Xangati

Bonus VDI Tip: Beware of anti-virus “in the wild”

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

Be especially careful about anti-virus as you go through your deployments. The thing that happens is when you take a user’s disk and remove it from the machine and put their storage on a SAN, most traditional anti-virus products are not aware of that transition. And, many of them are used to making near constant access to the disk. And when that happens on a shared SAN environment with hundreds of desktops sitting on that SAN, performance bottlenecks spring up all over the place.

Happily, most of the anti-virus products on the market can be tuned to work better in a VDI environment. And, there are often ways to go ahead and set updates and scans and whatever else has to happen on a staggered basis. So, I would encourage you to track your anti-virus architectures carefully, to monitor those servers closely, and particularly when you’re in your pilot phase, to watch how your pilot desktops are performing on the SAN with respect to anti-virus and you will definitely help to avoid difficulties we have seen others experience.

For example, I’d like to tell you about a Large Oil and Gas Company that was using one of the major big three anti-virus vendors as part of their VDI deployment. The Xangati tool was actually used to identify a major scaling issue for them. They had 600 VDI users and were in the process of going to 2000. There was some miscellaneous slowness in the environment that wasn’t a showstopper but, they were concerned it would expand and get worse as they more than doubled and even tripled their user population.

What Xangati found was that the particular way this anti-virus product was scanning the drive, if they had put 2000 users on the network, it would have literally filled an entire 10 Gig Ethernet Pipe. As you know, you’re not going to get 10 Gigs of Ethernet performance out of a SAN…the poor thing would die under a load like that. The reality was that they needed to do some work with their anti-virus vendor to really re-architect the way that the anti-virus scanning was happening in order to enable them to actually scale and get beyond the place where they were starting to have the first hint of a problem to the place where they would have had a complete showstopping event. So, when we suggest that checking out anti-virus is a good thing to do – it really is a good thing to do!

Here’s a list of all the tips in this series:

Tip #1: Track all the “moving parts” in a VDI environment

Tip #2: Zoom in on storage performance 

Tip #3: Analyze the networked activity of your VDI sessions

Tip #4: Record end-user performance issues

Tip #5: Establish a cross-silo operational model to proactively manage performance

Bonus Tip: Beware of anti-virus “in the wild”

VDI Tip #5: Establish a cross-silo operational model to proactively manage performance

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

Our fifth tip talks about the need to have capability that looks across the silos and enables you to be proactive in management. When we look at these interactions, it’s important that we don’t just look at them one at a time - that is that a particular desktop is talking to a particular user and using 150K of bandwidth - it’s also important to know at the same point in time what usage level is going to the storage. What is the use of different application ports and protocols that may be contending with the desktop protocol. And, it’s important to see all of this information at once and that’s exactly what a Xangati dashboard provides.

Take a look at this diagram and consider the idea that any one of the items on the outside of this wheel could be placed at the center so that we could see the whole world from the perspective of a virtual desktop. We could see the perspective of the world from a storage array looking back at the desktops or at other servers. We could look at a particular protocol and see what devices were implementing or using that protocol. It’s this 360 degree visibility that actually enables you to traverse the whole virtual infrastructure and quickly spot problems in a proactive and meaningful way.

 

For example, if we put the virtual desktop in the center of the universe. We understand how it talks to other virtual machines, it’s back end storage and what network issues may be affecting its application delivery. On the other hand, we could just as easily put a protocol into the center of the world and understand how PCoIP is being affected by perhaps file sharing traffic going across the WAN or a large corporate video chat that is happening at the time. Similarly, we could put the storage into the center of the universe and understand how the desktops may be contending against a particular data store or how a large request by a particular user may actually be causing storage latency for other connected users. 

Thanks for reading our blog series on the top 5 Tips for an Optimal VDI End-User Experience. We have one bonus VDI tip coming for you on Monday so, be sure to read on and not miss out!

