each attached vCenter Server instance provides resources, such as CPU and memory, which can be leveraged by vCloud Director.You have to deploy vcloud VM over vCenter by Installabe Package or OVF Appliance , you can donwnlaod trial Package by www.vmware.com.

VMware ESXi hosts:

VMware ESXi hosts provide the compute power for vCloud Director. ESXi hosts are placed in groups of resources, such as clusters or resource pools. These groups and their associated storage are then made available to vCloud Director. Add Esxi Host in Cluster and make a Resource Pool, if you are seeing no option for enabling Resource Pool, edit the cluster setting and select DRS option enable.

VMware vShield Manager:

VMware vShield Manager provides a central point of control for managing, deploying, reporting, logging and integrating vShield as well as third-party security services. Working in conjunction with vCenter Server, VMware vShield Manager enables role-based access control and separation of duties as part of a unified framework for managing virtualization security.

vShield Edge secures the perimeter, or edge, around a virtual datacenter. vShield Edge secures the edge of a virtual datacenter with firewalling, VPN, NAT, DHCP, and Web load-balancing capabilities. vShield Edge allows cloud infrastructures to be scaled in a rapid and secure manner.

vCloud Director Components:--->

Exchange Completion Time – Redefining Application & Storage Performance

2011-12-04T01:43:57Z

Roll back several years and certain vendors had you believe that Fibre Channel was dead and that the future would be iSCSI. A few years later and certain vendors were then declaring that Fibre Channel was dead again and that the future was FCoE. So while this blog is not a iSCSI vs FC or FC vs FCoE comparison list (there’s plenty of good ones out there and both iSCSI or FCoE each have immense merit), the point being made here is that Fibre Channel unlike Elvis really is alive and well. Moreover Fibre Channel still remains the protocol of choice for most Mission Critical Applications despite the FUD that surrounds its cost, manageability and future existence. Most Storage folk who run Enterprise class infrastructures are advocates of Fibre Channel not only because of its high performance connectivity infrastructure but also due to its reliability, security and scalability. Incredibly this is all with the majority of Fibre Channel implementations being vastly under utilized, poorly managed (due to lack of visibility) and running at a far from optimized state due to the constant day to day operations of most SAN Storage administrators. Indeed if Storage folk were empowered with a metric that could enable them to gain a better insight and understanding of their SAN Storage’s performance and utilization the so called impending death of Fibre Channel may have to take an even further rain check. Well that metric does exist; cue what is termed the “Exchange Completion Time.”

It’s now common for me to visit customer environments that run Fibre Channel SANs yet have various factions that complain they are suffering performance issues due to lack of bandwidth or throughput, whether that's server, VM, Network or Storage teams. In every single instance FC utilization has actually been incredibly low with peaks of 10% at the most and that's with 4GB/s environments not 8GB/s! At worst there may be an extremely busy backup server that singlehandedly causes bottlenecks and creates the impression that the whole infrastructure is saturated but even these occasions are often rare. What seems to be the cause of this misconception is the lack of clarity between what is deemed throughput and what is an actual cause of bottlenecks and performance slow downs i.e. I/O latency.

Sadly (and I am the first to admit that I was also once duped), Storage folk have been hoodwinked into accepting metrics that just aren’t sufficient to meet their requirements. Much like the folklore and fables of Santa Claus that are told to children during Christmas, storage administrators, architects and engineers have also been spun a yarn that MB/s and IOPS are somehow an accurate determination of performance and design considerations. In a world where application owners, server and VM admins are busily speaking the language of response times, Storage folk are engrossed in a foreign vocabulary that revolves around RAID levels, IOPS and MB/s and then numerous calculations to try and correlate the two languages together. But what if an application owner requested Storage with a 10ms response time that the Storage Administrator could then allocate with a guarantee of that performance? That would entail the Storage engineer not just looking at a one dimensional view from the back end of the Storage Array but one that incorporated the comprehensive transaction time i.e. from the Server to the Switch port to the LUN. That would mean considering the Exchange Completion Time.

To elaborate, using MB/s as a measurement of performance is almost akin to how people used to count cars as a measurement of road traffic. Harking back to my days as a student and before all of the high tech cameras and satellites that now monitor road traffic, I was ‘lucky’ enough to have a job of counting the amount of cars that went through Trafalgar Square at lunchtime. It was an easy job, I'd see five cars and I'd click five times but this was hardly accurate as when there was a traffic jam and all of the lanes were occupied I was still clicking five cars. Here also lies the problem with relying on MB/s as a measurement of performance. As with the counting car situation a more accurate way would have been to instead watch each single car and measure it's time from its origin to its destination. In the same vein, to truly measure performance in a SAN Storage infrastructure you need to measure how long a transaction takes from being initiated by the host, received by the storage and acknowledged back by the host in real-time as opposed to averages. This is what is termed the Exchange Completion Time.

