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TECHNICAL BRIEF

The Easy Way to Ensure Uptime for Your Critical Applications and Dependent Infrastructure

Written by

Ben ScheererQuest Server Virtualization Group

Quest Software Inc.

How to Virtualize with Confidence

How to Virtualize With Confidence 2

Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................... 3

How to Virtualize With Confidence ................................................................................................................................. 4

Challenges of Virtualizing Critical Infrastructure ......................................................................................................... 4

Visibility for Accurately and Quickly Resolving Performance Issues………………………………………………..…….5

From Detection to Diagnosis and Resolution……………………………………………………………………………..….9

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...10

About the Author…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 11


Introduction Many organizations are successfully virtualizing and consolidating the “low-hanging fruit” such as file/print servers,

non-critical applications and the like. As virtualized workloads continue their upward trend, the next steps are almost

quantum leaps. The leaps are commonly made into both critical infrastructure (e.g., Microsoft Active Directory) and

tier 1 packaged applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange).

What makes these leaps? Primarily it’s because so many organizations are ill-prepared or poorly equipped with the

tools and/or processes to manage availability and uptime deep into the layers of critical application infrastructure.

Problems worsen when organizations must deal with the complexity of mixed physical/virtual implementations in

which only partial components are virtualized, while others still reside on physical servers.

As you continue to virtualize more and more of this critical infrastructure, you want to be 100 percent sure you can

deliver the performance and uptime your stakeholders expect. The key to gaining confidence is proper monitoring

and management of your entire environment -- and that means reducing risk and increasing efficiency. In this

technical brief, we’ll discuss the challenges you’ll face in doing so. You’ll also learn what you need to overcome the

challenges, and how one powerful solution provides the most extensive set of capabilities on the market, yet is easy

to use. You will learn to worry less and less about keeping your users happy and maintaining availability.


How to Virtualize With Confidence

Challenges of Virtualizing Critical Infrastructure

When organizations virtualize critical infrastructure components, such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD), they face

new and unique challenges. Typically, administration of AD proves more difficult than expected because of the

difficulties of identifying and understanding the demands of replication, performance and availability. These difficulties

are compounded when AD resides in a mixed physical/virtual environment. That’s because administrators must

pinpoint precisely where problems reside—are they in the underlying infrastructure (physical or virtual), or within

virtualization technology itself? The search for answers compels administrators to address the following:

Understanding the AD component relationships between forests, domains, sites and other infrastructure in

mixed physical/virtual environments

Detecting, diagnosing and resolving performance and availability issues affecting AD and underlying

infrastructure

Communicating state- and service-quality information to stakeholders

The same difficulties surface when virtualizing into tier 1 applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange). With Exchange,

administrators must manage across both physical and virtual boundaries, as well as accurately identify and

understand the causes of performance and availability issues. Exchange also poses unique difficulties in exposing

state and health information in relation to virtual environments.

Current management tools may fall short in supporting needs such as:

Understanding the relationships and interactions between Exchange application components (roles, servers

and sites) plus supporting infrastructure

Detecting, diagnosing and resolving performance and availability problems specific to the Exchange

application environment

Communicating state- and service-quality information to stakeholders efficiently and thoroughly


Visibility for Accurately and Quickly Resolving Performance Issues The inherent risk in virtualizing critical tier 1 applications and infrastructure lies in both ensuring and communicating

the vital state and heath information of the virtual and physical infrastructures. To do so, organizations must adopt a

solution that is not only virtual-aware, but also virtual-exploitive. This solution should deliver capabilities for

diagnosing, detecting and resolving issues in the virtual and physical infrastructures side-by-side

Furthermore, accurate diagnosis must allow a drill-down into the root cause of issues in the infrastructure. For

example, if the Exchange e-mail service is experiencing delays related to a memory problem, the best approach

would be: first, to identify the locations of the components where problems exist (in both virtual or physical

environments); then, if the problem is in the virtual infrastructure, administrators must be able to drill down to find it

quickly, as well as obtain details about the alerts and visual presentation of the situation (for example, high CPU-

ready values on the VMware ESX server). Finally, administrators must be able to access either guidance on how to

resolve the problem, or launch an in-context automated workflow to correct it. Figure 1 shows ideal visibility of the

virtualized Exchange Server (virtualized state indicated by the blue tag in lower left corner of server icon), as well as a

quick view of the health of the supporting four core resources and the common monitoring components:

CPU

Memory

Network

Storage

Exchange Domain Controller Connectivity

Figure 1 also shows a dashboard that provides extensive visibility into resources highlighted by spinners,

send/receive and read/write motion indicators that change color on overall consumption or deviation from normal

values. This allows administrators to quickly detect, diagnose and resolve problems.