VDI Tip #4: Record end-user performance issues

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

As we’re talking about end user experience, this fourth tip is going to get directly at what’s necessary to keep track of end user performance. There’s no better way to track that than to record exactly what’s happening for a particular user at the exact time that they are having a problem. This is so important because it’s ultimately the end users who determine whether or not a VDI project will succeed. Because the users are now depending on this shared infrastructure to do their job, if there’s any problem with it, they are going to be very quick to complain about slowness, delays, etc. and any problem at all will get blamed on VDI. In order to move forward with a strong push from the user community, you have to take this into account early in the deployment. This is particularly problematic for IT because with end user issues, you basically can’t recreate them…an end user connects to a desktop in the pool but, the next time they connect, it might very well be a different desktop. And, when the reports of performance issues trickle in – maybe a day to a week after the incident, it becomes almost impossible to piece back together again what was the dynamic infrastructure used to support that user in a given point in time. 

Xangati changes that model. We have something called a Visual Trouble Ticket that allows an end user to file their own infrastructure report. They put in their name, phone number, and a comment (ie. internet is slow, mail is broken, I can’t access my application, etc.) and then click the “create visual trouble ticket” button and then a 15-minute recording is made of everything that user is doing: on the network, what their connectivity to storage is, which datastores, which desktop, what host it’s running on – all of that information is collected and recorded with true to second accuracy so that during that time, you can simply grab a scroll bar and move backwards and forwards in the recording and isolate exactly the pieces of information you need to figure out what happened at that time. This is all done without any agents on the desktop and without any probes inserted in the network.

Check back tomorrow for the 5^th Tip in our series where we look at establishing a cross-silo operational model to proactively manage performance.

VDI Tip #3: Analyze the networked activity of your VDI sessions

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

Today’s third tip really talks about the network activity of the VDI session. This ends up being particularly important because in VDI, we’ve actually decomposed the desktop into several different constituent parts.

What we’ve done in VDI is essentially taken a desktop and split it in between a screen display, the backend processing, and the storage for that desktop. These items are typically separated by a network and when you do that, the workload of the network becomes a critical part of the actual end user experience. It becomes important to be able to see the network workload which is not something that that typically falls into the desktop area for management but for VDI, it becomes critical to actually maintaining the end user experience.

Xangati is a tool that enables you to see not only what is going on in the virtual environment, but also in the physical environment and particularly to monitor latency to key remote sites and to verify that the kind of packet delivery that you’re getting out of the network is suitable for a virtual desktop deployment.
One place where this was particularly important was at a large, national law firm. We installed our dashboard and within the first day were able to identify some pretty significant challenges. Interestingly, about 600 VDI users, most of them having issues on a somewhat random basis and yet they were only halfway to where they needed to go and existing network tools were not helpful. In fact, they had doubled the size of their WAN and dedicated half of it just to VDI and they were still having issues. Well, the fascinating thing that we noticed was a particular user was using about 12 mbps in their VDI session. And, there were about a dozen other outliers who were again using many mbps of bandwidth. It turns out that the users weren’t doing anything wrong, it was that the desktop protocol needed to be optimized. There were many settings in the audio and video in particular that were just not optimal for what this organization needed. And, with a little bit of knob and dial twiddling inside the admin console and all of a sudden, everything was running smoothly. And, so, the source of the stall was identified quickly, allowing them to move on and meet their deployment goals.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Tip #4 where we look at recording end user performance issues.

VDI Tip #2: Zoom in on storage performance

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

As we’ve been pulled in to help with dozens and dozens of VDI deployments at various stages of success, stall, or even failure – we’ve again and again found that storage performance has an outsized impact on VDI performance. In fact, the majority of deployments end up suffering from storage performance fluctuation.

