The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments – Join the Webinar

We would like to invite you to the upcoming live webinar “The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments (Desktop | Applications | Cloud)“ with virtualization expert Dave Bartoletti (Forrester Research) on May 29 @ 2:00 pm ET | 1:00 pm CT | 11 am PT (Register now).

Whether you virtualize desktops or critical business applications, the dynamics and complexities of virtualized environments can cause significant performance and user experience issues that can diminish the benefits of virtualization and risk interruption of critical business processes. The toughest performance problems are the ones where users call and complain that “my application is slow”. IT administrators often struggle to determine the root-cause of the problem and restore service levels: Is it the application server? The virtualization layer? Is it the network? Database? Storage …?

Join our live webinar with virtualization experts Dave Bartoletti (Forrester Research) and Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations), and find out how to deliver:

• Reliable performance assurance and user satisfaction
• Complete performance visibility across your virtualized environment
• Automatic, rapid root cause diagnosis for even the most complex performance problems
• Pre-emptive problem detection and alerting before users call
• Rapid ROI through right-sizing and optimization

WEBINAR DETAILS

Webinar title: “The 7 Secrets to Performance Management of Virtualized Environments (Desktop | Applications | Cloud)”
Date & Time: May 29 @ 2:00 pm ET | 1:00 pm CT | 11 am PT | 7:00 pm UK
Presenters: Dave Bartoletti (Senior Analyst, Forrester Research) | Srinivas Ramanathan (CEO, eG Innovations)
Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/972927160

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

Citrix XenServer Success – Join Our Webinar and Achieve Peak Performance for Citrix XenServer Environments

We would like to invite you to the webinar “Citrix XenServer Success – Assuring Peak Performance of Critical Business Applications Virtualized on Citrix XenServer” on May 2 @ 11 am ET / 4 pm UK. Join Citrix and eG Innovations and learn how achieve the highest levels of performance, user satisfaction, and hardware utilization for applications and desktops running in a XenServer environment. Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/399137104

This webinar will show you how to virtualize applications on XenServer in complex IT environments and how to assure the environment performs flawlessly and in concert with the rest of the IT infrastructure.

• Pitfalls to avoid and best practices to leverage when virtualizing applications and desktops
• Achieve performance assurance on XenServer
• The value of end-to-end IT visibility and how to address how different hosts react
• How to preemptively pinpoint and resolve issues before users are effected
• Optimize current infrastructure utilization

WEBINAR DETAILS

Date: May 2, 2013
Time: 11:00 AM ET | 12:00 PM CT | 2:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM UK
Presenters: Mike Bursell, Senior Product Manager, Citrix XenServer  |  Bala Murugan Vaidhinathan, Chief Technology Officer, eG Innovations

Register Now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/399137104

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

eG Innovations Voted VirtualizationAdmin.com Reader’s Choice Award First Runner Up

The leading Virtualization resource site, VirtualizationAdmin.com selected eG Innovations first runner-up in the Monitoring, Management and Performance category of the VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Awards.

“Our Readers’ Choice Awards give visitors to our site the opportunity to vote for the products they view as the very best in their respective category,” said Sean Buttigieg, VirtualizationAdmin.com manager. “VirtualizationAdmin.com users are specialists in their field who encounter various solutions for virtualization at the workplace. The award serves as a mark of excellence, providing the ultimate recognition from peers within the industry.”

VirtualizationAdmin.com conducts bi-monthly polls to discover which product is preferred by administrators in a particular category of third party solutions for virtualization environments. The awards draw a huge response per category and are based entirely on the visitors’ votes.

4 Killer Techniques to Ensure Great UX When Virtualizing Apps, Desktops

If the idea of extending the benefits of virtualization to business critical applications is intimidating and if the thought of poor user experience (UX) and cost overruns is overwhelming, you are not alone. IT environments are changing dramatically and becoming too complex and dynamic for traditional, manual and fragmented management approaches. Whether companies are extending the benefits of virtualization to the next level of business critical applications, virtualizing the desktop layer, adopting multiple virtualization platforms or extending their cloud exposure – no one has tolerance for poor user experience issues and cost overruns.

