{"id":9159,"date":"2008-08-13T10:26:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9159"},"modified":"2008-08-13T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"introducing-scvmm-2008-performance-resource-optimization-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9159","title":{"rendered":"Introducing SCVMM 2008 Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why do I prefer Hyper-V, a version 1.0 hypervisor, over the more mature VMware ESX?\u00a0 It’s quite simple; management.\u00a0 This is where the "religious" VMware nutters scream about Virtual Center and ESXi web consoles – hold on to your hats, girls, this ones gonna be a bone shaker!<\/em><\/p>\n

I am a "laxy admin".\u00a0 I do not like to be poking and prodding in machines and consoles on a constant basis to do repetitive work.\u00a0 There’s better things that I can be doing such as actual engineering projects or working on the business side of things.\u00a0 I also like to know when something has gone wrong, either before it happens or before the customer calls us up.\u00a0 The traditional solution seems to be to have lots of management consoles all over the place.\u00a0 Honestly, that doesn’t work.\u00a0 Once server and application crawl takes over, there’s too much fire fighting involved in working with lots of management solutions.<\/p>\n

Here’s why I like HP (Dell play nice too AFAIK) and Hyper-V.\u00a0 The fit in nicely with the concept of Optimised Infrastructure by being very manageable, more than their competition.\u00a0 The idea is that you design your network, servers and applications so that they are easy to manage.\u00a0 This means using integration and automation so there is less manual work to be done, the service is fault tolerant and reliable, you can focus on developing\/enabling the business and the service that IT provides can be counted on.\u00a0 We also reduce our operating costs.\u00a0 Understanding these concepts and being able to use them is the difference between employing 15 IT staff and 77 IT staff (based on a real-world example).<\/p>\n

So back on point … what’s all this got to do with Hyper-V?\u00a0 MS’s System Center family of products are an integrated set of management tools to designed to build that automation and expertise into your network.\u00a0 Yes, in the past they were MS centric but partners did expand them to include 3rd party solutions, e.g. *NIX and Cisco.\u00a0 Now, MS is even doing this themselves.\u00a0 One of the core products they sell is OpsMgr 2007, the monitoring solution.\u00a0 Using an OpsMgr agent with management packs, I have expertise on different products that knows what to monitor, what is acceptable, what faults to watch for, best practices, etc.\u00a0 I can even extend this or tweak it with exceptions.\u00a0 This allows me to sit back and know that someone … or something … is watching my hardware, OS and applications.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Here’s the fun bit.\u00a0 There’s soon going to be a management pack for Hyper-V.\u00a0 That means we get in-depth expertise for monitoring the health and performance of the virtualisation platform using the same single pane of glass that I use to monitor everything else.<\/p>\n

So those VMware marketing types who try to sell ESXi off as being equal to Hyper-V, answer me this?\u00a0 Where do I install an agent on a machine with no OS?\u00a0 I’ve heard that I can monitor the hardware using cards in the server; what good is that for monitoring the hypervisor?\u00a0 You answer me that the hypervisor has a web console.\u00a0 Fantastic!\u00a0 Do I really want to log into lots of little web consoles?\u00a0 Ah … Virtual Center … so now I need to use it and my console that manages everything else?\u00a0 Virtualisation is meant to be good for a lazy admin like me … you know .. less work, put my feet up, more time for playing games, etc.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Microsoft’s answer to Virtual Center is Virtual Machine Manager 2008 which is being launched on September 8th.\u00a0 VMM 2008 gives us management over the VM’s on our Hyper-V servers or cluster.\u00a0 It includes the ability to audit physical machines to see if they’re candidates for virtualisation (don’t even have to pay for that agent license!) and a P2V conversion tool.\u00a0 VMM 2008 integrates with OpsMgr 2007 SP1 via PRO or Performance and Resource Optimization<\/a>.\u00a0 You can read much more about that here<\/a>.\u00a0 The idea is simple.\u00a0 OpsMgr monitors performance\/health and understands the relationship between VM’s and hosts.\u00a0 VMM 2008 manages VM creation and placement.\u00a0 PRO links the two to share that knowledge and act on it.\u00a0 What’s really cool is that we’re getting cradle-grave management of hosts and VM’s.\u00a0 But not only at the hypervisor, but all the way through the "stack" from the hardware, the host virtualisation, the VM and the VM’s OS and applications.<\/p>\n

That means I have a single integrated management solution for my entire network.\u00a0 I’m a big believer in infrastructure optimisation.\u00a0 I’ve witnessed it working and making my life easier.\u00a0 I’ve also witnessed the opposite where there was no management despite there being lots of junkware being installed to "manage" points of the infrastructure.\u00a0 Automation, expertise and integration are the keys to success.\u00a0 For me, that’s why I like HP servers\/storage and Hyper-V because they can be easily managed using Microsoft System Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why do I prefer Hyper-V, a version 1.0 hypervisor, over the more mature VMware ESX?\u00a0 It’s quite simple; management.\u00a0 This is where the "religious" VMware nutters scream about Virtual Center and ESXi web consoles – hold on to your hats, girls, this ones gonna be a bone shaker! I am a "laxy admin".\u00a0 I do … Continue reading “Introducing SCVMM 2008 Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}