For example, if you were to take a particular group of VDI desktops that live on posts or are connected to storage, they all make their connections as users in deployment in the environment, and things are working along just fine. In the course of just a couple of minutes, as users launch applications and connect to different resources, all of those interactions change. The bandwidth changes, the storage changes and these changes are all happening across the network. Over the course of a 5 min period, what’s happened on the storage can vary widely. Where organizations get into trouble is that many traditional storage tools average their metrics over a five minute interval. And, so even though there might have only been 30 seconds or a minute and a half of contention, on a five minute graph, it looks like a very smooth, flat line. Whereas during the actual contention event, it might have been a 3 or 4 or 500 milliseconds, in some cases we’ve seen fluctuations as high as 2 or 3 seconds, where storage is momentarily bogged down servicing a number of simultaneous requests. And, while that’s invisible to a traditional monitoring tool, ultimately IT is left without the tools to spot the issue and resolve the problem.  

What we’ve found is that dynamic interaction tracking is essential. If you don’t track things dynamically, there is no context to understand why resources are being consumed the way they are. The storage team doesn’t typically have any information available to them about how the hypervisor is perceiving their storage. So, it’s necessary to have something that can show them what the perception of the VDI desktop related to storage. And, these quick searches have to be visible because they often come and go in 10 to 15 to 30 seconds. And, when they go unnoticed, it’s very hard to understand whether observed storage latencies – are they tied to IOP surges where it’s legitimate demand on the hardware – or are there back issues that may be taking place. We’ve seen things ranging all the way from very heavy usage causing storage latency to things like spanning tree problems on a network causing storage latency. So, being able to understand and quantify those differences quickly is essential. 

For example, a Xangati customer, CBRE, were busy deploying about 2500 production VDI users at the point when they brought Xangati online and they were experiencing intermittent performance issues of the kind where they seemed to be jammed up and there was no clear pattern that could be observed. It was very hard to pin down. They were up against a wall of user resistance pushing their deployment further. Xangati came in and literally within hours of being deployed found several storage latency issues that were plaguing part of their virtual infrastructure.

The interesting comment from the designer and lead architect of that VDI deployment was that everyone should be doing VDI and they should be using Xangati.

Check back tomorrow for Tip #3 where we discuss analyzing the networked activity of your VDI sessions.

VDI Tip #1: Track all the “moving parts” in a VDI environment

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

It is essential for you to track all the moving parts in a VDI environment. It’s not enough to just look at the hypervisor or just look at the storage or even just look at the separate management console. It is crucial to have the ability to track all of those moving parts together.

The Gartner Group have basically made the observation that in VDI you essentially need to combine: network, storage, servers, the guest VMs, and various other existing IT products and the problem could be anywhere when the end user has a problem. It’s often the case that while the problem could be anywhere, VDI takes the blame as it’s the newest part of the infrastructure.

Their critical observation is really that the end user expects the performance of a VDI Desktop to be the same or better than whatever the physical devices that they used to have on their desktop (whether it be a laptop or a tower). They expect that level of performance and in order to do that, VDI has been implemented as a completely different architecture.

In terms of architecture, it is challenging as with VDI, you are actually creating a dynamic environment. As each user logs in and logs out of the system, the architecture combines in real time to make that particular session happen.

With VDI, you have a wide variety of devices – everything from thin clients and phones to dedicated partner terminals to standard PCs and you have a mix of storage, physical servers, and network devices. You need to be able to see how these various devices connect and how the traffic is going across the network.

The interesting thing is that all of these elements are combined in real time to serve a particular user. Maybe it’s a laptop or a virtual desktop, etc. and that’s how their session is maintained and their user experience is defined by that particular architecture.

Just moments later, another connection will use these same items but potentially order them in a different way, attach to a different desktop on a different host and connect to a different storage the back end and still be able to function.

When you start piling on multiple systems like this, that are all defined at the time of login, and dynamically allocated, the whole architecture is built in real time to meet the needs of your user base.

