One of my clients with a decent size VM environment (10 ESX hosts, multiple EMC FC arrays) had experienced an “application brownout” for weeks in their VM and physical environments.
Weeks and weeks of trying to fix this didn’t solve the problem, the tools in place (VirtualCenter, and others) didn’t have visibility from the VM down to the spindle nor did it find the I/O bottleneck and money was wasted by purchasing additional hardware.
BalancePoint was installed and they had data coming back within a few hours.
BP’s troubleshooting analysis found the issue , recommended the fix and the problem was solved within the first 48 hours of using this product.
“What is needed is a new approach to IT management to cope with the new challenges and complexity that server virtualization engenders. Toolsets for discovering and managing separate domains exist, but these traditional tools are inadequate in the interconnected and virtualized infrastructure. The lack of infrastructure-wide visibility and control in mixed physical and virtual environments is becoming a serious problem for IT”
