Managing Virtual Capacity and Performance

VMware Event Survey 2009

Systar surveyed 255 attendees at VMware’s VMworld conferences in Europe and the United States, in
addition to other regional VMware events, from September 2008 through February 2009 to understand
key drivers for Capacity and Performance Management investments. After VMware event attendees
completed the survey, Systar staff s spent a few minutes with many of the respondents to learn more
about the current state of their VMware environments, management maturity, growth plans, and
operational challenges. Elements of these discussions are included in the key findings of the survey results
below.

Systar is a leading provider of capacity management solutions. Systar’s award-winning OmniVision

product suite offers capacity management solutions for both distributed and virtual server environments,
including VMware, PowerVM, and Solaris Zones. OmniVision also assists with Physical-to-Virtual (P2V)
and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration projects.

For more information about Systar’s OmniVision solutions for VMware, please visit:

http://www.systar.com/products/omnivision/for_vmware

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

1) Characterize the pace of your VMware adoption.

Source: Systar VMworld and VMware Event Survey, Sept 08 – Feb 09 (255 responses)

Key Findings:

It was clear from our conversations with senior VMware administrators and IT managers at VMworld
events that nearly every company was planning to continue growing their VMware investments. Our
survey results provide new insight into the pace of that growth around the VMware community and the
challenges that come along with it.

Over 1 in 5 respondents feel that their pace of VMware adoption is too fast, while 3 out of 5 will
experience steady growth. In these organizations, Virtual Machine sprawl may introduce new risks to the
quality of service IT organizations can provide as visibility and control of the virtualized environment
reaches beyond their grasp.

For the “too fast” population, their survey results revealed that virtual machine growth was expected to
average over 216% in the next 18 months. Populating new VMs on ESX servers may be the easy part of
their growth plan, but ensuring quality of service remains high in the environment will be a key challenge.
These IT organizations will need to look for solutions that enable clear visibility to the health,
performance, and service quality of the virtualized environments where a top-down view of the systems is
available. With the flexibility to share allocations of server subsystems (CPU, Memory, etc.), use of
vMotion, and establishing VMware DRS & HA policies, the role of the individual server has diminished,
making way for the importance of clusters inside the data center. If too many VMs are loaded into a
cluster, physical and virtual resource capacity might be constrained when workloads reach their peak. In
the midst of sprawling VMware environments, constant visibility to available server capacity and its
performance over time will be critical to meeting and maintaining quality of service objectives.

For the “too slow” population, we found that a greater desire for increased VM density on ESX servers
was an important objective. In our conversations with these VMware administrators and IT managers, we
found them reluctant to pile too many VMs onto an ESX server or cluster because they lacked sufficient
analysis on the effect of consolidation. Even if the placement of VMs on a server was deemed successful
at the start, they were weary of the lack of administrative visibility to the ESX server’s or cluster’s capacity
and performance over time. They lacked an efficient way to measure capacity of the planned
configurations and the ability to qualify excess or inadequate capacity over time as more VMs were
added. The reluctance to add more VM’s was apparent through survey results showing VM growth for

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

this population was only expected to be 48% over the next 18 months, compared to the 216% for the “too
fast” population.

2) Prioritize areas of capacity management for virtual environments that are

important for you. (Number from 1 – 5, highest priority =1)

Ranking Category

#1 Sizing VM requirements

#2 Sizing hosts or servers

#3 Ensuring acceptable response times

#4 Sizing the number of VMs per host

#5 Sizing clusters, pools or farms

Source: Systar VMworld and VMware Event Survey, Sept 08 – Feb 09 (255 responses)

Key Findings:

Nearly 39% of the surveyed population ranked sizing VMs, hosts and servers as their top priority for
capacity management. These results tell us that most companies are at an early level of VMware
management maturity, where the focus is still oriented toward individual servers or virtual machines.
Comfort with configuring and managing capacity for individual server elements tends to mimic traditional
physical server environments.

In physical server environments, enterprise IT organizations have often maintained a policy of one server
for one application. Through hundreds of our own conversations with large IT organizations and research
findings from leading analysts, the projected the average utilization of today’s physical server
environments generally falls between 10 - 20%. Therefore there is a general practice of over-sizing the
infrastructure in relation to anticipated workload demands.

In the virtualized environments, over-sizing a virtual machines may mean allocating resources that could
be used by other workloads to increase overall utilization. One result of over-sizing virtual machines is
that VMware’s Admission Control will prevent the optimal number of VMs per ESX Host.