So, in this environment, how do you determine which things are taking which resources and how do you determine, when there is a contention issue, how to resolve it? How do you know when you see a storage latency spike that affects a particular VM, what are the other items that may be contributing to that dynamically in real time.

And, that is exactly what Xangati provides. Because of the transformational architecture that puts virtual desktops in a position of talking out of the network through physical servers, using resources from the cloud, and talking to a variety of end user devices and being dependent on a whole cluster of connection brokers: active directory, DHCP, DNS and other IP services, it becomes necessary to have tools that can actually monitor that entire environment. You start multiplying that out by dozens of hundreds of client devices and the complexity becomes such that you need to monitor the entire environment.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Tip #2 where we zoom in on storage performance.

A Blog Series: 5 Tips for an Optimal VDI End-User Experience

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

Over the course of the next ten days or so, I will share various VDI tips based on my experience as the Technical Marketing Director at Xangati. I have worked with many customers on their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments (including VMware’s VMworld team on the Hands on Labs VDI) and have seen firsthand how critical management solutions are to the success of the initiative. 

These blog posts will provide insightful information with special focus on: 

• Top 5 tips for an optimal end-user experience
• Complexity of tracking all the “moving parts” in a VDI environment
• Capturing end-user performance issues as they happen
• Analyzing your storage infrastructure performance in real-time
• Understanding the networked activity of your VDI sessions
• Establishing a cross-silo operational framework to proactively manage performance
• Details of case studies of enterprises who are leveraging these tips

To get you started, here are some of the “Smoking Guns” I've identified with our VDI customers affecting VDI user experience:

•   Storage latency fluctuations
•   AV updates bogging down desktop
•   Back-ups running in middle of day
•   Mis-configured IP storage traffic
•   DHCP servers failing intermittently
•   Outliers affecting VM density
•   Mis-configured security gateway
•   Congested WiFi network
•   YouTube clogging VPN connection
•   vSwitch introducing network latency
•   Sessions routed over too many hops
•   AV solution with architectural flaws
•   Making solution non-viable for VDI

Stay tuned for Tip #1 posting on Monday, January 16^th discussing all the moving parts in a VDI environment.

The Xangati Difference

Jagan Jagannathan, Founder and CTO, Xangati

You’ve heard us talk at length about how Xangati solutions help drive virtualization initiatives, giving the confidence to migrate LOB applications and extend virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives. With the clarity provided through our VI and VDI solutions, administrators can take the next step in data center virtualization – whatever that step might be for their particular business. They can do so confidently, knowing that our state-of-the-art monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities allow them to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.

Successful virtualization means that businesses can fully capitalize their technology investment – which often leads to competitive advantage. The key to successful virtualization is effective performance management. However, not all performance management solutions are equally effective.

Virtualization means a complex and intertwined infrastructure. To implement it in the right way, you must first recognize the new performance management requirements that come with virtualization which are as follows :-

• cross-silo;
• real-time;
• scalable; and
• focused on interactions.

It is critical that the solution with the right approach – designed specifically to meet these requirements – be used. We believe that Xangati has that solution, and I’d like to take you under the hood of the Xangati solution to explain why, by providing a keener understanding of The Xangati Difference.

Requirement #1 – Cross-Silo

With little or no separation between silos within a virtualized infrastructure, the days of distinct, individually managed silos are becoming a relic of the past. In a virtualized environment, the center of gravity is not found in just one specific silo. Rather, there is continuous and dynamic interplay occurring within and across multiple silos. To adequately address this dynamism across silos, performance management solutions must be comprehensively cross-silo.

Xangati’s performance management solution is carefully designed for virtualization’s large scale and dynamic environment and was built as a truly extensible cross-silo solution. With Xangati, you can see why storage backups are taking longer than expected and impacting VDI end user performance; and you can see why memory is highly utilized and impacting your recently migrated LOB applications –by easily peering across silos. By viewing and correlating this cross-silo information, you have concrete and actionable context for problem solving.

