SYNOPSIS

Virtualization complicates, even as it optimizes. With virtualization having become so popular, it’s time for another look at the best practices in virtual and cloud management. With an eye towards virtualization’s original value propositions, this guide intends to illuminate the industry’s new best practices, deconstructed into four fundamental activities: performance management, capacity management, compliance management, and workload automation.

CHAPTER PREVIEWS

Chapter 1: New Best Practices in Performance Management

In a world where unlimited resource supply is now considered a waste of hardware investment, today’s virtual environments are striving to make best use of every dollar spent. That desire for optimization mandates a change to our old ways of thinking. That change arrives in the solutions that now exist to automate much of the number crunching. Implementing such a solution for performance management in your virtual environment is the new best practice.

Chapter 2: New Best Practices in Capacity Management

There exists an economy of resources in a virtual environment. Hardware contributes to resource supply, while resources are demanded by needy virtual machines. IT data centers perhaps unknowingly follow the rules of supply and demand, or at least the good ones do. Today’s ever-increasing embrace of virtualization and cloud computing creates the situation where direct measurement of supply and demand has become the new best practice. This chapter simplifies answering the question: What do you have versus what do you need?

Chapter 3: New Best Practices in Configuration & Compliance Management

Chapter 3 leverages the same kinds of data that are collected for performance and capacity management. This time, however, that data gets used for managing compliance and configuration control. You’ll find that these three activities—performance, capacity, and configuration management—are more tied together than you’d think.

Chapter 4: Workload Automation in Virtualized and Cloud Environments

In Chapter 4, you’ll learn how the bundling of configurations into runbooks and policies goes far towards automating large-scale and complex activities. As before, all these best practices fit together to create a cohesive management experience.