Massive changes are occurring to how applications are built and how they are deployed and run. The benefits of these changes are dramatically increased responsiveness to the business (business agility), increased operational flexibility, and reduced operating costs.
The environments onto which these applications are deployed are also undergoing a fundamental change. Virtualized environments offer increased operational agility which translates into a more responsive IT Operations organization. Cloud Computing offers applications owners a complete out-sourced alternative to internal data center execution environments. IT organizations are in turn responding to public cloud with IT as a Service (IaaS) initiatives.
For applications running in virtualized, distributed and shared environments, it will no longer work to infer the “performance” of an application by looking at various resource utilization statistics. Rather it will become essential to define application performance as response time – and to directly measure the response time and throughput of every application in production. This paper makes the case for how application performance management for virtualized and cloud based environments needs to be modernized to suit these new environments.
In large IT organizations, monitoring tool sprawl has become so commonplace that it is not unusual for administrators to be monitoring 10 to 50 solutions across various departments.
Unified monitoring solutions like Zenoss offer a cost-effective alternative for those seeking to rein-in monitoring inefficiencies. By establishing a central nerve center to collect data from multiple tools and managed resources, IT groups can gain visibility into the end-to-end availability and performance of their infrastructure. This helps simplify operational processes and reduce the risk of service disruption for the enterprise.
This paper can help you make an effective business case for moving to a unified monitoring solution. Key considerations include:
• The direct costs associated with moving to a unified monitoring tool• The savings potential of improved IT operations through productivity and efficiency• The business impact of monitoring tools in preventing and reducing both downtime and service degradation
Download the paper now!
This white paper is a Windows PowerShell guide for beginners. If you are an IT Professional with little-to-no experience with PowerShell and want to learn more about this powerful scripting framework, this quick-start guide is for you. With the PowerShell engine, you can automate daily management of Windows-based servers, applications and platforms. This e-book provides the fundamentals every PowerShell administrator needs to know. The getting started guide will give you a crash course on PowerShell essential terms, concepts and commands and help you quickly understand PowerShell basics.
You will also learn about:
This white paper focuses on PowerShell 4.0; however, you can be sure that all the basics provided are relevant to earlier versions as well. For those who are ready to take the next steps in learning PowerShell and looking for more information on the topic, this PDF contains a list of helpful resources.
You're facing VM sprawl if you're experiencing an uncontrollable increase of unused and unneeded objects in your virtual VMware environment. VM sprawl occurs often in virtual infrastructures because they expand much faster than physical, which can make management a challenge. The growing number of virtualized workloads and applications generate “virtual junk” causing VM sprawl issue. Eventually it can put you at risk of running out of resources.
Getting virtual sprawl under control will help you reallocate and better provision your existing storage, CPU and memory resources between critical production workloads and high-performance, virtualized applications. With proper resource management, you can save money on extra hardware.
This white paper examines how you can avoid potential VM sprawl risks and automate proactive monitoring by using Veeam ONE, a part of Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam ONE will arm you with a list of VM sprawl indicators and explain how you can pick up and configure a handy report kit to detect and eliminate VM sprawl threats in your VMware environment.
Read this FREE white paper and learn how to:
Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) offers IT system administrators a central way to manage user accounts and devices in an IT infrastructure network. Active Directory authenticates and authorizes users when they log onto devices and into applications, and allows them to use the settings and files across all devices in the network. Active Directory services are involved in multiple aspects of networking environments and enable interplay with other directories. Considering the important role AD plays in user data-management and security, it’s important to deploy it properly and consistently follow best practices.
Active Directory Basics is a tutorial that will help you address many AD management challenges. You’ll learn what really goes on under the Active Directory hood, including its integration with network services and the features that enable its many great benefits. This white paper also explains how administrators can make changes in AD to provide consistency across an environment.
In addition, the Active Directory Basics tutorial explains how to:
This whitepaper provides an overview of Citrix AppDNA with Liquidware Labs FlexApp.
Zerto Offsite Backup in the Cloud
What is Offsite Backup?
Offsite Backup is a new paradigm in data protection that combines hypervisor-based replication with longer retention. This greatly simplifies data protection for IT organizations. The ability to leverage the data at the disaster recovery target site or in the cloud for VM backup eliminates the impact on production workloads.
Why Cloud Backup?
The Great Big White Paper on when to use AppV, when to use FSLogix, and when to use them together! The latest release from Duncan Murdoch of Amber Reef, "The purpose of this document is to discuss the strengths and weakness of App-V and FSLogix Apps, and how the two can be used together to form a complete application provisioning and management strategy." The document uses scenario-based considerations to demonstrate the pros and cons of using each solution independently, or when combined.
Optimizing the way applications are delivered and managed has been an ongoing challenge in enterprise IT, and the variety of approaches over the years have been received with varying degrees of success. While every method has pros and cons, some of the most stubborn issues include time-to-deliver, application conflicts, plug-ins and licensing. The too-frequent result is high IT overhead, too many gold images and excess spending on application licenses.
Too many companies are settling on less than optimal solutions because that is all they are presented with and they are unaware of the true state of the art for application management. It is possible to dramatically reduce the number of Windows gold images, in some cases to a single image. It is possible to deliver exactly what each and every end user needs to do their job, and nothing else. It is possible for a user to log into a random system and instantly be presented with their personal desktop, all the right applications, plugins and add-ons, the right printers, and the right fonts. It is possible and it is simple.
Citrix AppDisk, when integrated with FSLogix Apps, provides a unique set of features that can improve end-user productivity, reduce IT overhead and lower the cost of desktop management. With FSLogix patent pending Image Masking technology, AppDisk gains very granular and powerful user-based policy control over every aspect of a user’s desktop and applications, and enhances the ability to distribute applications on network attached disk images. FSLogix Apps also enable AppDisks to scale to a much greater degree than any other similar technologies available today.