Xangati achieves this through its support of disparate feeds from all silos – network, storage, servers, VMs, applications, etc. Some feeds such as netflow may be voluminous and continuously pushed while other feeds such as desktop stats may only be amenable to being pulled periodically. Whether they are pushed continuously or pulled discretely, Xangati can collect and collate disparate feeds from:

• the network – in the form of netflow, SNMP, DNS, AAA/Radius, LDAP;
• the hypervisor – in the form of virtual host, VM, network performance data;
• storage – in the form of storage target performance data; and
• applications – such as performance data from VDI desktops and clients, as well as their managers.

The ability to do this is significant – and essential in order to be cross-silo and extensibly so.

Requirement #2 – Real-time

In a virtual environment, understanding what is happening at any precise moment – in real-time – is critical if we are to uncover and fully understand the causality of the behavior and interactions between objects. Reports that are averaged over minutes or hours or a day do not provide the second-by-second insight that is vital. The importance is in the second-by-second transients. You need to see dynamic shifts as they occur and how they change over time to solve many problems.

The challenge is that the amount of data in a virtualized infrastructure is voluminous, and the amount of time you have to process that information is miniscule – no more than a few microseconds for each interaction. If we need to scale to a million objects in a virtualized environment – and we need to render that information on a per-second basis, we must go to a single microsecond time span to crunch the data.

Xangati’s collation engine is based in memory – allowing you to view and know about the behavior and interaction of any multitude of objects – and what they’re doing – down to the second. A database approach simply cannot handle this kind of time scale. The ability to process all of this data in memory is truly unique to Xangati and – from my own personal background in network security – I can also assure you that it’s the only way to crunch data to scale in real-time.

The Xangati Difference means you have unparalleled real-time insights coupled with automated alerts – giving a high-definition video of everything that’s occurring versus a Polaroid snapshot.

Requirement #3 – Scalable

Virtual environments grow like there’s no tomorrow, with objects and interactions scaling to 10s and 100s of thousands! The requirement to be real-time is closely tied to the requirement to be highly scalable. You not only need to know what’s happening in real-time but you also need to be able to do so for a very large number of objects.

Xangati’s memory-driven architecture allows administrators to see dynamic interactions scaling to 100s of thousands. Also contributing to this scale is Xangati’s agent free model. While other performance management tools frequently rely on a multitude of agents to get the data they want, it is not an approach that is scalable. Additionally, agents are a source of resistance within IT organizations due to their deployment and management complexity. Without agents, Xangati can more easily cover all of the dynamic interactions across all silos that can impact VI or VDI performance.

With The Xangati Difference – in just one second – you have insight into more than a million metrics and interactions! Even at intervals of five to 15 minutes, other solutions don’t scale close to those numbers.

Requirement #4 – Focused on Interactions

Effective performance management in a virtualized world requires an understanding of how the actions of one object affect another. If there’s a problem with one object, you need to be able to see which other object interacts with it specifically that could be the causing the problem. To accomplish this requires analytics that can detect and show, for example, that a CPU spike relates to a certain interaction between two VMs. The combination of the interactions is what really helps to understand the particular nature of the issue.

Xangati uses dynamic and interactional profiling and analytics to troubleshoot when there are performance issues. This ability to automatically unearth performance problems as – or even before – their adverse effects are felt is really important. It allows administrators to solve and/or contain these problems before their effects ripple through the infrastructure and become harder and harder to deal with and contain – both technically and otherwise.

Xangati delivers this troubleshooting capability through the use of interactional metrics.  Using these interactional metrics, Xangati can identify the few adverse interactions from the many normal ones because we know how each and every object in the infrastructure behaves and interacts with other objects. Xangati is the only commercial profiling engine that  incorporates interactional metrics at the same level as more traditional consumptive metrics (such as resource usage metrics).

