Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Srinivas Ramanathan, Founder and CEO of eG Innovations
Five Key Predictions for Application and Desktop Virtualization in 2016
The notion that application and desktop virtualization are no longer
buzzwords is a clear sign that these technologies have matured and gained
mainstream adoption. However, the end-user computing landscape is ever-changing. We continue to see the platform providers -
Citrix and VMware - compete with protocol improvements and optimizations with a
view towards improving the user experience, meeting user demand for graphics
intensive applications, and accounting for the increased adoption of
hyper-converged systems for scaling deployments. Plus, we also see an increase
in cloud-enabled desktop and application virtualization that simplifies
management and enables dynamic workload changes to be handled through cloud
bursting.
From a performance monitoring and management perspective, here are five
key predictions for 2016:
1.
Enterprises will look to
incorporate performance monitoring and management technologies from the outset
as they deploy new and upgraded application and desktop virtualization. Traditionally, monitoring tools are considered only once an
infrastructure has performance issues. But at that point, it is often too late
because there is no empirical data to indicate what is causing the issue. Even
when the monitoring tool provides sufficient visibility into bottleneck areas,
re-engineering the infrastructure is often cost-prohibitive or otherwise
impractical. With years of experience, enterprises, system integrators and virtualization
architects now realize that performance monitoring is like insurance - it is
something you need from the beginning - as you start your application and
desktop virtualization deployments. In doing
so, organizations will better see performance issues and abnormalities early in
the life cycle and have a practical opportunity to take action to prevent the
issues from becoming service impacting.
2.
As application and desktop
virtualization vendors explore hybrid models, the need for performance management
will increase. Application and
desktop virtualization vendors are seeking ways to make it easier for
organizations to deploy their technologies, for example, the Citrix Workspace
Cloud, where the control plane of the infrastructure resides on the cloud but
the data plane resides on premise. Although this hybrid model makes it easier
for enterprises to set up the system (in this example, Citrix managing the
control plane), monitoring and management of performance will not be any
easier. On the contrary, there will now be an additional layer of complexity
when a problem happens - is the slowdown due to the network, the on-premise
data center or applications, or could it be in the control plane managed by the
cloud service provider? This additional layer will require more visibility to
take proper advantage of the benefits of emerging hybrid models.
3.
Performance monitoring and
management tools will have to be more specialized for application and desktop
virtualization than ever before.
A significant number of organizations deploying application and desktop
virtualization have tried to use legacy monitoring tools to meet evolving
performance management requirements. The challenge here is that most general-purpose
monitoring tools are not sufficiently specialized for application- and desktop-virtualized
infrastructures. Such tools will not be effective for identifying and helping
resolve issues in advance. As the rate of change in end-user computing
increases, to be effective, performance monitoring and management tools will
need to adapt quickly to these changes. As one example, many organizations are
beginning to adopt graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver an improved user
experience. So in order to help maintain
a great user experience, performance monitoring tools must now be able to
monitor GPU utilization to identify times when utilization is high and provide actionable
insights: Why the utilization is high and which virtual desktops or users are
responsible.
4.
An increasing need for efficiency
will drive organizations to seek a single integrated console from which they
can monitor their application and desktop virtualized infrastructures as a
service. Historically,
organizations have relied on tools provided by the virtualization vendors to manage
application and desktop virtualization. Increasingly, the focus of these
vendors has been on making their platforms perform better, which means holistic
monitoring and management has received less attention. As a result,
organizations have needed to deploy multiple management tools and consoles for
monitoring the different infrastructure tiers that are associated with the
application/desktop virtualization service. This has resulted in slow, manual
diagnosis and an increasing reliance on experts to perform manual analysis and
troubleshooting. As the industry matures, faster problem diagnosis is becoming
a requirement, rather than a nice-to-have. Increasing automation in the
performance management space, by correlating metrics from every layer and every
tier of the infrastructure will become mandatory for application and desktop
virtualization success.
5.
Performance monitoring and
management will not just be about troubleshooting. Enterprises will start to
use performance monitoring to fine tune and optimize their application and
desktop virtualization rollouts to improve ROI. In most cases, performance monitoring tools
are being used to troubleshoot problems as they happen. At the same time, these
tools collect a wealth of information about the infrastructure that provides
interesting insights that can help optimize the infrastructure for maximum
capacity and ROI. For example, instead
of simply adding more hardware, by analyzing performance across the server
farm, organizations can identify the key resources that are bottlenecks and discover
precisely what type / how much capacity needs to be added to enhance
performance and utilization.
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About the
Author
Srinivas Ramanathan is the Founder
and CEO of eG Innovations, a leading IT infrastructure and application
performance monitoring software company. He has been associated with designing
and implementing IT performance monitoring solutions for over 20 years. Prior
to starting eG Innovations, Srinivas was a senior research scientist at
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA where he contributed to several
key product introductions including Firehunter, an ISP performance monitoring
system and WebQoS for differentiated quality of service for web accesses.
Srinivas has extensive experience in Internet technologies, performance
monitoring and management, and multimedia systems, having co-authored more than
forty technical papers and has been a co-inventor of fourteen US patents. He
has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California,
San Diego and a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of
Technology, Chennai, India.
