Managing Virtual Worlds

With everything in life, there’s a yin and a yang, and the same goes for the cloud. The cloud increases an organization’s IT flexibility and muscle, yet this virtual environment also creates new management challenges.

ViCeMonitor Pro, CSC’s management suite for virtual- and virtualization-based cloud computing environments, monitors and analyzes more than 5,000 host servers and 75,000 virtual machines daily for more than 150 accounts that span industries, countries and the public and private sectors.

Erik Franz, a CSC senior systems engineer in Bad Homburg, Germany, decided to create ViCeMonitor when he was working on a client virtualization project. The project was almost complete, but the team needed a management tool. A free tool wasn’t an option, since the ones that were available lacked the functionality the team needed, says Franz.

At the same time, licenses for commercial tools, even if they offer all the capabilities needed, are pricey, especially for large environments. One large CSC client, for example, would have to spend more than $55,000 for an external tool that has only some of ViCeMonitor’s features. To date, CSC estimates that ViCeMonitor already has saved the company more than $4 million due to reduced time-management and licensing costs.

Building a tool for the cloud

Franz spent 2,000 hours developing the first version of ViCeMonitor. “I’ve been writing software my whole life, and I thought, ‘Why not write our own tool?’” he says. “I then gave it to my direct colleagues, who gave me new ideas that would save even more time and money. Those colleagues then gave the tool to other CSC engineers they knew, who, in turn, passed it on, and so on. Almost everyone sent me feedback and ideas, most of which is now reflected in our toolset.”

Even though clients are turning to virtual environments to save hardware resources, they also first thought they would be able to reduce their administrative tasks. However, they found instead that management overhead was higher than anticipated because of required increases in monitoring and reporting.

For example, when the U.S. Army’s Tactical Battle Command transitioned from a physical to a virtual server infrastructure and fielded virtual enterprise systems to the service’s combat and combat-support units, they faced unique challenges monitoring their new virtualized environment. Without a monitoring tool, they found they were unaware of potential problems that translated to critical data loss and system outages during training exercises.

Since then, several Army units have incorporated ViCeMonitor into their common operating picture ‘big board’ for proactive monitoring of their tactical virtualized environments. “The ability to consolidate monitoring and reporting capabilities has greatly improved digital situational awareness, responsiveness and availability of services,” says Damon Godinet, CSC field software representative. “Soldiers have taken to ViCeMonitor for its ease of installation and straightforward navigation.” Today, the Army uses ViCeMonitor at about 16 different unit sites at field garrison and combat locations worldwide.

In a cloud environment, VirtualCenter (ViCe) servers hold configuration, health and performance information about an organization’s system, and counters keep track of that information. “This new additional software layer of virtualization technology — this hypervisor [or virtual machine manager] — must be monitored very closely for activities such as troubleshooting and baseline management,” says Franz.

Trying to monitor these hypervisors and counters manually to see what’s happening system-wide before that information becomes historical is nearly impossible, even for the smallest of systems. Dedicating staff to reporting and capacity planning activities can also be costly and time consuming.

Speedy check-ups

Performing an in-depth health check, for example, of a large environment containing more than 200 servers and 2,000 virtual machines, would take hours. In comparison, ViCeMonitor can perform such a check in a few seconds. The suite also enables engineers to rapidly fill unexpected customer requests.

“ViCeMonitor is based on real-world needs,” Franz says. “This is the greatest advantage over any expensive third-party tool — not only is ours less costly, but other tools lack the quirks we need so often to do our job right. It’s a tool from CSC engineers for CSC engineers, and it has our combined knowledge and expertise.”

The software suite tracks status information and performance counters automatically, processes the necessary data and then intelligently combines it. Through an intuitive, single interface, managers can quickly monitor, analyze, troubleshoot and report on their virtual environments, regardless of their size.

“ViCeMonitor targets a relatively new and highly specialized area of services to gain visibility and control over dynamic virtual environments, improve uptime, resource optimization and performance, and mitigate management risks,” says CSC operations manager Oliver Giebel. “It is the perfect addition to CSC’s cloud capabilities.”