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
Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union is more than just a bank. It is a financial cooperative intent on helping its members save time, save money and earn money. Over the years, the credit union has grown from providing financial resources to military service members and their families to serving hundreds of thousands of members across Texas and around the world. RBFCU has a presence in three major market areas — Austin, Dallas and San Antonio — and has more than 55 branches dedicated to serving members and the community.
First and foremost, RBFCU is people. It’s the more than 1,800 employees who serve members’ needs each day. It’s the senior team and Board of Directors that guide the credit union’s growth. It’s the members who give their support and loyalty to the credit union each day.
To help its employees provide the credit union’s members with the highest levels of services and support, Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union relies on IGEL’s endpoint computing solutions.
With so many organizations looking to find ways to embrace the public cloud without compromising the security of their data and applications, a hybrid cloud strategy is rapidly becoming the preferred method of efficiently delivering IT services.
This guide aims to provide you with an understanding of the driving factors behind why the cloud is being adopted en-masse, as well as advice on how to begin building your own cloud strategy.
Topics discussed include:• Why Cloud?• Getting There Safely• IT Resilience in the Hybrid Cloud• The Power of Microsoft Azure and Zerto
You’ll find out how, by embracing the cloud, organizations can achieve true IT Resilience – the ability to withstand any disruption, confidently embrace change and focus on business.
Download the guide today to begin your journey to the cloud!
Print data is generally unencrypted and almost always contains personal, proprietary or sensitive information. Even a simple print request sent from an employee may potentially pose a high security risk for an organization if not adequately monitored and managed. To put it bluntly, the printing processes that are repeated countless times every day at many organizations are great ways for proprietary data to end up in the wrong hands.
Mitigating this risk, however, should not impact the workforce flexibility and productivity print-anywhere capabilities deliver. Organizations seek to adopt print solutions that satisfy government-mandated regulations for protecting end users and that protect proprietary organizational data — all while providing a first-class desktop and application experience for users.
This solution guide outlines some of the regulatory issues any business faces when it prints sensitive material. It discusses how a Citrix-IGEL-ThinPrint bundled solution meets regulation criteria such as HIPAA standards and the EU’s soon-to-be-enacted General Data Protection Regulations without diminishing user convenience and productivity.
Finally, this guide provides high-level directions and recommendations for the deployment of the bundled solution.
Virtualizing Windows applications and desktops in the data center or cloud has compelling security, mobility and management benefits, but delivering real-time voice and video in a virtual environment is a challenge. A poorly optimized implementation can increase costs and compromise user experience. Server scalability and bandwidth efficiency may be less than optimal, and audio-video quality may be degraded.
Enabling voice and video with a bundled solution in an existing Citrix environment delivers clearer and crisper voice and video than legacy phone systems. This solution guide describes how Sennheiser headsets combine with Citrix infrastructure and IGEL endpoints to provide a better, more secure user experience. It also describes how to deploy the bundled Citrix-Sennheiser-IGEL solution.
Welcome to the IGEL Software Platform: Step-by-Step Getting Started Guide. My goal for this project is to provide you with the tools, knowledge, and understanding to download the IGEL Platform trial software and perform basic installation and configuration without being forced to read many manuals and numerous web support articles.
This document will walk you, step-by-step, through what is required for you to get up and running in a proof-of-concept or lab scenario. When finished, you will have a fully working IGEL End-Point Management Platform consisting of the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS), IGEL Cloud Gateway (ICG) and at least one IGEL OS installed, connected and centrally managed!
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.
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:
Key Findings Include:
This eBook explains how to identify problems with vSphere and how to solve them. Before we begin, we need to start off with an introduction to a few things that will make life easier. We’ll start with a troubleshooting methodology and how to gather logs. After that, we’ll break this eBook into the following sections: Installation, Virtual Machines, Networking, Storage, vCenter/ESXi and Clustering.
ESXi and vSphere problems arise from many different places, but they generally fall into one of these categories: Hardware issues, Resource contention, Network attacks, Software bugs, and Configuration problems.
A typical troubleshooting process contains several tasks: 1. Define the problem and gather information. 2. Identify what is causing the problem. 3. Fix the problem, implement a fix.
One of the first things you should try to do when experiencing a problem with a host, is try to reproduce the issue. If you can find a way to reproduce it, you have a great way to validate that the issue is resolved when you do fix it. It can be helpful as well to take a benchmark of your systems before they are implemented into a production environment. If you know HOW they should be running, it’s easier to pinpoint a problem.
You should decide if it’s best to work from a “Top Down” or “Bottom Up” approach to determine the root cause. Guest OS Level issues typically cause a large amount of problems. Let’s face it, some of the applications we use are not perfect. They get the job done but they utilize a lot of memory doing it.
In terms of virtual machine level issues, is it possible that you could have a limit or share value that’s misconfigured? At the ESXi Host Level, you could need additional resources. It’s hard to believe sometimes, but you might need another host to help with load!
Once you have identified the root cause, you should assess the impact of the problem on your day to day operations. When and what type of fix should you implement? A short-term one or a long-term solution? Assess the impact of your solution on daily operations. Short-term solution: Implement a quick workaround. Long-term solution: Reconfiguration of a virtual machine or host.
Now that the basics have been covered, download the eBook to discover how to put this theory into practice!
If you’re here to gather some of the best practices surrounding vSphere, you’ve come to the right place! Mastering vSphere: Best Practices, Optimizing Configurations & More, the free eBook authored by me, Ryan Birk, is the product of many years working with vSphere as well as teaching others in a professional capacity. In my extensive career as a VMware consultant and teacher (I’m a VMware Certified Instructor) I have worked with people of all competence levels and been asked hundreds - if not thousands - of questions on vSphere. I was approached to write this eBook to put that experience to use to help people currently working with vSphere step up their game and reach that next level. As such, this eBook assumes readers already have a basic understanding of vSphere and will cover the best practices for four key aspects of any vSphere environment.
The best practices covered here will focus largely on management and configuration solutions so should remain relevant for quite some time. However, with that said, things are constantly changing in IT, so I would always recommend obtaining the most up-to-date information from VMware KBs and official documentation especially regarding specific versions of tools and software updates. This eBook is divided into several sections, and although I would advise reading the whole eBook as most elements relate to others, you might want to just focus on a certain area you’re having trouble with. If so, jump to the section you want read about.
Before we begin, I want to note that in a VMware environment, it’s always best to try to keep things simple. Far too often I have seen environments be thrown off the tracks by trying to do too much at once. I try to live by the mentality of “keeping your environment boring” – in other words, keeping your host configurations the same, storage configurations the same and network configurations the same. I don’t mean duplicate IP addresses, but the hosts need identical port groups, access to the same storage networks, etc. Consistency is the name of the game and is key to solving unexpected problems down the line. Furthermore, it enables smooth scalability - when you move from a single host configuration to a cluster configuration, having the same configurations will make live migrations and high availability far easier to configure without having to significantly re-work the entire infrastructure. Now the scene has been set, let’s get started!