Virtualization and BSM Tools
How Virtualization would impact Business Service Management (BSM) Tools
Posted by Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal
Last month I was doing a server capacity assessment as my client wanted to move an isolated trouble ticketing tool to their existing Service Desk tool platform, as part of consolidation. The capacity assessment was initiated as per the established methodology of gathering the target server utilization and application performance metrics. While I was analyzing the processor utilization data, the physical processor details, and comparing it to the benchmark set by the tool vendor- I just couldn’t connect the dots! I realized my lack of understanding of a virtual environment; the Service Desk tool was implemented on a Virtual Machine (VM) and the monitoring tool (which I used to collect utilization data) didn’t support virtualization.
As you are aware from the industry buzz, virtualization is in and it will affect many aspects of Service Management - shorter deployment time, complexity of change management, new ways of doing capacity management etc. However, the key aspect would be the development of awareness and skills in virtualization technologies – for instance, the expertise required to do a change impact analysis or a root cause analysis.
Based on my above mentioned brush with virtualization, I believe the impact of virtualization on BSM tools would be felt in achieving the following:
- Monitoring and Managing the virtual environment with the existing BSM tools, or adding more tools if needed.
- Implementing the BSM tools itself on a virtual platform.
In Monitoring and Managing a virtual environment, the change would be more visible in the features vendors provide in their tools for Discovery (virtual and physical discovery), Monitoring (virtual and physical utilization, dynamic thresholds etc.) and Service Automation (from Power On/Off VM to Create/Delete VM). Virtualization vendors also provide their own VM management tool kits (like vCenter from VMware or Service Center VM Manager from Microsoft) and the challenge of an existing Enterprise System Management tool would be to support monitoring and management of the virtual resources (e.g. monitoring via SNMP) and/or interfacing with the virtualization vendor’s management tools, as the leading BSM tool vendors are doing now.
Implementing BSM tools on a virtual environment? If you count the number of tools (or modules) that forms your BSM platform, it would be no less than 5 and may go up to 10 or more! Having multiple boxes with overhead in cost and maintenance effort, most likely, won’t attract a management buy-in. Hence, most customers would like to implement their BSM portfolio on VMs and also have VMs created for development and staging environments of the tool platform. Though some customers were already running these tools on virtual environments, vendors are now officially declaring compatibility, support and licensing requirements for their tools on leading virtualization platforms.
All these recent developments in these two areas clearly indicate as to how BSM tools needs to adapt to the virtualization era!
