VirtualWisdom 6.0: Hybrid Infrastructure Management

VirtualWisdom 6.0 is a combined hardware and software monitoring and automated infrastructure operations (AIOps) solution that provides a holistic view of the performance of Hybrid IT infrastructure, i.e. one that includes virtualised and public cloud elements, as well as more traditional on-premises equipment. This in itself marks out VirtualWisdom as an advanced solution in a market that has, until recently, been characterised by domain specific Application Performance Management (APM), Network Performance Management (NPM), and a plethora of infrastructure management tools that have created silos of information. What makes VirtualWisdom 6.0 very powerful, in Bloor’s opinion, is the way in which it maps applications to the infrastructure. At any one point in time, I.T. managers can see how individual applications are affecting servers, storage and network switches and vice-versa. This does not necessarily remove the need for APM tools, rather, it complements them and ensures the rapid discovery of the root cause of the problem without the usual time consuming, silo-based finger-pointing exercises.

Customer Quotes

“89 percent of respondents are unable to consistently meet their SLAs for mean time to resolution (MTTR) of IT issues, thereby exposing their businesses to considerable risk.”
Dimensional Research survey

“We just can’t have a system down or even slow. Our success is measured by 24×7 real time access to our applications.”
Gregory Phillips, Principal Systems Architect for a large US Federal Agency

At the heart of the system lies the VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance. This is a purpose built, rack mounted appliance that persists and correlates real-time data from VMs, servers, SAN and NAS networks—with I/O metrics from Virtual Server Probes, Network Switch Probes, and “off-the-wire” from the hardware Performance Probes – forming a complete view of your end-to-end system between virtual machines, whether in the cloud or on-premises, and the storage environment as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – VirtualWisdom Architecture

Where most IPM solutions sample data, VirtualWisdom captures information from software and hardware probes – at the microsecond level. By default, customers receive 16 days of per second data. Beyond that you are talking about capacity management rather than infrastructure performance. The huge amount of data ingested by VirtualWisdom 6.0 is fed into real-time dashboards that are easily configurable to provide drill-downs, relevant and understandable for both business executives and technical operations staff. Heuristics and machine-learning analytics provide cross-silo correlation of events to continually update and tune the effectiveness of the performance data and, additionally, provide the ability to rebalance VM workloads.

Existing customers well versed with the capabilities of previous versions will see a new iSCSI performance probe that complements existing Fibre Channel SAN and NAS performance probes. Meanwhile, agentless monitoring of storage arrays and hyperconverged systems have been enhanced to take in NetApp, IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Dell EMC VMAX/PowerMax, Dell EMC VxFlex OS hyperconverged system (previously ScaleIO), Nutanix, and VMware vSAN.

Figure 2 – Example of application dashboard

In 2017 Bloor published a Spotlight; “Instrumenting the Virtualised Data Centre for Performance SLAs”. At that point there still seemed to be a lack of tools that could provide effective performance monitoring of virtualised and cloud-based servers as well as on-premises equipment. This release includes 3 significant new capabilities for monitoring those virtualised and cloud-based environments. Host operating system monitoring, and integration to monitor VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V and IBM Power-VM are covered by WisdomPack for enterprise compute, while WisdomPack for cloud compute offers agentless software integration for Host operating system monitoring within Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

A software-only deployment of VirtualWisdom 6.0 can generally be handled by customers themselves. However, a range of installation and support packages are available, and customers may want to avail themselves of one of these where hardware probes and the VirtualWisdom platform appliance are to be installed.

In an increasingly digital-first world the performance of customer facing applications can make the difference between business success and failure. As the quote from Gregory Phillips, who is a user of VirtualWisdom, shows, downtime and poor response times on applications can have a direct impact on the bottom line. Yet, as underlying infrastructures become more complex, residing in both on-premises and cloud data centres, with diverse compute, network and storage components from a wide range of vendors, understanding the impact and cross-correlation of events has become more difficult.

Ten years ago, Google discovered that an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. They have spent a huge amount of time and money to ensure they understand exactly how their infrastructure performs….and their business flourishes. All businesses need that same sort of capability.

The Bottom Line

The ability to decode and understand the way your hybrid infrastructure interacts with your applications is now a critical business requirement. We are impressed with the strides Virtual Instruments have made in the last couple of years. To be competitive you need to embed intelligence in your infrastructure. VirtualWisdom 6.0 allows you to do that.