While many storage arrays have tools that provide information on IOPS and MB/s to get a better picture of a SAN Storage environment and it’s underlying latency it's also key to consider the amount of Frames per second. In Fibre Channel a Frame is comparable to a word, a Sequence a sentence and an Exchange the conversation. A Standard FC Frame has a Data Payload of 2112 bytes i.e. a 2K payload. So for example an application that has an 8K I/O will require 4 FC Frames to carry that data portion. In this instance this would equate to 1 IOP being 4 Frames and subsequently 100 IOPS of the same size equating to 400 Frames. Hence to get a true picture of utilization looking at IOPS alone is not sufficient because there exists a magnitude of difference between particular applications and their I/O size with some ranging from 2K to even 256K. With backup applications the I/O sizes can be even larger. Hence it's a mistake to not take into consideration the amount of Frames/sec when trying to measure SAN performance or if trying to identify whether data is being passed efficiently. For example even if you are witnessing a high throughput in MB/s you may be missing the fact that there is a minimum payload of data and the Exchange (conversation) is failing to complete. This is often the case when there’s a slow draining device, flapping SFP etc. in the FC SAN network where instead of data frames causing the traffic you have a number of management frames dealing with issues such as logins and logouts, loss of sync or some other optic degradation or physical layer issue. Imagine the scenario, a Storage Administrator is measuring the performance of his infrastructure or troubleshooting a performance issue and is seeing lots of traffic via MB/s – unaware that many of the environment’s transactions are actually being cancelled across the Fabric!

This lack of visibility into transactions has also led to many storage architects being reluctant to aggressively use lower tiers of storage as poor I/O performance is often attributed to the storage arrays when often bottlenecks in the storage infrastructure are actually the root cause. Measuring performance via Exchange Completion Times enables measurement and monitoring of storage I/O performance, hence ensuring that applications can be correlated and assigned to their most cost- effective storage tier without sacrificing SLAs. With many Storage vendors adopting automated tiering within their arrays some would feel this challenge has now been met. The reality of automated tiering though is that LUNs or sub-LUNs are only dynamically relocated to different tiers based on the frequency of data access i.e. frequently accessed is more valuable so should reside on a higher tier and infrequently accessed data should be moved to lower tiers. So while using historical array performance and capacity data may seem a sufficient way to tier, it’s still too simplistic and lacks the insight for more optimized tiering decisions. Such an approach may have been sufficient to determine optimum data placement in the days of DAS when the I/O performance bottleneck was disk transfer rate but in the world of SANs and shared storage to look just at external transfer rates between SSD, Fibre Channel or SATA drives is a detached and inaccurate way to measure the effect of SAN performance on an application’s response time. For example congestion/problems in the SAN can result in severely degraded response times or cancelled transactions that fail to be acknowledged by the back end of the array. Furthermore incorrect HBA queue depths, the difference between sequential and random requests, link and physical layer errors all have an impact on response times and in turn application latency. By incorporating the Exchange Completion Time metric i.e. measuring I/O conversations across the SAN infrastructure into your tiering considerations, tiering can now accurately be based on comprehensive real time performance as opposed to device specific views.

Monitoring your FC SAN Storage environment in a comprehensive manner that incorporates the SAN fabric and provides metrics such as the Exchange Completion Time rapidly changes FC SAN troubleshooting from a reactive to proactive exercise. It also enables Server, Storage and Application administrators to have a common language of ‘response times’ thus eliminating any potential silos. With the knowledge of application I/O latency down to the millisecond, FC SAN Storage administrators can quickly be transformed from the initial point of blame to the initial point of resolution, while also ensuring optimum performance and availability of your mission critical data.

Big Data meets Complex Event Processing: AccelOps delivers a better architecture to attack the data center monitoring and analytics problem

2011-11-30T23:04:39Z

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: AccelOps. Connect with AccelOps: Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, RSS.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion centers on how new data and analysis approaches are significantly improving IT operations monitoring, as well as providing stronger security.

The conversation examines how AccelOps has developed technology that correlates events with relevant data across IT systems, so that operators can gain much better insights faster, and then learn as they go to better predict future problems before they emerge. That's because advances in big data analytics and complex events processing (CEP) can come together to provide deep and real-time, pattern-based insights into large-scale IT operations.

