September, 2008
by Dave Thorn
PHILACMG held its latest meeting on Friday, September 12. Storage, capacity planning and VMware were the subjects, and 32 people arrived ready to hear about them.
Emmanuel Sauvion of Sysload Software started the day by presenting, in his self-described Boston accent, Performance Management in the VMWare World. He described how to manage hosts from a performance perspective while remembering the guest machines, what to manage, and keeping users happy while saving money.
Sysload was also the Featured vendor for the day, and Ted Dinkel did this part of the presentation. He described Sysload's French origins, as well as Sysload's products for addressing server capacity management in virtualized environments.
Next, Denise Kalm of CA presented a preview of her CMG'08 paper, A Kalm Approach to Capacity Planning - Road Rules. She outlined her Kalm Performance Rules based on her years of performance capacity planning experience. (one that stood out was that we have two ears and one mouth, and they should be utilized proportionately) Her hope was that the Kalm Performance Rules could be used by the attendees, along with their own experiences, to create their own set of best practices.
Following lunch, Alok Jain of Interscape Technologies presented Performance Aspects of Open Systems & EMC Storage Arrays (Symmetrix & Clariion). Alok discussed how to monitor system and storage performance in the open systems environment, what metrics to analyze at the system level, and how to relate them to enterprise Storage Area Networks attached to EMC Symmetrix and Clariions. He showed how this work ties in to consolidations, energy cost reductions, and green computing in general.
Finally, Eric Landrieu of Perfman presented Managing The Capacity and Performance of A Virtualized Data Center. He discussed the important metrics and best practices in managing virtualized data centers, and the consequences of improperly configured servers and virtual machines.
By the time we were finished it was raining, but it didn't dampen the spirits of anyone who saw these four fine presentations. Everyone went home just a little bit smarter, which after all is our objective!