While over-sizing physical servers was the norm, we see the same thing happening with VMware Host
servers. Due to lack of visibility into the ESX Host capacity requirements, VMware architects are often
over-sizing VMs by 4x to 5x, utilizing only a small portion of the capacity, even under peak workloads.

Where rule-of-thumb estimates for sizing physical servers may have been the norm, the exercise becomes
much more risky in virtual environments. If workloads on the virtual machines are relatively steady, and
not “peaky”, capacity risks are minimized and quality of service is more predictable. As more virtual
machines are added to an ESX server, behavior of the workloads can become increasingly unpredictable.
It is clear from our survey results that the priority given to sizing VMs and ESX servers reflects the over-
sizing concern described above.

Coming in a close third position, managing response times is a high priority. Clearly, priorities of the
surveyed IT organizations were not focused on “virtualize and pray” approaches to capacity management.

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

Respondents showed a strong desire to understand when capacity constraints in virtual server
environments would begin to introduce risks to quality of service expectations of the end user.

Priority rankings for sizing clusters was ranked last overall when considering survey results from the
earliest surveys, but the most recent surveys in 2009 show it as the highest priority. As VMware
architects and their teams gather experience using VMware and their environments grow at a steady
pace, the importance of the cluster also grows. Managing VMware at the cluster level is recommended
by most industry experts, as DRS and HA policies enable the cluster to become the computer. As the
cluster grows in importance, optimizing DRS limits and reservations will be key to maximizing capacity and
reducing hardware, software, and energy costs.

3) Select your organization’s need for reporting performance and capacity metrics
across the virtualized infrastructure.

Source: Systar VMworld and VMware Event Survey, Sept 08 – Feb 09 (255 responses)

Key Findings:

One of the most striking survey results showed that 71% of the VMworld and VMware event attendees
surveyed considered capacity and performance metrics to be a “high” or “very high” need. The need for
capacity management solutions in VMware environments dominates the landscape.

As IT organizations flock to VMware for solutions that enable server consolidation programs (the #1 driver
behind VMware growth according to the company), capacity management becomes a primary concern. If
servers are consolidated too much, a densely populated VMware ESX server or an under-sized VM can
quickly become saturated under peak workloads.

Making the situation even more difficult, of those survey respondents describing a “high” or “very high”
need for capacity and performance metrics, 78% claimed that they did not have access to best-in-breed
management tools for VMware and that management processes are still evolving. The imbalance of high
needs and lack of access to best-in-breed solutions combines to represent higher anxiety for IT
organizations looking to better qualify the results of server consolidation projects or to quantify their
company’s return on VMware investments to date.

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

Before many large IT organizations have even formalized a basic capacity management methodology for
their traditional physical server environments, they are being thrust into more complex and demanding
virtualized environments. One affect of this quick transition is that best-in-class methodologies and skills
for capacity management are not available, or do not transfer well to the virtualized server environments.

Given the lack of methodologies and skills, IT organizations looking for best-in-breed capacity
management solutions should expand their consideration beyond the most technically advanced
solutions, to those solutions that are easy to deploy, learn, and use by non-capacity specialists. These
organizations should also consider options that include both physical and virtual server environments to
make the most of their investment. Although VMware is the dominate force in virtualized server
environments today, selection of management solutions for capacity and performance metrics should not
be limited to VMware alone.

4) Approximately how many ESX servers do you have? (round to nearest 10)

60
54
50

40

29
30

20

10

0
ESX in Production ESX in Test/Dev

Source: Systar VMworld and VMware Event Survey, Sept 08 – Feb 09 (255 responses)

Key Findings:

As many organizations make progress with their VMware investments, they are also interested to know
how their peers are progressing. Where survey results from a few years ago would have shown
significantly more VMware ESX servers deployed in test/development environments, the tide toward
moving ESX servers into production has clearly turned. VMware ESX server populations in production
environments outweigh numbers in test/development by nearly 2:1.

Through informal conversations with VMworld and VMware event attendees, we are told that the
production servers are hosting Tier 2 and Tier 3 business applications, but there continues to be limited
adoption of VMware for Tier 1 mission-critical applications (e.g. large scale databases). As comfort with
VMware continues to grow along with the production environments, we would expect to see more Tier 1
applications infiltrating VMware deployments.

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

Along with the strong migration of VMware into production environments, VM density on ESX servers in
production continues to be somewhat constrained. Although the average VMware administrator claimed
nearly 20 VMs deployed per ESX server, 42% of those surveyed had deployed less than 10 VMs per ESX
server. VM density under 10 per ESX server seemed to reveal itself as a “magic number” for
administrators. With 10 VMs or below, IT managers and VM administrators commented that they could
easily track and manage their environment’s health using the basic administrative capabilities of
VMware’s vCenter.