A simple truth: Current application delivery and deployment solutions for Windows®-based desktops are often not fast enough, and the methods employed introduce complexities and limitations that cost enterprises valuable time, money and productivity. There is a strong need for a solution that is faster to deploy, simpler to use, and improves productivity rather than degrades it. In fact, the best solution would seamlessly and instantaneously personalizing the entire desktop, from profiles and printers to applications and extensions, while supporting license compliance and cost optimization. And, of course, it wouldn’t matter if the target desktops were physical, virtual, or cloud-based. FSLogix is delivering that solution today.
UNIQUE, CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY
This year, Zenoss conducted its third annual State of Converged Infrastructure survey with 410 global IT leaders to explore how they are using converged infrastructure to respond to business needs for agility and speed. The survey received responses from 410 global IT professionals. A few highlights from the report:
There are many open source monitoring tools available today that provide a cost-effective alternative for tackling baseline infrastructure monitoring challenges – Ganglia, Groundwork, Nagios, Zabbix, and Zenoss Core are just a few.
However, not every tool is right for every environment.
Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of open-source offerings is essential to determining whether they will work to meet your specific goals.
The only way to recover a VM with full functionality and full performance without performing an explicit restore operation is through VM replication. Maintaining a replica VM, however, requires frequent and potentially expensive update processes that involve both explicit backup and implicit restore operations. To enable the extensive use of replication by IT, VMBackup adds critical optimizations to both restore and replication operations that dramatically minimize overhead on ESXi hosts and production VMs to just VM snapshot processing. Specifically, a BDR Backup server running on a VM is able to leverage hot-add SCSI transfer mode to write logical disk and logical disk snapshot files directly to a vSphere datastore, without involving the ESXi host for anything more than creating a VM snapshot.
A key a value proposition for Vembu VMBackup is its ability to directly read and write all backup and restore data directly to and from a datastore snapshot. As a result, Vembu VMBackup offloads all I/O overhead from production VMs and ESXi hosts, which is critical for maintaining an aggressive DRM strategy in a highly active virtual environment. What’s more, the performance of Vembu VMBackup in openBench lab's test environment made it possible to enhance support for a mission-critical OLTP application running on a VM using a combination of incremental backups for backup and replication. As a result, they were able to comply with a 30-minute RPO, restore the VM to a production environment in 5 minutes, and return to full-production level processing of business transactions—850 cTPS—in under 15 minutes.
VMBackup adds a new replica management module that enables an IT administrator to fully manage an initial failover and later finalize failover or failback with consolidation. In addition, BDR backup server simplifies all management functions by eliminating the need to run a separate client module on a BDR backup server, which becomes its own client within the BDR reporting hierarchy.
The ability to configure and deploy high-performance VMs within a vSphere virtual environment continues to put CIO’s under increasing pressure to deal with the rampant bête noire of IT: business continuity. What started with Line of Business (LoB) driven Service Level Agreements (SLAs) requiring IT to meet rigorous Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO and RPO) has grown into an auditable ISO standard (ISO22301) and an emerging software niche for Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) systems.
For this analysis, openBench Labs assessed the performance and functionality of the Vembu OffsiteDR Server, a DRM device that increases the resilience of recovery processes. Their initial intent was to examine the ability to restore data in the event of a catastrophic failure in vSphere environment, including:
The full capabilities of Vembu OffsiteDR Server, however, quickly revealed that the device had a much broader operational impact. With the installation of OffsiteDR Server on an external physical server, they were free to configure end-to-end backup and restore operations in a way that optimized RTO and RPO for all business-critical application scenarios running in vSphere test environment.
In openBench lab's test environment, the combination of Vembu OffsiteDR Server deployed on a physical server with a Vembu BDR Backup server deployed on a VM provided a value proposition that extended far beyond the enhancement of DRM recovery resilience. With OffsiteDR Server installed on a physical server, they were able to optimally leverage VM and physical server platforms to easily implement all of the data protection functionality provided by Vembu BDR Suite, leverage all of the performance optimizations available to VMs in a vSphere environment, and do so in the most cost-effective system configuration.
Vembu has grown its revenue 35% annually over the past two years and is on track to meet that mark in 2014. Key product additions this year include a suite of CRM applications and the introduction of onpremises virtual appliances (with physical appliances to come in the near future). The latter move puts Vembu in more direct competition with relatively well known players in the hybrid cloud backup battle.
Vembu is celebrating its 10 year anniversary by exceeding the 60,000 customer milestone, sold mainly through its 4,400 channel partners. That compares with 55,000 customers and 4,000 resellers in February 2014. The company has added 400 resellers so far this year, and has begun to emphasize VARs in addition to its traditional target market of MSPs. Notable serviceprovider partners include Verizon's Terremark subsidiary, mindSHIFT Technologies, HostPapa and Hitachi Data Systems. The profitable Vembu claims to have exceeded 35% revenue growth in each of the past two years, and is on track for similar gains this year.
The company expects to have 200 employees by the end of 2014 (up from 160 in February), and 300 by the end of 2015. Most of its employees are near its headquarters in Chennai, India (with 65% engaged in R&D), but Vembu has been steadily expanding internationally. It opened an office in London this year, and relocated its US headquarters to Addison, Texas, where it expects to grow its workforce from 15 employees this year to 50 next year Vembu's worldwide distribution of partners roughly equates to its worldwide revenue distribution: 70% North America, 20% Europe and 10% AsiaPacific – a distribution that has remained fairly steady over the past year. However, although about 30% of its revenue comes from outside North America today, Vembu hopes to increase that to 50% in 2015. Key target markets for 2015 include the EU5 countries, Scandinavia, Brazil and China