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Less is More: Discovering Your True Computing Potential
by Tom Smart
Novell Connection Magazine - December 2008

Here's an excerpt:

In the November issue of Novell Connection, we discussed the goal of data center automation and outlined our three-pronged strategy for achieving it: Discover, Create and Manage/Orchestrate. This month, we’ll examine the Discovery phase in more detail.

Knowing What You Have and How It Behaves

Before you can virtualize effectively, you need to know what you have. That includes the operating systems, applications and services that may be candidates for virtualization, as well as the hardware that may host virtualized environments. Most enterprise IT shops already have discovery technologies they use for inventorying assets and managing licenses. However, identifying good candidates for virtualization requires much more fine-grained detail about assets and how they behave—as well as the ability to compare those behaviors.

In other words, you need to know not just what CPUs, memory, storage and resources you have available, but also how specific workloads are utilizing these resources over time, as well as when and why utilization spikes occur. You also need the ability to compare these utilization trends between different applications and platforms to determine the best opportunities for virtualizing systems and the best physical machines to run the virtualized systems.

This detailed, comparative trend analysis can help you assign virtual machines to physical machines based on their average and spike resource needs—choosing virtual processes that will “play together well” in a given physical environment. It can also help you decide which processes require maximum resource availability and are best left to run in their own dedicated physical environment.

The Right Tool for the Job

At Novell, we use PlateSpin PowerRecon to provide complete and precise details on our available assets and how they are being utilized—and to graph utilization across workloads and machines for intelligent analysis.

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