One of the lessons I from Donald Trump, is there are only two things important to executives – does it work and I am getting a deal.
Bottom line: out of all the complexity of Green projects, all the various issues, there are only 2 things an executive wants to hear.
- Is it working?
- Did we get a good deal?
Anything else is not important.
With the current economy and deployment of virtualized solutions, virtualization has reached the stage of commoditization, and now users are looking for deals. To find the best value, requires looking at the Virtualization Solution holistically and adding up the total costs for the solution. The first place people look is the processor and virtualization software. Experienced hardware oriented people know RAM, Storage, I/O, and networking are next in costs and can have a dramatic impact on the overall performance of a virtualized solution. Next is the monitoring and management of the virtualized environment and how that data can be used to optimize the solution while meetings SLAs. With rising power costs and climate change managing your cost the performance per watt is prudent.
A term used frequently for this approach is rightsizing. Keeping all these issues in mind, picking the right server hardware and software configurations has a huge effect on your efficiencies. Whether you are in production for web, database, or applications; or development and test; the choices of what configuration you pick and what combination of virtualized environments are now the big decisions on how efficient you are.
This exercise is analogous to picking your vehicle fleet and your method to load those vehicles. Think like the experts at UPS what vehicle you pick, the route chosen, and how it is loaded all effect the overall cost and service level. Speaking of UPS they have an interesting white paper on category management. Category management is one approach to commoditization of things.
Model
This last step enhances the category review step from the original eight-step process. The category review process has typically involved perhaps hundreds of work hours to complete. This step needs to be backed by decision support and modeling capabilities. Category managers need to be able to simulate category performance results from changes in various inputs – category strategies, definitions, roles and tactics.
UPS has added the step of modeling which is done by few.
To get you started on virtual system modeling check out this DMTF document.
The CIM system virtualization model, including CIM schema additions and a set of supporting profile documents, enables the management of system virtualization. Virtualization is a substitution process producing virtual resources which change aspects of the way consumers interact with the resources. These virtual resources are usually based on underlying physical resources, but they may have different properties or qualities. For example, virtual resources may have different capacities or sizes than the underlying resources or may have different qualities of service, such as improved performance or reliability. In system virtualization a host computer system provides the underlying resources that compose virtual computer systems and their constituent virtual devices.