Virtualization's less-than-sexy side

Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- While VMware Inc. worked to share its cloud computing vision at its annual conference here, some of the systems administrators on hand were more focused on the kinds of problems that cause a BlackBerry to vibrate with an urgent message. Take application performance, for instance.

Application performance woes can often be traced back to a bottleneck, but finding the source in a virtualized environment can be something of a Where's Waldo game: Is it a hardware issue, something in the database, an application or some kind of networking problem?

On the floor at this weeks' VMworld, Terry Smith, a systems administrator at a utility he declined to identified, said finding those bottlenecks can be hard. Then he pointed to a VMware product, AppSpeed, that's due out sometime next year. Based on technology VMware acquired when it bought privately held application performance company B-Hive Networks Inc. in May, AppSpeed is designed to spot degradation in response times and then automatically remediate it.

"This might be able to really narrow it down," Smith said of the coming tool.

When vendors put together CIO-level presentations, they often focus on what virtualization can accomplish in the broad sense: consolidating servers, and saving energy and data center space. What managers may be less aware of are the headaches systems administrators face when implementing what is still a relatively young technology for x86 servers.

When systems administrators begin their hunt for the source of performance problems, one person likely to get a call about such issues is Christopher Rhoden, a network engineer at a human resources and payroll provider he ask not be named.

"We have to prove we are not the bottleneck," said Rhoden, noting he would welcome any tool that can help systems administrators root out performance issues.

For now, Rhoden is skeptical that AppSpeed -- at least in its first incarnation -- will be able to help. "I'm always suspicious of new tools," he said, wondering whether it will be able to scale to accommodate all the applications in an environment.

With that in mind, third-party vendors are trying to fill the niche.

Altor Networks Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., for instance, said it already has technology that can now look at the communication between virtual machines, helping a systems administrator locate the problem and even detect security issues. An IT manager of a consumer products company who has been using the product for four months and asked not to be identified, said it has helped him discover and troubleshoot application performance issues. That's critical, he said, because when he's asked about a service-level agreement issue, he has to know exactly the source of the problem.