In an increasingly complex and diverse virtualized environment, you need to know about each and every object in the infrastructure – how they behave and interact with each other in real-time – to a scale of hundreds of thousands of objects.  Whether these elements are virtual, physical, on the ground or in the cloud, The Xangati Difference means that you have the built-in awareness to visualize and understand second-by-second behavior – resulting in a management solution that is proactive in helping you ensure virtual infrastructure performance.

Great Customer Service is Knowing What is NOT the Problem

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Euclid Insurance, located in Itasca, Illinois, knows how important customer service is when growing a business. For almost 60 years, Euclid has been providing brokerage services, employee benefits, retirement programs and property and casualty insurance coverage for companies of all sizes across the U.S. and can attribute customer service to much of their longevity and success. Dan Novak, the IT Manager for Euclid, has his own set of customers to keep happy—the 140 Euclid employees that depend on his virtual and physical network.

Dan’s infrastructure currently includes three ESX 4.1 servers hosting VMware View 4.6. He has 65 virtual desktops that he supports and after implementing the VDI solution he started to see some performance issues for various users at various times. Due to the nature of a virtualized environment, performance problems can have a ripple effect on other elements in the infrastructure that can appear and forever disappear in a matter of moments. Finding a monitoring solution that could see metrics for all of the objects across his infrastructure in real time is what led him to trial the Xangati VDI Dashboard.

“I knew that there were multiple factors that can affect a user’s performance and in order to find the root cause we needed to be able to monitor all of the possible factors,” said Dan. “The biggest benefit of Xangati was how the VDI Dashboard showed me what items were not causing an issue.”

With Xangati, Dan was able to eliminate the finger pointing between networking and storage by determining that one user’s performance problem was in fact CPU utilization. Dan used Xangati to record high-CPU events and correlate those with user performance issues. At the same time he was able to see other system metrics during the performance event which helped further confirm CPU utilization as the true source of the performance problem and its ripple effect.

By quickly eliminating which elements are not causing the performance problems across the infrastructure, Dan is able to provide superior support for his Euclid employees and keep them productive. After all, like Euclid Insurance, Dan puts a premium on customer service.

“I attempted to use other management software but lack of support prevented us from moving forward with those vendors, said Dan. “Support is one area where Xangati really shines.”

Private Tours at VMworld 2011 Copenhagen Hands On Labs

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

VMworld 2011 Copenhagen is less than 1 week away! This year, Xangati is pleased to offer you a private tour of the VMworld Hands On Labs infrastructure.

On this tour you will see:

• An overall health score of the VMworld infrastructure
• Live interactions between the virtual desktops and the resources (servers, VMs, apps, networks, clouds, storage devices) they use to conduct the lab sessions
• Alerts and recordings
• PCoIP activity and detail

Choose the 30-minute private tour you would like to book:

• Tuesday, 19 October, 10.00
• Tuesday, 19 October, 12.00
• Tuesday, 19 October, 14.00
• Wednesday, 20 October, 10.00
• Wednesday, 20 October, 12.00
• Wednesday, 20 October, 14.00
• Wednesday, 20 October, 16.00

The video below gives a general overview of the tours we conducted at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas where over 13,000 labs were completed, 148,000 VMs were created and destroyed, and 131 TB of NFS traffic passed through the network in just 5 days. Watch the video of VMworld Las Vegas and then book your private tour for Copenhagen.

 

Managing 400 XenDesktops on vSphere

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Athabasca University, serving 38,000 students in 84 countries worldwide by offering online courses, knows the importance of having an infrastructure that is running problem free—their students depend on having access to courses at any time since “learning at your pace” is one of the advantages of attending Athabasca. With 1,200 faculty and staff members supporting these students, access to the information that the staff needs is just as critical. So when Kevin Richards, PC Systems Analyst at Athabasca, set out to deploy a VDI solution, he knew a management tool would be an important element in its success.