Some considerations:

1. Take the User Perspective – As more and mission-critical business applications such as SAP are virtualized, more complexity and dynamic dependencies are introduced in the infrastructure required to deliver the service to end users. With this rise in complexity, there are more opportunities for things to go wrong. This makes it even more important that IT administrators focus on understanding the user experience and monitor performance pre-emptively in order to maintain and improve the availability, reliability and performance of mission-critical application environments.
2. Assess Performance as Virtual Desktops Go Mainstream – VDI and virtual desktop adoption continues to accelerate and broaden from pilot to full scale deployments. This increases the likelihood that support teams are bombarded with users calling with “my desktop is slow” issues. Almost half of all VDI projects still fail due to end user experience issues or cost overruns. As projects go full scale, assessing virtual desktop performance in production deployments will become a key concern as companies seek to maintain high end-user satisfaction and high return on their IT investments. Look for performance management platforms that provide deep visibility into the entire VDI service infrastructure, from the desktop and user session to the application and virtualization layer, and across all infrastructure domains that impact user experience.
3. Proactively Manage Cross-domain Dependencies and Complexity – Companies are increasingly taking advantage of multiple virtualization platforms to match the right platform to the specific requirement. VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization increase efficiency, enhance flexibility, and reduce hardware cost – but they also add cross-domain dependencies and complexity that needs to be pro-actively managed. This complexity requires a new set of technologies that go beyond traditional silo and vendor centric tools and provide deeper visibility into the virtualization layer, into VMs – from the user session and virtual application to the underlying hardware.
4. Plan the Management of Cloud-based Business Services – Cloud computing in different forms – public, private or hybrid – continues a fast-paced adoption rate as enterprises look to leverage it for improving the agility, scalability, redundancy and costs savings of their business operations. While cloud computing offers enterprises several benefits, it also throws up a number of new challenges when it comes to management of the performance of business services delivered from the cloud. For cloud computing to be successful, it is paramount that users of cloud-based services get the same experience as they would if these services were hosted in their corporate network. Poor user experience can threaten the success and ROI of cloud initiatives. Hence, it is essential that enterprises adopting cloud computing plan how they can manage the performance of cloud-based business services.

When performance issues occur with cloud or on-premise services, it’s often difficult to pinpoint the root cause with traditional tools. A new, holistic approach is needed to ensure uninterrupted visibility across every tier and every layer of the entire cloud ecosystem and to address the needs of different stakeholders – from cloud consumers to service providers of private, public and hybrid clouds.

Traditional performance management tools are not keeping pace with the rapid rate of change in virtualized IT environments – they are too silo driven, lack integration and do not quickly and precisely pinpoint the exact cause of performance challenges. IT managers need intelligent performance management solutions that deliver complete transparency and can troubleshoot the exact source of a problem in minutes rather than hours – ideally before the problem manifests itself to the user.

Article originally featured on WIRED: http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/four-killer-techniques-to-ensure-great-user-experience-when#ixzz2PDWrEqJP

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 3

[Read part 1]  |  [Read part 2]

Here is the final post of our 3-part series about virtual desktop performance:

Best Practices for VDI Success
Based on the earlier discussion, we can conclude that for VDI success, you need to:

• Build performance assurance early into the VDI life cycle. For successful deployments, focus on the virtual desktop infrastructure, not just the virtual desktop. Build performance assurance early in the deployment life cycle in order to avoid costly issues and re-mediation downstream, and to mitigate the risk of VDI failure during deployment. It is imperative that IT considers inter-desktop dependencies from the very beginning. When deploying VDI on a large scale, avoid slow, manual ad-hoc processes not only for the deployment but also for performance assurance. Automation is a key to being able to be alerted to problems in advance, well before users notice and complain.
• 360-degree visibility is key. Today, service delivery is more demanding than ever. Companies require 360-degree VDI service visibility of every layer, every tier of the infrastructure ‒ from desktops to applications and from network to storage. The virtual desktop where user applications run is often a blindspot and VDI service managers require the ability to look inside the virtual desktop to understand user activity and the performance they are seeing. It is critical to be able to get this level of visibility without needing to install agents on each and every desktop.

Often, different tools are used for monitoring each of the VDI tiers. This leaves a lot of room for finger-pointing between domain administrators. Having the ability to monitor all the different tiers from a single unified console and being able to analyze the performance of these tiers from a single console, across a common time window, is a key to effective management of the virtual desktop infrastructure.

