Cloud Computing: Practical Steps

Want to learn how to manage and grow your IT infrastructure without having to buy another server? There is useful little article floating around the web, titled Practical Steps for Building and Managing an Internal Cloud, by one of our network managers, Stephen Dalgar, and our Director of Product Marketing, Marina Gil-Santamaria.

By now we’ve all recognized the importance of virtualization and its growing prevalence among IT professionals. Moving to a virtual environment significantly reduces hardware costs and complexity, while increasing server utilization and reducing the overall cost of ownership. Here at WhatsUp Gold, we not only provide tools to monitor your virtual environment, we also share our best practices for virtualization with you. After all, we haven’t purchased a single server in almost three years of sustained network growth, so read on to learn how we achieved this.

When making a move to virtualization, there are steps you can take in order to stay organized and maintain efficiency. According to Dalgar and Gil-Santamaria, the following checklist proved indispensible when building our cloud:

1. Properly scope your virtualization project, objectives and goals, as well as success metrics
2. Get buy-in from all key stakeholders (sponsoring, business and technical)
3. Put a policy in place for how physical to virtual migrations are to be executed
4. Put strict controls in place to allow for VM creation
5. Closely monitor physical resources, cpu, interface, memory, and disk utilization.
6. Use Resource pools allowing production servers to take precedence over hardware.
7. Look for a management tool that offers single console monitoring across network devices, servers, applications, virtual resources, network traffic and events and log data
8. Inventory your physical and virtualized environments on an on-going basis
9. Overlay compliance and data security policies and organizational and management requirements
10. Don’t forget to monitor, alerts and report on critical vCenter alerts, there are actually 300+ vCenter events

You should also establish set infrastructure management strategies for when the cloud is in place.

WhatsUp WhatsVirtual is precisely the tool to help with the virtualization process with one console to manage both your physical and virtual environments. Once you have WUG you simply refresh your license to get automatic discovery, mapping and documentation of the physical servers and virtual resources that make up your entire infrastructure. WhatsVirtual also integrates with VMware API to collect performance metrics, gain access to key management tasks, and oversee VMware vMotion or High Availability live migrations. When your environment is in place you have the ability to control virtual machine actions like power on, power off, suspend, reset, and backup as well. Additional capabilities include workspace reports for physical host servers, virtual machines, and virtual clusters; and seamless integration into the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center.

Learn more about WhatsUp WhatsVirtual or download your free 30 day trial!

Now through August 15, buy WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual at a Special Introductory Price!

To learn more about building and managing a virtual environment, view the full article.