vSphere with Operations Management:

The Customer Perspective

Julia Lee, VMware

VSVC4686

#VSVC4686

2

Key Takeaways

Learn about vSphere with Operations Management

• What is it and how can it help you

Hear from customers who have implemented vSphere with capacity optimization and performance monitoring:

• Three different environments, three different use cases

• Results and improvements over status quo

Each customer will present their story

• We will try to accommodate Q&A at the end

This is not a product deep-dive or roadmap session

• Attend Hands-on Labs (HOL-SDC-1301 Applied Cloud Operations, HOL-SDC-

1310 vSOM 101) and VCM5781 What’s New and What's Next in vCenter

Operations: A Tech Preview

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What is vSphere with Operations

Management?

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vSphere has transformed how companies deploy and use IT

Agility. Efficiency. Resiliency.

• How much time before my current

capacity runs out?

• Which virtual machines are over-

provisioned?

• How can I identify emerging

performance issues before they

impact the business?

…but new customer challenges

arise

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Virtualize Smarter with Insight to Workload Capacity and Health

vSphere vCenter Server

• Capacity planning – know how many

days before capacity runs out so IT can

continue to be responsive

• Optimize efficiency – know which virtual

machines might be overprovisioned

• Improve performance - faster root cause

identification of emerging issues

• Proven virtualization platform – for fully

virtualized environments (including

business critical applications)

VMware vSphere

The proven compute virtualization platform

vSphere with Operations Management

• World’s leading virtualization platform

• Insight to workload capacity and health

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vSphere with Operations Management vs. vCenter Server

vSphere vCenter Server

vSphere with Operations Management

• Collects the metrics from vCenter Server

and provides a holistic view and deep

insights into the health, risk and

efficiency of IT infrastructure

vCenter Server

• vCenter Server collects real time

performance data from virtualized hosts

• vCenter Server stores the data in

vCenter database and also keeps a

historical roll up of data

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Comprehensive Visibility into Your Virtual Environment

Overview

Comprehensive visibility for

virtual infrastructure with health,

risk and efficiency scores

Single pane of glass for capacity

and performance management

Benefits

End-to-end visibility into virtual

infrastructure health

Ensure service levels for IT

services

Optimize for efficiency and cost

Immediate

Problems

Future

Problems

Opportunities

to Optimize

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Meet Our Panelists

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Introducing Donald Wilkins of Navicure

About Navicure

• Leading Internet-based medical claims

clearinghouse serves 50,000+

healthcare providers

• Inc 5000, Deloitte Fast 500 Company

and Best in KLAS for 3 years

• 235 employees

About Donald Wilkins

• 18 years in Healthcare EDI related

services

• 2002-2013 Director IT at Navicure

• VMware Mid-Market Customer

Advisory Board member

• Woodturning as a hobby

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The Navicure Environment

Virtual Environment

• 13 vSphere 5.1 hosts

• 130 VMs of both traditional development and production applications

• Newly deployed vCD infrastructure

• SRM deployed since 2008

Physical Environment

• Mixture of both Dell Rackmount and Cisco UCS X86 systems

• 22TB Oracle RAC DB running on T4-4 SPARC systems

• Over 600TB or Dell Equallogic iSCSI SAN

• Cisco Nexus

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Introducing Raj Dasgupta of Exostar

About Exostar

• Leading provider of secure collaboration

solutions and business process integration

throughout the extended value chain

• 100,000 Customers, Operating an

environment that enables over

$40 billion in transactions annually

• Founding partners include some of the

largest Aerospace and Defense

companies in the world

• 150 employees

About Raj Dasgupta

• 15+ years experience in Business to

Business (B2B) Exchanges

• At Exostar for past 12 years, Currently

Director of IT

• Develops mobile games in his free time

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The Exostar Environment

Virtual Environment

• 30+ vSphere 5.1 hosts across 3 Datacenters (2 US, 1 UK)

• 350+ VMs of both traditional development, test and production applications

• 85% Virtualized

• Expected 30-40% year over year growth in number of VMs

Physical Environment

• Mixture of both Dell Poweredge and Cisco UCS X86 systems

• Over 200TB on NetApp, 3PAR and EMC SAN

• Currently leveraging Flexpod architecture for scaling

• Cisco Nexus Switching, Juniper Firewalls

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Introducing Mike Preston of Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board

