Virtualization Technology News and Information
White Papers
RSS
White Papers Search Results
Showing 1 - 16 of 24 white papers, page 1 of 2.
The Definitive Guide to Monitoring Virtual Environments
The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual env

OVERVIEW

The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual environment to new levels of efficiency, performance and scale.

This guide explains the pervasiveness of virtualized environments in modern data centers, the demand these environments create for more robust monitoring and analytics solutions, and the keys to getting the most out of virtualization deployments.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

·        History and Expansion of Virtualized Environments

·        Monitoring Virtual Environments

·        Approaches to Monitoring

·        Why Effective Virtualization Monitoring Matters

·        A Unified Approach to Monitoring Virtualized Environments

·        5 Key Capabilities for Virtualization Monitoring

o   Real-Time Awareness

o   Rapid Root-Cause Analytics

o   End-to-End Visibility

o   Complete Flexibility

o   Hypervisor Agnosticism

·        Evaluating a Monitoring Solution

o   Unified View

o   Scalability

o   CMDB Support

o   Converged Infrastructure

o   Licensing

·        Zenoss for Virtualization Monitoring

High Availability Clusters in VMware vSphere without Sacrificing Features or Flexibility
This paper explains the challenges of moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.

Many large enterprises are moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources.

Realizing these benefits with business critical applications, such as SQL Server or SAP can pose several challenges. Because these applications need high availability and disaster recovery protection, the move to a virtual environment can mean adding cost and complexity and limiting the use of important VMware features. This paper explains these challenges and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.

Monitoring 201: Moving Beyond Simplistic Monitoring and Alerts to Monitoring Glory
Are you ready to achieve #monitoringglory?

Are you ready to achieve #monitoringglory?

After reading this e-book, "Monitoring 201", you will:

  • Be able to imagine and create meaningful and actionable monitors and alerts
  • Understand how to explain the value of monitoring to non-technical coworkers
  • Focus on productive work because you will not be interrupted by spurious alerts
It's Automation, Not Art
It’s Automation, Not Art Learn how to simplify application monitoring with this free eBook.
We recently reached out to IT professionals to find out what they thought about monitoring and managing their environment.  From the survey, we learned that automation was at the top of everyone's wish list.
 
This guide was written to provide an overview on automation as it relates to monitoring.  It was designed specifically for those familiar with computers and IT, who know what monitoring is capable of, and who may or may not have hands-on experience with monitoring software.
Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. According to Gartner, hybrid IT (especially with IaaS subscription) enterprises must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM) to gain visibility into their IT landscapes.

With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. According to Gartner, hybrid IT (especially with IaaS subscription) enterprises must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM) to gain visibility into their IT landscapes.

The guide provides insight into the IT infrastructure monitoring tool market and providers as well as key findings and recommendations.

Get the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools to see:

  • The ITIM market definition, direction and analysis
  • A list of representative ITIM vendors
  • Recommendations for adoption of ITIM platforms

Key Findings Include:

  • ITIM tools are helping organizations simplify and unify monitoring across domains within a single tool, eliminating the problems of multitool integration.
  • ITIM tools are allowing infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to scale across hybrid infrastructures and emerging architectures (such as containers and microservices).
  • Metrics and data acquired by ITIM tools are being used to derive context enabling visibility for non-IT teams (for example, line of business [LOB] and app owners) to help achieve optimization targets.
The Forrester Wave: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019
Thirteen of the most significant IASM providers identified, researched, analyzed and scored in criteria in the three categories of current offering, market presence, and strategy by Forrester Research. Leaders, strong performers and contenders emerge — and you may be surprised where each provider lands in this Forrester Wave.

In The Forrester Wave: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019, Forrester identified the 13 most significant IASM providers in the market today, with Zenoss ranked amongst them as a Leader.

“As complexity grows, I&O teams struggle to obtain full visibility into their environments and do troubleshooting. To meet rising customer expectations, operations leaders need new monitoring technologies that can provide a unified view of all components of a service, from application code to infrastructure.”

Who Should Read This

Enterprise organizations looking for a solution to provide:

  • Strong root-cause analysis and remediation
  • Digital customer experience measurement capabilities
  • Ease of deployment across the customer’s whole environment, positioning themselves to successfully deliver intelligent application and service monitoring

Our Takeaways

Trends impacting the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team include:

  • Operations leaders favor a unified view
  • AI/machine learning adoption reaches 72% within the next 12 months
  • Intelligent root-cause analysis soon to become table stakes
  • Monitoring the digital customer experience becomes a priority
  • Ease and speed of deployment are differentiators

10 Best Practices for VMware vSphere Backups
In 2021, VMware is still the market leader in the virtualization sector and, for many IT pros, VMware vSphere is the virtualization platform of choice. But can you keep up with the everchanging backup demands of your organization, reduce complexity and out‑perform legacy backup?