• Manage VDI as a service, not as many silos. Administrators need deep insights into the causes of VDI service performance issues in order to detect and fix root-cause problems. It’s no longer useful to monitor individual silos because of the complexity of today’s infrastructures. There are just too many opportunities for problems. Also, bear in mind that VDI service managers are not likely to be experts in each of the technologies used in the infrastructure. Therefore, it’s essential that they have access to management solutions that can intelligently analyze and correlate between problems at different tiers and help them quickly pinpoint where the root-cause of problems lie. Since the virtualization platform is an integral part of the infrastructure, the management solution must be virtualization-aware, i.e., it must be capable of monitoring the virtualization platform, but it must also be intelligent enough to understand the inter-dependencies between the virtualization platform and the applications and desktops that it hosts.

Conclusion
By proactively alerting administrators to problems and providing accurate root-cause diagnosis, a performance assurance solution ensures that the performance of a virtual desktop is comparable to that of a physical desktop. By providing deep insights into the performance of each VDI tier and identifying areas for optimization, a performance assurance solution can ensure that the infrastructure is right-sized and thereby generates the best return on investment. For these reasons, enterprises deploying virtual desktop infrastructures must consider performance assurance early on in the VDI life cycle. Historical analysis has indicated that these deployments have had the best chance of virtual desktop deployment success.

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 2

[Read part 1]

Let’s continue our 3-part series about virtual desktop performance:

Multi-tier architecture makes VDI challenging
From a user’s perspective, VDI is a very simple service – the user logs in with their domain account and can access applications on their desktop. From an administration perspective, VDI is a lot tougher to manage than it appears to be for a user. The reason for this is there are many, many tiers of software and hardware that have to work together to support the service. A user logging in connects to a connection broker first. The broker authenticates the user using Active Directory. Once the user is authenticated, the broker communicates with a virtualization platform (vSphere, XenServer, Hyper-V, etc.) and provisions a virtual desktop. The desktop OS may be streamed from a provisioning server, and the storage for the desktop is hosted on a SAN. For VDI to work, every tier of this infrastructure should work. If not, users will experience slowness and complain about performance.

The Role of Performance Assurance
In most VDI projects, performance assurance is not looked at upfront. The focus initially is on the VDI technology – Which broker to use? What protocols to use? What thin clients to use? Once the VDI deployment is underway and users start complaining about slowness, that is when performance monitoring, reporting and root-cause diagnosis get attention. The questions then are: Where is the bottleneck? Is it due to capacity? Or due to one user or application hogging resources? Or could it be that the workload has changed?

Many times there are no benchmarks of normal usage across the infrastructure. Hence, it’s impossible to tell whether the workload has changed or is different from what was expected when the infrastructure was first planned. Making problem diagnosis harder is the fact that different tiers of the infrastructure are managed by different teams and each of these teams may be using a different toolset to monitor the infrastructure. Coordinating across the domain experts to determine the exact cause of slowness can be a time-consuming and expensive exercise. After the problem is finally isolated, it may be too difficult to fix an issue (because the VDI architecture is already in place) or the remedial action may entail significant changes to the existing architecture, making the problem resolution process lengthy and expensive.

Effective performance management doesn’t just help with the diagnosis of problems. It can also help you optimize your infrastructure, so you can get more out of your infrastructure investments. For instance, you may find out that a few of your servers are handling most of your users, while other servers are idling. By detecting such imbalances in load distribution, you may be able to identify changes that can make your infrastructure function more effectively.
Understanding the performance requirements of your users can also help you plan the virtual desktop infrastructure more efficiently. For example, if you know which users run applications that are CPU intensive and which ones run applications that are memory intensive, you can distribute your workload in such a way that a server has a good mix of CPU intensive and memory intensive users, so that the server’s resources are best utilized. On the other hand, your user density (number of users per server) would be a lot less if you had all your CPU intensive users on the same server.

[Read part 3]

Virtual Desktop Success ‒ The Role of Performance Assurance in VDI Deployments – Part 1

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been a hot topic for years – and every year one expert or another makes a claim that this will be the year of VDI. Finally, 2013 may be the year that VDI goes mainstream. We’re seeing the cost of VDI implementation come down to being roughly comparable to the cost of managing PC endpoints. Many organizations are starting to move from pilot to production. While the pilots worked fine, many organizations are finding that VDI projects fail in the rollout phase due to performance and poor user experience issues. One of the key reasons for this is that the pilot phase is often over-provisioned and less complex.