Here to explain how these new solutions can drive better IT monitoring and remediation response -- and keep those critical systems performing at their best -- is Mahesh Kumar, Vice President of Marketing at AccelOps. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: AccelOps is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Is there a fundamental change in how we approach the data that’s coming from IT systems in order to get a better monitoring and analysis capability?

Kumar: The data has to be analyzed in real-time. By real-time I mean in streaming mode before the data hits the disk. You need to be able to analyze it and make decisions. That's actually a very efficient way of analyzing information. Because you avoid a lot of data sync issues and duplicate data, you can react immediately in real time to remediate systems or provide very early warnings in terms of what is going wrong.

The challenges in doing this streaming-mode analysis are scale and speed. The traditional approaches with pure relational databases alone are not equipped to analyze data in this manner. You need new   thinking and new approaches to tackle this analysis problem.

Gardner: Also for issues of security, offeners are trying different types of attacks. So this needs to be in real-time as well?

Kumar: You might be familiar with advanced persistent threats (APTs).    These are attacks where the attacker tries their best to be invisible.   These are not the brute-force attacks that we have witnessed in the   past. Attackers may hijack an account or gain access to a server, and   then over time, stealthily, be able to collect or capture the   information that they are after.
These kinds of threats cannot be   effectively handled only by looking at data historically, because these are activities that are happening in real-time.

These kinds of threats cannot be   effectively handled only by looking at data historically, because these are activities that are happening in real-time, and there are very, very weak signals that need to be interpreted, and there is a time element of what else is happening at that time.   This too calls for streaming-mode analysis.

If you notice, for   example, someone accessing a server, a database administrator accessing a   server for which they have an admin account, it gives you a certain   amount of feedback around that activity. But if on the other hand, you   learn that a user is accessing a database server for which they don’t   have the right level of privileges, it may be a red flag.

You   need to be able to connect this red flag that you identify in one   instance with the same user trying to do other activity in different   kinds of systems. And you need to do that over long periods of time in   order to defend yourself against APTs.

Gardner: It's always been difficult to gain accurate analysis of large-scale IT operations, but it seems that this is getting more difficult. Why?

Kumar: If you look at trends, there are on average about 10 virtual machines (VMs) to a physical server.    Predictions are that this is going to increase to about 50 to 1, maybe   higher, with advances in hardware and virtualization technologies. The increase in density of VMs is a complicating   factor for capacity planning, capacity management, performance   management, and security.

In a very short period of time, you have in effect    seen a doubling of the size of the IT management problem. So there are a   huge number of VMs to manage and that introduces complexity and a lot   of data that is created.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is another big trend. All analyst research and customer feedback suggests that we're moving to a hybrid model, where you have some workloads on a public cloud, some in a private cloud, and some running in a traditional data center. For this, monitoring has to work in a distributed environment, across multiple controlling parties.

Last    but certainly not the least, in a hybrid environment, there is    absolutely no clear perimeter that you need to defend from a security    perspective. Security has to be pervasive.

Given these new    realities, it's no longer possible to separate performance monitoring    aspects from security monitoring aspects, because of the distributed    nature of the problem. ... So change is happening much more quickly and rapidly   than ever before. At the very least, you need monitoring and management   that can keep pace with today’s rate of change.
At the very least, you need monitoring and management   that can keep pace with today’s rate of change.

The basic problem you need to address is one of analysis.   Why is that? As we discussed earlier, the scale of systems is really   high. The pace of change is very high. The sheer number of   configurations that need to be managed is very large. So there's data   explosion here.

Since you have a plethora of information coming   at you, the challenge is no longer collection of that information. It's how you analyze that information in a holistic manner and provide   consumable and actionable data to your business, so that you're able to actually then prevent problems in the future or respond to any issues in real-time or in near real-time.

You need to nail the   real-time analytics problem and this has to be the centerpiece of any   monitoring or management platform going forward.

Advances in IT

Gardner: So we have the modern data center, we have issues of complexity and    virtualization, we have scale, we have data as a deluge, and we need to    do something fast in real-time and consistently to learn and relearn   and derive correlations.

It turns out that there are some   advances in IT over the past several years that have been applied to   solve other problems that can be brought to bear here. You've looked at what's being done with big data and in-memory architectures, and you've also looked at some of the great work that’s been done in services-oriented architecture (SOA) and CEP, and you've put these together in an interesting way.
Big data is   about volume, the velocity or the speed with which the data comes in and   out, and the variety or the number of different data types and sources   that are being indexed and managed.

Kumar: Clearly there is a big-data angle to this.

Doug Laney, a META and a Gartner analyst, probably put it best when he highlighted that big data is    about volume, the velocity or the speed with which the data comes in and    out, and the variety or the number of different data types and sources   that are being indexed and managed.