Read this whitepaper to learn critical best practices for VMware vSphere with Veeam Backup & Replication v11, such as:

  • Choose the right backup mode wisely
  • Plan how to restore
  • Integrate Continuous Data Protection into disaster recovery concept
  • And much more!
Spotcheck Inspection with Stratusphere UX
This whitepaper defines an inspection technique―and the necessary broad-stroke steps to perform a limited health check of an existing platform or architecture. The paper defines and provides a practical-use example that will help you to execute a SpotCheck inspection using Liquidware’s Stratusphere UX.
The ability to meet user expectations and deliver the appropriate user-experience in a shared host and storage infrastructure can be a complex and challenging task. Further, the variability in deployment (settings and overall supportive infrastructure) on platforms such as VMware View and Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop make these architectures complex and difficult to troubleshoot and optimize. This whitepaper defines an inspection technique―and the necessary broad-stroke steps to perform a limited health check of an existing platform or architecture. The paper defines and provides a practical-use example that will help you to execute a SpotCheck inspection using Liquidware’s Stratusphere UX.
The Monitoring ELI5 Guide: Technology Terms Explained Simply
Complex IT ideas described simply. Very simply. The SolarWinds Explain (IT) Like I’m 5 (ELI5) eBook is for people interested in things like networks, servers, applications, the cloud, and how monitoring all that stuff (and more) gets done—all in an easy-to-understand format.
Complex IT ideas described simply. Very simply. The SolarWinds Explain (IT) Like I’m 5 (ELI5) eBook is for people interested in things like networks, servers, applications, the cloud, and how monitoring all that stuff (and more) gets done—all in an easy-to-understand format.
CloudCasa - Kubernetes and Cloud Database Protection as a Service
CloudCasa™ was built to address data protection for Kubernetes and cloud native infrastructure, and to bridge the data management and protection gap between DevOps and IT Operations. CloudCasa is a simple, scalable and cloud-native BaaS solution built using Kubernetes for protecting Kubernetes and cloud databases. CloudCasa removes the complexity of managing traditional backup infrastructure, and it provides the same level of application-consistent data protection and disaster recovery that IT O

CloudCasa supports all major Kubernetes managed cloud services and distributions, provided they are based on Kubernetes 1.13 or above. Supported cloud services include Amazon EKS, DigitalOcean, Google GKE, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Microsoft AKS. Supported Kubernetes distributions include Kubernetes.io, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Multiple worker node architectures are supported, including x86-64, ARM, and S390x.

With CloudCasa, managing data protection in complex hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environments is as easy as managing it for a single cluster. Just add your multiple clusters and cloud databases to CloudCasa, and you can manage backups across them using common policies, schedules, and retention times. And you can see and manage all your backups in a single easy-to-use GUI.

Top 10 Reasons for Using CloudCasa:

  1. Backup as a service
  2. Intuitive UI
  3. Multi-Cluster Management
  4. Cloud database protection
  5. Free Backup Storage
  6. Secure Backups
  7. Account Compromise Protection
  8. Cloud Provider Outage Protection
  9. Centralized Catalog and Reporting
  10. Backups are Monitored

With CloudCasa, we have your back based on Catalogic Software’s many years of experience in enterprise data protection and disaster recovery. Our goal is to do all the hard work for you to backup and protect your multi-cloud, multi-cluster, cloud native databases and applications so you can realize the operational efficiency and speed of development advantages of containers and cloud native applications.

Virtualization Monitoring 101
Written to provide you with virtually everything you need to know about monitoring VMs, container, the cloud, and more. It’s designed to discuss virtualization realities from the age-old debate of on-prem vs. cloud vs. hybrid to newer technology like container orchestration. Whether you are a humble sysadmin, network engineer, or even monitoring specialist, this FREE eBook offers context, perspective, and actionable lessons to help you.

Virtualization Monitoring 101 was written to provide you with virtually everything you need to know about monitoring VMs, container, the cloud, and more.