Once VM populations on servers grew beyond 10 or for those organizations looking to increase VM
densities over the magic number, desire for capacity and performance metrics became increasingly
important. At companies with VM densities of 25 or more, it seemed obvious that the need for capacity
and performance metrics would increase; what was more remarkable for these survey respondents was
that only 30% had access to best-in-class management tools, skills, and processes.

5) Access your organization’s maturity to support virtualized servers.

Source: Systar VMworld and VMware Event Survey, Sept 08 – Feb 09 (255 responses)

Key Findings:

Where best-in-class management tools, skills, and processes have become commonplace in physical
server environments, the migration of those elements has clearly not progressed into virtualized server
environments. Nearly 78% of those surveyed believed they did not have access to best-in-class tools,
processes, or skills in their virtualized server environments.

Many VMworld and VMware event attendees that we spoke with had quickly determined that their
physical server management tools did not provide them management capabilities suited toward
virtualized environments. When pursuing their need for capacity and performance metrics in physical
server environments, many attendees claimed to rely on gathering huge volumes of raw performance
metrics and applying unscientific rule-of-thumb or Microsoft Excel-based analytics – a process that was
admittedly time and resource intensive, and unfortunately error-prone. When considering this same
approach for determining capacity risks in their environments, most IT operations managers or VMware
administrators admitted that the data on their VMs was either not available or nearly impossible to
compile from vCenter data based on the scale of their virtualized environments. Even if they could collect

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

the data from vCenter, they realized that information from a single snap-shot in time, would quickly
become outdated in the continuously dynamic virtual server environment. Additionally, the snap-shot
would not be able to reveal long-term trends of capacity and its resource utilization.

Summary

It is clear that a lack of capacity and performance management tools has not limited the excitement or
significantly delayed VMware deployments. In fact, even as the current economic crisis lingers on, leading
analyst and large enterprises continue to confirm that the virtualization budgets are not being cut.

Our survey results from late 2008 through early 2009 demonstrate a significant need for capacity and
performance management solutions to help IT Managers and VMware administrators gain better control
of their rapidly growing virtualized infrastructure, allowing them to maintain the expected quality of
service for their end-users.

With the lack of transferable capacity and performance management methodologies, skills, and tools
from the physical server world, companies deploying large virtualized server environments will seek
solutions that are easy to adopt, learn, and use. As VMware environments grow beyond the
departmental level, VMware teams are becoming aware that management tools provided by their
virtualization vendor will not scale, are too cumbersome to use, or do not provide the necessary
management insight. The best solutions will not only be required to deliver the required functionality,
but must also incorporate processes that can easily be adopted by the IT organization. Where solutions
require new skill sets, special training, or lengthy learning curves, VMware architects and administrators
will look for alternatives that are easier to employ.

Automation of capacity and performance management initiatives in virtualized server environments will
be a key requirement for IT managers, VMware architects, and VMware administrators. Physical server
methods of capacity management that require manual collection and analysis of huge data sets will not
translate into the virtual server world. In VMware and other virtualized server environments, data
collection and analysis must be automated. Additionally, best-in-class solutions will move beyond
presentation of basic utilization metrics for CPU, Memory, Disk, and NIC subsystems, and will begin to
analyze true capacity saturation. Capacity saturation should be analyzed as a combination of raw metrics
that describe not only when a virtualized system is heavily utilized, but where that heavy utilization is
resulting in extended wait times for, or contention between, server resources. Automating this type of
analysis will provide IT managers and VMware administrators visibility to where response times and
overall quality of service is at risk.

Finally, as virtualized server deployments continue to expand and Architects & Administrators become
more sophisticated in their ability to configure the powerful features offered by VMware, understanding
of capacity will need to spread beyond the VM and ESX server to virtualized clusters, and then pools.
Today’s most experienced organizations view capacity of their virtualized server environments, not from
the bottom up, but from the top down. To recognize where capacity risks and opportunities exist, IT
organizations will need to start from above the virtualized cloud and dive in, rather than begin their
assessment from points inside the cloud itself.

© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management

About Systar

Systar is a leading worldwide provider of performance management software. Systar’s OmniVision

product suite enables customers to achieve the optimal alignment between IT resources and business
requirements in both distributed and virtualized server environments. Systar’s proven capacity
management solutions deliver the full benefits of virtualization by enabling customers to gain visibility into
these complex environments, tune for optimal capacity, and move business-critical applications into
production with full confidence.

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© 2009 Systar, Inc. http://www.systar.com/solutions/virtualization_management