If you and your organization have already implemented some virtualized solutions, you clearly realize the importance of being able to manage your network’s capacity. But because resources are distributed differently in a virtualized architecture, being able to properly execute when allocating resources can be a problem.
Although it’s a problem, it’s actually a good one to have because you’re moving to a better solution. It can be a bit overwhelming, however, when you don’t exactly know how to properly manage network infrastructures in this way. So what do you do?
Performing a baseline is very important to get rolling, and it can’t be stressed enough that this should be your first priority. If you are not doing regular baselines, you need to start right now. You want to get into a habit of doing this more often, since you are gearing toward using less hardware to get maximum performance out of your software.
Another one of the things you will need to do is communicate with those on your application development and database teams. Why? Because, virtualization allows you to run more applications on less hardware. Because of this fact, there will need to be a close relationship with those who develop applications and maintain resource-heavy database applications.
These folks likely know much more about specific application and database resource allocation more than you do. If you don’t have any knowledge of these things, those specialists are a great asset, as they work with specific application architecture all day long.
It’s imperative that you have the right tools to help you monitor network performance. Running an application performance monitor is important to keep track of the software running in your VMs. This is true more than ever, as it only takes one stubborn app sharing resources on a single device to ruin your day.
In addition, you need to make sure that the overall performance of your network is displayed in a dashboard that you can keep on your desktop while you are busy working on other tasks. That way, as problems arrive (and you know that they will) you can be on top of them right away. You can even have these tools alert you to problems by setting specific thresholds to keep you even more in the loop!