Don’t miss the infrastructure demands by focusing too much on the desktop
Very often, when an enterprise begins the virtual desktop journey, the focus is on the user desktop. This is only natural; after all, it is the desktop that is moving ‒ from being on a physical system to a virtual machine. Therefore, once a decision to try VDI is made, the primary focus is often to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model usage, predict the virtualized user experience and, based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can’t.

With VDI, the virtual desktops no longer have dedicated resources. The virtual desktops share the CPU, memory, disk and network resources of the physical machine on which they are hosted. While resource sharing provides several benefits, it also introduces new complications in the infrastructure. A single malfunctioning desktop can drain resources to the point that it impacts the performance of all the other desktops.

Resource sharing across virtual desktops also introduces other interesting artifacts. In many of the early VDI deployments, administrators found that when they just migrated physical desktops to VDI, backups or antivirus software could cause problems. These software components were scheduled to run at the same time on all the desktops. When the desktops were physical, it didn’t matter, because each desktop had dedicated hardware. With VDI, the synchronized demand for resources from all the desktops severely impacted the performance of all the virtual desktops. This was not something that was anticipated because the focus of most designs and plans was on individual desktops and not the holistic virtual desktop infrastructure.

The cost of failure with VDI is much higher than with physical desktops
In the physical world if a desktop failed, only one user would be impacted – so the failure or slowdown was minimal. In the virtual world, a single malfunctioning desktop is much more severe, as one failure can impact hundreds of desktops. A CTO of a large multi-national organization recently mentioned this as the single biggest reason why he was averse to moving to virtual desktop technology.

[Read part 2]

eG Innovations Named to 2013 CRN Data Center 100

eG Innovations was honored by CRN as a 2013 CRN Data Center 100 company.

“The 2013 CRN Data Center 100 list is recognition and a validation of our strategy in developing performance management solutions that help our customers balance the realities of dramatic change in the data center driven by virtualization and the cloud,” said Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO eG Innovations. “Our customers are interested in being able to correlate, diagnose, predict and analyze their virtualized environments to ensure maximum performance, improve the user experience and generally improve the ROI of their IT investments.”

According to CRN, the Data Center 100 list looks at companies developing software tools for monitoring and managing data center operations. These tools are primarily software applications that help monitor data center functions. More importantly, those tools notify administrators proactively when something is not working properly so that issues can be addressed before users call the helpdesk.

Selected by CRN’s editorial staff, the 2013 Data Center 100 list was featured in the January issue of CRN Magazine and online at http://www.crn.com.

4 Ideas to Solve the Visibility Gap Between Citrix EdgeSight and VMware vCenter

Val King over at WhiteHat Virtual Technologies just wrote a great blog post about 4 Ideas to Solve the Visibility Gap Between Citrix EdgeSight & VMware vCenter - and we would like to share it with you:

With the Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 End of Life date fast approaching (March 31, 2013,) many customers are engaged in last minute projects to make the leap from Presentation Server 4.5 to XenDesktop 6.5, which now includes Presentation Server, now renamed XenApp.

Most organizations are taking this opportunity to move from physical servers to a virtualized Citrix environment. As an example, one client or ours currently scheduled to make the transition will be moving from 40 physical servers to six VMware hosts will full redundancy.

The projected savings from the electricity and hardware maintenance costs alone make this a significant win for the customer, however with virtualization comes some added complexity.

Adding Another Layer to Manage introduces a visibility gap for IT

For customers that are using Citrix EdgeSight today to manage their Citrix environments today, nothing really changes. You will still get great data on what is happening inside your Citrix environment if you have taken the time learn EdgeSight and customize the templates to make sure you are getting meaningful data in your reports.

What EdgeSight does not do is show you what is happening outside of your Citrix environment. If an end user is experiencing slow performance because a database server in your environment is misbehaving, EdgeSight will not be able to tell you that.

With the addition of a hypervisor layer, in this case VMware, you have access to VMware vCenter Operations Manager to help gauge the health of your VMware environment and see what is happening at the hypervisor layer.

vCenter provides an outside view of the Citrix XenApp servers, but is not able to offer in-depth insight into activities within each virtual machine. VM OS issues, disk partitions within a VM filling up, or a process with a large memory leak are an example.

