June, 2009
by Tom Kelman
After a year-long hiatus, Kansas City CMG came back strong with a May 13 meeting focused on performance management of virtualized systems. Held at the conference facilities on the Sprint corporate campus, the meeting was well-attended, drawing in more than 60 attendees from throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area - and from as far away as Omaha.
CMG VP Frank Bereznay started off the meeting by presenting Peg McMahon, KCCMG's chair, with the plaque honoring her as a 2008 Mullen Award Winner.
Frank then presented the day's first paper, "Forecasting Data Center Power Requirements: Tips from the Trenches." In his paper he discussed real life lessons learned about forecasting data center power requirements. Because of a proliferation of servers, his company Kaiser Permanente was running out of power in their data center. It had gotten to the point where they couldn't add any new equipment.
Frank and his group analyzed the power needs of the equipment in the center. Much of the data gathering was manual and time consuming.
However, Frank said it was worth it since the final analysis as to how a data center utilizes power surprised everyone. For example, they discovered that the low and high usage over time were within one percent of each other. Also, the biggest user of the power resource was the server farm -- not the mainframe. Kaiser Permanente ended up creating a governance board to keep track of power usage and approve each piece of equipment going into or out of the data center.
Frank's paper created plenty of buzz from the attendees and was the most requested power point from the conference.
The rest of the day's presentations focused on virtualization.
The next paper, "Performance Management in Virtualized Environments," was by Emmanuel Sauvion from Sysload. In it he dealt with the conceptual shifts that performance analysts need to make in dealing with virtualized systems. He also discussed the similarities and differences between IBM's Power V, Sun Solaris xVM, and VMware ESX. He looked at how the three systems managed CPU, memory, and disk storage. This ended up being an excellent introduction to the next presentations.
Then Charles Johnson and Rich Fronheiser, analysts from Metron-Athene, gave three solid information-packed sessions on each of the major virtualization processes for distributed systems.
Charles Johnson started by discussing Microsoft VM. He first explained the various reasons for using virtualization, such as reducing costs and going "green." After giving a short history of the Microsoft VM system, he discussed Microsoft Server 2008 and Hyper V explaining what it is, its capabilities, and the hardware requirements to run it.
After a lunch supplied by Sysload Software, Charles returned to discuss the various flavors of Unix virtualization - Sun Solaris, HP, IBM AIX, and XEN. He explained the differences between hardware partitioning, software partitioning, and the use of a hypervisor. He also discussed how the systems did resource management and what was available to monitor them.
Rich Fronheiser then went on to focus on VMware. He discussed how the use of VMware can increase the efficiency of the hardware. He also showed us what metrics were available from the system and how they could be used for reporting, trending, modeling, and forecasting.
At the end of the scheduled sessions, Rich Fronheiser generously and spontaneously offered an additional presentation on the how capacity management is incorporated into V3 of ITIL. Rich has received the certification to teach ITIL V3 and has given several classes in the capacity management area of ITIL. Even though it was late in the day, many people stayed for this additional information.
Kansas City CMG would like to thank our sponsor Sysload Software for the lunch they provided. Besides Sysload, there were several other companies who had tables at the conference including Metron-Athene, Symantec and ASG Software Solutions.
The day's conference was well received and informative for all the attendees.