For    example, in an IT management paradigm, a single configuration setting    can have a security implication, a performance implication, an    availability implication, and even a capacity implication in some cases.    Just a small change in data has multiple decision points that are    affected by it. From our angle, all these different types of criteria    affect the big data problem.

Couple of approaches

There are a couple of approaches.   Some companies are doing some really interesting work around big-data   analysis for IT operations.

They primarily focus on gathering the   data, heavily indexing it, and making it available for search, thereby   derive analytical results. It allows you to do forensic analysis that   you were not easily able to with traditional monitoring systems.

The   challenge with that approach is that it swings the pendulum all the way to the other end.   Previously we had a very rigid, well-defined   relational data-models or data structures, and the index and search   approach is much more of a free form. So the pure index-and-search type of an approach is sort of the other end of the spectrum.

What    you really need is something that incorporates the best of both worlds   and puts that together, and I can explain to you how that can be   accomplished with a more modern architecture. To start with, we can't do   away with this whole concept of a model or a relationship diagram or   entity relationship map. It's really critical for us to maintain that.
What   you really need is something that incorporates the best of both worlds   and puts that together.

I’ll    give you an example. When you say that a server is part of a network   segment, and a server is connected to a switch in a particular way, it conveys certain meaning. And because of that meaning, you can now   automatically apply policies, rules, patterns, and automatically    exploit the meaning that you capture purely from that relationship. You    can automate a lot of things just by knowing that.

If you stick    to a pure index-and-search approach, you basically zero out a lot of    this meaning and you lose information in the process. Then it's the    operators who have to handcraft these queries to have to then    reestablish this meaning that’s already out there. That can get very,    very expensive pretty quickly.

Our approach to this big-data   analytics problem is to take a hybrid approach. You need a flexible and   extensible model that you start with as a foundation, that allows you   to then apply meaning on top of that model to all the extended data   that you capture and that can be kept in flat files and searched and   indexed. You need that hybrid approach in order to get a handle on this   problem.

Gardner: Why do you need to think about the architecture that supports this big data capability in order for it to actually work in practical terms?

Kumar: You start with a fully virtualized architecture, because it allows you not only to scale easily, ... but you're able to reach into these multiple disparate environments and capture and analyze and bring that information in. So virtualized architecture is absolutely essential.

Auto correlate

Maybe    more important is the ability for you to auto-correlate and analyze    data, and that analysis has to be distributed analysis. Because whenever   you have a big data problem, especially in something like IT    management, you're not really sure of the scale of data that you need to   analyze and you can never plan for it.

Think of it as applying a MapReduce type of algorithm to IT management problems, so that you can do    distributed analysis, and the analysis is highly granular or specific.    In IT management problems, it's always about the specificity with which    you analyze and detect a problem that makes all the difference between   whether that product or the solution is useful for a customer or not.
In IT management problems, it's always about the specificity with which     you analyze and detect a problem that makes all the difference.

A major advantage of distributed analytics is that you're freed from   the scale-versus-richness trade-off, from the limits on the type of   events you can process. If I wanted to do more complex events and   process more complex events, it's a lot easier to add compute capacity   by just simply adding VMs and scaling horizontally. That’s a big aspect of automating deep forensic analysis into the data that you're   receiving.

I want to add a little bit more about the richness of CEP. It's not just around capturing data and massaging it or looking at it from different angles and events. When we say CEP, we mean it is advanced to the point where it starts to capture how people would actually rationalize and analyze a problem.

The only way   you can automate your monitoring systems end-to-end and get more of the human element out of it is when your CEP system is able to capture   those nuances that people in the NOC and SOC would normally use to rationalize when they look at events. You not    only look at a stream of events, you ask further questions and then    determine the remedy.

No hard limits

To    do this, you should have a rich data set to analyze, i.e. there    shouldn’t be any hard limits placed on what data can participate in the    analysis and you should have the flexibility to easily add new data    sources or types of data. So it's very important for the architecture to    be able to not only event on data that are is stored in in traditional   models or well-defined relational models, but also event against data   that’s typically serialized and indexed in flat file databases.

Gardner: What's the payoff if you do this properly?

Kumar: It is no surprise that our customers don’t come to us saying we have a big data problem, help us solve a big data problem, or we have a complex event problem.
Customers say they are so interconnected that they want these managed on a common platform.

Their   needs are really around managing security, performance and   configurations. These are three interconnected metrics in a virtualized   cloud environment. You can't separate one from the other. And   customers say they are so interconnected that they want these managed   on a common platform. So they're really coming at it from a   business-level or outcome-focused perspective.