About HPEDSB

• Serves approximately 16,000 students and

2,000 staff scattered throughout 42

elementary and 8 secondary schools

• Notable Alumni: Don Cherry (Hockey Night in

Canada, ESPN)

About Mike Preston

• Systems Analyst, VCP4/5, vExpert 2012/2013,

Toronto VMUG Co-Leader

• Active blogger (blog.mwpreston.net) and

Tweeter (@mwpreston)

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The HPEDSB Environment

Main datacenter consists of 21 hosts / ~250 VMs running

everything from the free ESXi hypervisor to Enterprise Plus

Recently expanded virtualization into our schools by adding

another 50 hosts / ~200 VMs licensed with Essentials ROBO

~90% virtualized and rising

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Navicure vSphere with Operations Management Use Case

Staffing augmentation

• General health overview of the environment

• Problem isolation / identification

• Alert notification

• Reporting

Capacity Planning

• Forecasting for both operational issues and Capital Expenses due to licenses

or HW

• Resource Alignment (vmotion or svmotion candidates)

• VM reconfiguration through efficiency opportunities.

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Exostar vSphere with Operations Management Use Case

Operations

• Single “Pane of Glass” Operational View

• Issue Identification and Resolution

• Alert notification

• Reporting for both Technical Team and Business Operations

Capacity Planning

• Resource reclamation to increase efficiency (underutilized VMs)

• Forecasting capital expenditures based on resource trends

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The HPEDSB vSphere with Operations Management Use Case

One of the very first companies to use vCenter Operations since

the VMware branding. Beta version was deployed late 2010. At the

time we had ~ 75 VMs.

We were looking for a solution that gave us visibility into our

environment and that was tailor made for virtualization.

Added to the environment as a “compliment” to current IPSwitch

monitoring solutions. Didn’t take much time to realize the benefit

of a solution that understood the virtualization layer. Identified

issues with memory ballooning and swapping almost immediately.

Currently running version 5.6 of vCenter Operations

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Donald Wilkins: How I Use the Dashboard

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Raj Dasgupta: How I Use the Dashboard

Operational Rollup by Application or Environment

Key system metrics displayed and sortable on

Health/Workload/Anomalies etc

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Mike Preston: My Go-to Dashboards (1 of 3)

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Mike Preston: My Go-to Dashboards (2 of 3)

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Mike Preston: My Go-to Dashboards (3 of 3)

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Virtualizing with Capacity Optimization Increases Your ROI

40% 37%

30%

-26%

Increase

capacity

utilization

Increase

consolidation

ratios

Increase

hardware

savings

Reduce

diagnostics &

problem

resolution time

Source: Sept 2012 Management Insights Study

Benefits of running vSphere with Operations Management

Impact beyond running vSphere alone

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Raj Dasgupta: vSOM Measurable Benefits

24% faster identification of system issues

80% less time compiling key operational reports

85% less time generating forecasting reports

Approximately 16% more VMs per host as a result of resource optimization

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How vSOM Has Helped HPEDSB

Huge ROI-imt (Return on Investment in my time). vSphere is my main responsibility

but not my only one. Dashboards make it very easy to see at a glance where

problems exist. Times when discovery root cause is as easy as double-clicking.

Real ROI – wasted resources on over allocated VMs can easily reported on and

clawed back.

Discovering what's normal. Traditional tools would flood inboxes with alerts when

CPU hit certain thresholds. vCops acknowledges when a CPU is running hot and

recognizes that as normal behavior. Alerts now only come when the normal

threshold is not met or exceeded.

Virtualization defender. Utilizing vCops we can show application owners a baseline

on how their VMs are performing. Handy when fingers are automatically pointed at

the virtualization layer.

Report Card Time – essential during key reporting times throughout the year when

1500 teachers are accessing the system concurrently. Easy to monitor and gauge

when we need to stand up more infrastructure to support our users.

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Getting Started and Resources to Help

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vSphere with Operations Management: Download a 60-day Trial

VMware TV on

Youtube

Free 60-Day Trial

28

Understand Your ROI at http://roitco.vmware.com

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Customize to your

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THANK YOU

vSphere with Operations Management:

The Customer Perspective

Julia Lee, VMware

VSVC4686

#VSVC4686