It’s designed to discuss virtualization realities from the age-old debate of on-prem vs. cloud vs. hybrid to newer technology like container orchestration. Whether you are a humble sysadmin, network engineer, or even monitoring specialist attempting to monitor these things for the first time; or you’re more involved in a focused project including one or more of these technologies, this FREE eBook offers context, perspective, and actionable lessons to help you.

Topics covered include:

  • Inventory in the age of orchestration
  • Moving from on-prem to cloud
  • What matters in different environments
  • The most vivid “franken-duck” explanation of how cloud works ever written
Beyond the Bits: Best Practices for Monitoring Systems and Applications in a Modern Data Center
Our two-week email course, Beyond the Bits, provides a closer look into the philosophy, theory, and fundamental concepts involved in monitoring your infrastructure environment.

Our two-week email course, Beyond the Bits, provides a closer look into the philosophy, theory, and fundamental concepts involved in monitoring your infrastructure environment.

The Fundamentals
Gain access to daily foundational building blocks to help you master the challenges associated with infrastructure monitoring.

Management Principles
Monitoring doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. Beyond the Bits provides the sound management principles you need to reduce automation intimidation and monitoring alerts.

Food for Thought
At the end of each chapter, answer thought-provoking questions to tie in what you’re learning with your day-to-day roles and responsibilities.

VMware Backup For Dummies
Your virtual machines are at the heart of all that your business does, hosting practically any workload. So make sure you have the best recovery methods and data protection strategies in place to ensure maximum business continuity with this FREE E‑book.

Your virtual machines are at the heart of all that your business does, hosting practically any workload. So make sure you have the best recovery methods and data protection strategies in place to ensure maximum business continuity with this FREE E‑book. Here’s what’s covered inside:

  • Explore VMware backup tools and components
  • How to implement VMware backup
  • Understand levels of backup consistency
  • Five tips for better virtual machine backup

GET E-BOOK

Maximizing Monitoring With Automation
Since the 2015 merger, various teams within the now combined Springer Nature IT department—such as the network, SysAdmin, and infrastructure teams—from different countries and with different backgrounds, methodologies, and vendors—had to collaborate and consolidate. Learn how Springer Nature’s embracement of technology and customization allowed them to employ ways to work smarter, not harder—or more costly—to support various IT teams across the organization.

Since the 2015 merger, various teams within the now combined Springer Nature IT department—such as the network, SysAdmin, and infrastructure teams—from different countries and with different backgrounds, methodologies, and vendors—had to collaborate and consolidate.

Springer Nature was already using SolarWinds® solutions upon Senior Systems Monitoring Analyst Dave Morris’s arrival at the company. He recalls, “It was a smaller SolarWinds environment then, and we’ve since grown it. After the merger, many other legacy products were very niche, and we couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining them as they were no longer suitable for the needs of the company and team. We decided to focus on SolarWinds, and because we utilize so many SolarWinds modules and we keep growing it as we go, the environment—and the benefit we receive from SolarWinds—continues to build.”

Though the Springer Nature IT infrastructure is now immense, it’s managed by a team of two: Morris and Software Engineer Consultant Liam Miller. Together, they comprise the global systems monitoring team for the entire Springer Nature business. As proponents for SolarWinds and in introducing SolarWinds products to the internal IT teams, it has been a process of building a team’s confidence in what the solutions could deliver as they get used to newer ways of working and scalability.

See It, Fix It, Manage It: Ensuring Hybrid and Multi-cloud Applications Are Reliable and Secure
Most enterprises are moving to hybrid or multi-cloud architectures. Operating these environments requires IT teams to rethink their approach to monitoring and reporting on applications and environments. Cloud services differ in functions which makes achieving and maintaining a consistent configuration difficult but not impossible. A significant portion of companies plan to utilize third-party products, reducing some of the variability in feature capabilities across clouds to simplify management.

The author of this Pathfinder report is Mike Fratto, a Senior Research Analyst on the Applied Infrastructure & DevOps team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Pathfinder reports navigate decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explore the business value of adoption, and recommend the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.

This report explores the following topics:

  • the growth of already commonplace cloud usage for mission-critical applications
  • the importance of cloud governance
  • the top cloud security concerns for enterprises
  • the adoption of third-party tools for cloud management
  • the steps IT teams should take to make their cloud environments more secure and reliable
2022 Data Protection Trends
The largest data protection industry report from 3,000+ IT leaders.
3,000+ business and IT leaders were surveyed on their IT and data protection strategies, including their plans for 2022. Learn more.