What AccelOps   does under the covers, is apply techniques such as big-data analysis,   complex driven processing, etc., to then solve those problems for the   customer. That is the key payoff -- that customer’s key concerns that I   just mentioned are addressed in a unified and scalable manner.

An   important factor for customer productivity and adoption is the product user-interface. It is not of much use if a product leverages these advanced techniques but makes the user interface complicated -- you end up with the same result as before. So we’ve designed a UI that’s very easy to use, requires one or two clicks to get the    information you need; a UI-driven ability to compose rich events and   event patterns. Our customers find this very valuable, as they do not   need super-specialized skills to work with our product.

Key metrics

What we've built is a platform that monitors data center performance,    security, and configurations. The three key interconnected metrics in    virtualized cloud environments. Most of our customers really want that    combined and integrated platform. Some of them might choose to start    with addressing security, but they soon bring in the performance    management aspects into it also. And vice versa.

And we take a holistic cross-domain perspective -- we span server, storage, network, virtualization and applications. What   we've really built is a common consistent platform that addresses these problems of performance, security, and configurations, in a holistic manner and that’s the main thing that our customers buy from us today.

Free trial download

Most of our customers start off with the free trial download. It’s a very simple process. Visit www.accelops.com/download and download a virtual appliance trial that you can install in your data center within your firewall very quickly and easily.

Getting    started with the AccelOps product is pretty simple. You fire up the    product and enter the credentials needed to access the devices to be    monitored. We do most of it agentlessly, and so you just enter the    credentials, the range that you want to discover and monitor, and that’s    it. You get started that way and you hit Go.
We do most of it agentlessly, and so you just enter the   credentials,   the range that you want to discover and monitor, and that’s   it.

The product then   uses this information to determine what’s in the environment. It   automatically establishes relationships between them, automatically   applies the rules and policies that come out of the box with the   product, and some basic thresholds that are already in the product that   you can actually start measuring the results. Within a few hours of   getting started, you'll have measurable results and trends and graphs   and charts to look at and gain benefits from it.

Gardner: It   seems that as we move toward cloud and mobile that at some point or   another organizations will hit the wall and look for this automation   alternative.

Kumar: It’s about automation and distributed   analytics and about getting very specific with the information that you   have, so that you can make absolutely more predictable, 99.9 percent   correct of decisions and do that in an automated manner. The only way   you can do that is if you have a platform that’s rich enough and   scalable and that allows you to then reach that ultimate goal of   automating most of the management of these diverse and disparate   environments.

That’s something that's sorely lacking in products   today. As you said, it's all brute-force today. What we have built is a   very elegant, easy-to-use way of managing your IT problems, whether it’s from a security standpoint, performance management standpoint, or   configuration standpoint, in a single integrated platform. That's   extremely appealing for our customers, both enterprise and cloud-service    providers.

I also want to take this opportunity to encourage those of your listening or reading this podcast to come meet our team at the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference, Dec. 5-9, at Booth 49 and learn more. AccelOps is a silver sponsor of the conference.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: AccelOps. Connect with AccelOps: Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, RSS.

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Register now to hear HP experts on latest support strategies for unique challenges of virtualized and cloud environments

2011-11-28T18:23:34Z

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support    and remediation. Keeping virtualized servers that support mission-critical applications and databases     at top levels of performance 24 x 7 is a much   different problem than    for maintaining physical servers in traditional configurations.

That's why HP has made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware implementations a top priority. And while the technology to support and fix these     virtualized environments is essential, the people, skills and knowledge    to manage these systems are perhaps the most decisive elements of    ongoing performance success.

Live discussion

To find out more, I'll be moderating a live deep-dive discussion on Dec. 7,      with a group of HP experts to explore how to make the most of the      available people, technology and processes to provide an insurance      policy against systems failure. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The stakes have never been higher for keeping applications and business up and running.

Register now as seats are limited for this free HP Expert Chat.

In this discussion, you'll hear latest recommendations for how IT support should be done -- even amid a rapidly changing IT landscape of virtualized, hybrid and cloud computin g. First in the hour-long multi-media presentation, comes the inside story of how modern service and support works from one of HP's top services experts, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products, who has 27-plus years experience with HP, and eight-plus years supporting VMware.

After Cindy's chat, viewers will be invited to participate in the interactive question-and-answer session with actual HP VMware experts. Moreover, both questions and answers will be automatically translated into 13 major languages to demonstrate how service and support services know no boundaries, time zones or language barriers.

Register now as seats are limited for this free HP Expert Chat.

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