There simply is no correlation between Citrix EdgeSight and VMware vCenter, so at best information is in separate silos, at worst some problems are invisible to both tools.

So How do you Find and Fix a Problem you Can’t See?

Customers have an expectation that Presentation Server 4.5, XenApp 6, or XenDesktop 6.5 for that matter, will perform as well if not better than a traditional desktop. Add to that the fact that 80%+ of the virtual Citrix environments we deploy are on a VMware hypervisor layer, though the visibility problems are the same for XenServer and Hyper-V, and you realize this is a problem that everyone has that cannot be ignored if we are going to deliver the end user experience that our customers are expecting.

That is the long way to go about saying this was/is a problem we had to find a solution for our business, and to help our customers address this proactively, before they eventually found themselves in this visibility hole.

There are enough challenges that pop up managing an information technology infrastructure, why purposely bake one more visibility problem into the mix?

How do you Virtualize Citrix on any Hypervisor and not Introduce a Management Visibility Gap?

This is the criteria we arrived at for our own business. We needed a management tool that would:

• Give us full visibility into each VM on a host server.
• Give us full visibility from the hypervisor layer.
• Give us full visibility inside the Citrix environment like EdgeSight
• We would LIKE to get visibility into application performance.

Ideally, the tool would provide full visibility into Active Directory, the network, SQL/Oracle databases, and the SAN infrastructure so any problem that manifests in Citrix could be readily identified at its source.

We had one additional wrinkle in our requirements in that whatever we picked, it would have to help us in our primary mission of helping our customers deliver an exceptional measurable end user experience, be it on customer premise, managed by Whitehat, or in our hosted environment.

We chose eG Innovations for its ability to see across all platforms and layers, with agent/agentless installation in the data center.

To solve this problem and others like it:

1. Evaluate your management tools. If they were created to managed physical servers but do not have a handle of managing virtual infrastructures, it is time to look for an upgrade. There is a reason they don’t still wear leather helmets in the NFL.
2. Identify the gaps in your management tools you have in place today and determine ahead of time how you are going to isolate and identify problems that fall into those gaps.
3. Where possible replace management tools that manage individual silos of data with tools that can see more of the big picture. Consolidating management tools shortens the learning curve, and lets your team spend more time working on a resolution to the problem than trying to remember how to make the tools work.
4. Look for tools that include some level of automatic root cause diagnosis, so you can reduce the time it takes to find the problem and do not end up wasting cycles trying to solve symptoms.

New Webinar on XenApp Virtualization Success

We would like to invite you to the upcoming webinar “XenApp Virtualization Success – How to Eliminate Storage and Networking Bottlenecks to Deliver Peak Performance“ presented by Atlantis Computing and eG Innovations on January 17 @ 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm UK.

Virtualizing Citrix XenApp (or migrating to the new XenApp 6.5 and/or Windows Server 2008R2/2012) introduces new performance challenges and deployment risks that can impact storage, networking and end user experience. To boost server utilization, simplify maintenance, accelerate deployments and pinpoint performance challenges, it is necessary that organizations understand and gain visibility into the dynamic inter-dependencies between user, application, and storage layers. Organizations must also adapt and manage their IT architecture to handle the increased storage and networking traffic without impacting user experience or application performance.

Join our webinar and learn from virtualization and performance experts Chetan Venkatesh (Chief Technology Officer and Founder, Atlantis Computing) and Bala Vaidhinathan (Chief Architect, eG Innovations) how to more quickly virtualize a Citrix XenApp environment without affecting user experience, performance or increasing cost.

During the webinar, we will review how to:

• Architect an optimal virtualized XenApp implementation
• Automate XenApp deployment to speed delivery of applications and data
• Get peak performance for all layers of the virtualized IT environment
• Put the elements together to lower risk, boost user satisfaction and ensure high ROI

WEBINAR DETAILS

Date & Time: Thursday, January 17 at 9am PT | 12pm ET | 5pm UK

Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/601053409

Presenters: Chetan Venkatesh (Chief Technology Officer and Founder, Atlantis Computing) | Bala Vaidhinathan (Chief Architect, eG Innovations)
We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!