Managing the ever increasing number of virtualized systems
Our firm is deeply involved in researching technologies that compliment the specialized needs of our very unique customers. The goal is always to push the envelope to achieve gains in computing performance that allows our customer’s to execute their information centric missions any where in the world they choose with increasing speed and agility.
At present we are pushing the use of virtualization technologies further in support of our clients’ need for rapid reaction capabilities in the servers deployed worldwide. Our clients typically have hundreds of servers with custom applications located throughout geographies in support information needs at home and abroad. Managing this cadre of distributed virtualized computing power in a cost effective manner continues to be the challenge for which we are in constant search of solutions that enhance our clients’ abilities to remotely manage, patch, reconfigure, shutdown and restart at will any remotely deployed system. But what about the health and status? We have to be able to determine what is running, what is struggling to run and the root cause of any issue that impedes reliability and performance of our clients’ systems. A total or partial outage in any part of the world means that vital business functions and global information needed for decision support is interrupted.
Currently we are deep in the study of commercial off the shelf applications that may provide our clients the ability to better manage their broadly deployed virtualized computing resources regardless of location to reduce the number of resources and the cost needed to address issues with remotely distributed systems. Our clients’ heavy use of VmWare continues to expand across their enterprises and our VmWare trained and Virtualization System Engineers continue to develop proof of concepts and test products that may hold the promise of a solution with the need to manage systems remotely in a cost effective manner. Some of our clients have developed specialized applications that meet their needs in part but yet are lacking the full server management capabilities they are seeking.
Some of the challenges our customers face include the following:
- Updating BIOS and firmware from either a local share or from a repository
- Incremental updates that intersect with the timing of server reboots
- Replicating server configuration templates
- Ensuring Systems Engineering baseline technology standards.
- Streamlining of server deployments regardless of the number of servers involved
- Accessing the detail deployed servers for inventory, monitoring and alerting
- Integrating remote support and diagnostic operations
- Controlling configuration compliance by being able to detect and compare changes to policies
The list above just scratches the surface of what our clients are asking us to be able to achieve in a cost effective manner with their deployed systems. In response we have been researching and evaluating the trends in solutions that meet the individual needs of our clients. vCenter Configuration Manager from VMware is one solution that offers many of the capabilities when integrated with the unique software features of servers such as those from Dell. vCenter Configuration Manager allows you to perform physical and virtual system provisioning via a centralized mechanism. You can deploy vSphere to ‘bare metal’ and then load operating systems into VM containers or to ‘bare metal’ systems. Configuration Manager also automates software provisioning and ties that into the compliance enforcement process. With Configuration Manager, you can easily create software packages, push packages to systems and guests, automatically find missing software (e.g., anti-virus), and remediate to install required software to non-compliant systems.
Another RTGX partner solution for meeting the challenge is the suite of CA Virtual and Physical Management solution such as:
- CA Automation Suite for Data Centers
- CA Process Automation
- CA ARCserve Backup
- CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager
Quest Software, Citrix, IBM and Microsoft are just some of the other vendors offering multiple solutions designed to enhance the ability to deploy and manage virtualized resources. Even RTGX has jumped into market with our own specialized point utilities for virtualization and virtualized application management. Our solutions are gap fillers that meet our customers specialized needs not met by commercial solutions. Our specialized utilities are designed to compliment but not replace more robust enterprise solutions. We integrate with various solution frameworks to meet the IT mission needs of our customers.