Kevin’s VDI deployment includes 10 VMware ESX servers running 70 virtualized servers and 400 XenDesktops. Getting detailed metrics and visibility into all of these objects was imperative and some of his initial challenges were to dig down and find specific performance metrics such as disk access and network bandwidth. This led him to trial and eventually purchase the Xangati VDI Dashboard.

“I looked at other solutions, which provided a high-level overview, but Xangati gives that overview and much more detail,” said Kevin. “Xangati gives you performance metrics on absolutely anything you would need to know about your virtual environment.”

The Xangati VDI Dashboard gives Kevin an overall health score of his VDI by leveraging its unique performance health engine but also allows him to get granular details such as tracking which datastore’s high latency is affecting user logins, zooming inside the desktop VM to see what processes are overrunning memory, and recording which specific hypervisor is over-run by “boot storms.”

Kevin has used Xangati to drill down into specific desktop sessions that are experiencing issues and quickly identify the problem. For instance, one XenDesktop in particular was very slow to respond. With Xangati, he was able to easily see that the network that particular machine was utilizing was experiencing the issue, so instead of troubleshooting with the end user, the server or anything else, he knew the problem was with the network and was easily able to resolve it.

With Xangati helping manage the VDI, Kevin, the Athabasca faculty and staff, and the university’s students are all achieving their goals.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Xangati wants to help you work smarter, not harder.

Managing a virtualized infrastructure is no easy task, especially when you’re dealing with a myriad of physical and virtual devices. We know that the amount of data you need to monitor for performance management in your virtualized infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. 

With infrastructure resources being continuously shared across the infrastructure, managing performance in a VDI environment, in particular, requires a vast amount of detail as to what is happening at the exact time of a performance problem in order to accurately identify the source. As Gartner analyst Terry Cosgrove points out, “Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) is trading a configuration management challenge for a performance challenge.” Hundreds of thousands of different objects are in a constant state of flux, and every single element’s activity can potentially impact another, setting off a chain reaction that can be overwhelming to track.

At Xangati we realized early on that the changes in the data center operation required a completely new approach to identify and resolve performance problems. Our products have been designed to allow you to work smarter, not harder to locate problem sources faster and more easily than any other solution out there. Our goal has been to make it as effortless as possible for you to monitor your infrastructure to ensure performance success.

Xangati’s visual trouble ticket is one of our very best tools to do that by allowing your end users to trigger a ‘trouble ticket’ uniquely paired with a DVR recording at the time of their specific performance problem. With this visual trouble ticket, you have unparalleled insight into the virtual desktop that completely captures the precise moment when a problem took place. Our customers have found this tool invaluable in quickly isolating issues, and no one else offers a similar capability.

The visual trouble ticket provides you with a constructive “incident management process” giving objective information about an end user’s activity so that you can effectively focus your efforts to resolve the problem. Mark Vaughn of SearchServerVirtualization.com describes the visual trouble ticket as follows, “The Xangati Management Dashboard Suite takes a unique approach to record-and-replay capabilities, allowing users to record the current state of a virtual machine (VM) and immediately attach it to a help-desk ticket.”

With the visual trouble ticket, you get objective data surrounding a user’s activity that is presented from multiple vantage points – from the standpoint of the infrastructure, protocols and even from within the desktop care of the Windows Management Interface (WMI).

This data is invaluable in helping the service desk to immediately triage an issue and determine the source:

• Is it human error? Is a user, for example, impacting his own experience by trying to watch a high definition YouTube video over his remote access VPN while using his virtual desktop?
• Is it a storage latency or a network congestion issue?
• Or is there some kind of process bogging down the desktop?

Armed with the facts provided through the visual trouble ticket – as opposed to time-consuming speculation – Xangati has seen customers reduce time to problem resolution by up to 70 percent! And that translates to satisfied end users – crucial in a VDI environment, where a poor end user experience can effectively kill a VDI project.