Figure 1: vFoglight provides extensive visibility into the virtualized state and health of Exchange

Visibility must not only extend deeply into the AD and Exchange virtual and physical layers, but it must also be able to

reveal the information required for successfully managing the environment across the virtualized layer and within the

critical application infrastructure. For AD, visibility and analysis of key components—including forests, domains, sites

and domain controllers—must encompass both broad and granular data. With Exchange, key components to monitor

include roles, servers and sites. Figure 2 presents a “perspectives” view that includes data on critical components of

AD and Exchange in both VMware and Windows environments.


Figure 2: This “perspectives” view provides insight of AD and Exchange components in both physical and virtual

environments.

With the data provided in Figure 2, administrators can get a quick assessment of the current state of the

environments. They can conduct further investigations into issues using color-coded symbols, which lead them to

problem areas. By clicking the “Explore” button, they can drill down to details. Figure 3 shows an example of a drill-

down into the data for two virtual servers hosting domain controllers in a caution state.


Figure 3: Presentation of detailed data on health of AD and its associated components after administrators drill down

through the interface.

From Detection to Diagnosis and Resolution Visual cues, along with essential alerts and reports, provide a clear understanding of the health of both virtual and

physical environments. These capabilities guide administrators to accurately diagnose problems and fix them quickly.

This level of management must provide:

Visibility through logical and architectural representations of the AD and Exchange state and relationships,

including associations to the physical and virtual infrastructure

Out-of-the-box alerts, with expert advice, to help administrators reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for

incidents and problems affecting AD and Exchange performance and availability

Service-level performance and availability reports to show how AD and Exchange infrastructure is

supporting the business

An effective solution must help administrators accurately identify the root cause of issues and resolve them quickly.

Moreover, the solution must provide views that show data about the critical infrastructure and applications from the

operating system to the hypervisor (if applicable).


Conclusion Success in server virtualization depends on innovative performance-management technologies and practices.

Examining the virtualization layer in depth with a solution specifically designed for managing virtualized environments

from the ground up is essential.

When virtualizing AD and Exchange environments, the solution must be built to manage and monitor performance

across the multiple, diverse components in both physical and virtual environments. The ability to detect, diagnose and

resolve issues related to their interdependent components is also necessary.

Quest® vFoglight®, along with the Foglight® for Active Directory and Foglight® for Exchange cartridges provide the

capabilities for managing the entire infrastructure with greater efficiency and less risk. They allow administrators to

detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting AD and Exchange -- as well as related components -- for both virtual

and physical environments. With vFoglight, administrators can visualize the AD and Exchange state and relationships

through logical and architectural representations. They can also use out-of-the-box alerts and built-in, expert advice

to maintain performance and availability. Service level agreement reports show how effective management of the

environment supports the business.


About the Author Ben manages product marketing for the Quest vFoglight virtualization monitoring solutions. His 18 years of industry

experience includes CA, Inc. and Vizioncore (which Quest acquired). Ben has served in a variety of roles, including

software sales and as consultant for product and solutions marketing. He speaks frequently at industry events and

has published a host of articles and white papers on IT management topics. Ben holds a master’s degree in

computer information systems from the University of Denver as well as a bachelor’s degree in marketing from

Western Michigan University. He is ITIL® V3 Foundation-certified.


© 2010 Quest Software, Inc.

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TECHNICAL BRIEF

About Quest Software, Inc.

Quest simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers

worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems

easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud

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Quest, Quest Software, the Quest Software logo are registered trademarks of Quest Software, Inc. in the U.S.A. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. TBD-VirtWithConfidence-US-EH20101109

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