Today, vSphere continues to rule the roost when it comes to virtualization. However, upstarts such as Hyper-V 3 have the potential to disrupt this space and, in some instances, give organizations a reason to move to a multi-hypervisor model. In fact, many of today’s most powerful virtualization monitoring solutions, including SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, provide deep support for both vSphere and Hyper-V, from the host level right down to the spindle. These tools provide administrators with critical at-a-glance metrics necessary to maintain expected levels of performance in the IT environment. These tools also often provide capacity planning projections that can assist decision-makers in planning the long-term needs of the environment. Of course, such tools continue to provide administrators with fault monitoring so that quick action can be taken to restore a service if it goes down.
For many organizations, the ability to take a multihypervisor approach to monitoring is extremely important and provides one step in potentially abstracting the hypervisor choice a bit and enabling more selection in that space. However, many organizations are also adding cloud-based services to their IT portfolio. These services will not operate in the traditional virtualized sense and, because they’re running in someone else’s data center, there may be completely different sets of management metrics that come with such services. Or, at the very least, an administrator’s reaction to management metrics may be different in a clod environment.
With CIOs considering the cloud for different kinds of workloads, monitoring needs may change, depending on where and how those workloads are operated. In a pure hosting (non cloud) environment, traditional monitoring might make the most sense as these kinds of workloads are still just traditional physical or virtual servers running in someone else’s data center. Even though someone else may manage the workload, the customer may want deep performance metrics to ensure workload performance and to be able to hold a provider accountable to Service Level Agreement terms.
In the cloud, capacity metrics may not have as much meaning since scalability becomes less of an issue, but ongoing performance metrics are still important items to consider. In addition, availability metrics remain important, regardless of where a workload is running.
In your opinion, as workloads shift to the cloud, what items do IT departments need to closely monitor and what tools should they use to accomplish their monitoring goals?