By showing second-by-second the environment that existed when an individual was experiencing performance problems, the visual trouble ticket allows you to successfully track the escalation process – instead of trying to piece together what happened from an end user’s memory.

With the visual trouble ticket, you can more quickly focus on the cause of the performance problem, resulting in faster time to problem resolution, and enabling you to work smarter, not harder.

The Force is Strong with This One – Xangati at VMworld 2011

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

With attendance surging at 19,000 and counting, VMworld reminds me of its own  little virtualization galaxy. But it’s a galaxy that Xangati is most glad to visit—with an energy level and excitement that is unmatched by any other conference of its kind. Xangati is always thrilled to be part of VMworld, and this year’s show in Las Vegas was no different.

Xangati extends kudos to @bknudtson, @vseanclark and @theronconrey for organizing a great kick-off party at this year’s VMunderground WuPaaS. With bacon t-shirts and a bacon gift basket, we kept the pork (and ale) flowing all night long! Monday night’s Official Unofficial VMworld Community Tweetup gave us yet another chance to hook up with the vblogger and peep communities—and to give away some poker chips! A big thanks to @jtroyer for setting up a winner! 

Besides being incredibly fun, both events also gave us the opportunity to engage with some of our favorite vbloggers, customers and partners in a more casual setting. The Xangati team always looks forward to them—and hopes to sponsor more in the future!

With a Star Wars theme that seemed to really resonate with attendees, the force was especially strong with Xangati this year. For the second year in a row, Xangati won for “Virtualization Management” at the Best of VMworld awards program. The latest release of our Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) was recognized out of more than 40 nominees for its outstanding performance, functionality and value. 

In addition, the XMD took home the silver in Virtual Intelligence Briefing’s Emerging Technology Excellence Awards that were also announced at the show. Not to be outdone, Xangati for vSphere, was featured once again by @kendrickcoleman and @davidmdavis as one of the industry’s top ten free tools for VMware vSphere. You can see the video with all the winners here.

Listening closely to your needs has always been our #1 priority and—I believe—has directly influenced Xangati’s success—reflected not only by these awards but also from the tremendous attendee response at the show. Reactions to the XMD were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and our message “The VI Admin Strikes Back” certainly ‘struck’ a chord. 

Beyond its clever marketing appeal (kudos team!), the Star Wars angle resonated because it’s rooted in reality. It is absolutely essential for VI managers to be able to accurately identify problem areas within the VI and communicate them to other business areas. The XMD gives them the necessary tools to do this—combating the blame game that frequently happens when no one can find the problem.

With 360-degree insights into all the dynamic interactions occurring throughout the infrastructure, Xangati allows you to fill in the holes, giving the confidence to virtualize your business-critical applications.

These insights are just as vital for deployments of VDI. Only a 360-degree view into all silos—and the continual interactions that are occurring between them—can guarantee performance spanning end-to-end across the VDI—and keep your end users satisfied.

Xangati fills in the gaps by continuously monitoring all of  the individual interactions—between both physical and virtual elements. This ability is exactly why VMware has selected Xangati for the past two years to manage its hands-on labs at VMworld. This year, over 13,000 labs were completed, 148,000 VMs were created and destroyed, and 131 TB of NFS traffic passed through the network in just 5 days. Our Performance Health Engine provided real-time health analyses for all of the moving parts—across storage, network, servers, desktops, clients and applications.  

And it moves. And it’s pretty—so pretty that it’s almost like ‘eye-candy’ for administrators. Really—everyone loves the look of this dashboard!

But—above all else—it’s functional. The real-time data it provides makes it valuable. Presenting the data in an easy-to-understand, intuitive fashion makes it usable. The price makes it doable for any organization.

New technologies can be intimidating, but you can’t fight change. Xangati helps you embrace the force of virtualization with the tools for success—harnessing virtualization with knowledge and defense. Without this knowledge, there is fear, and fear is the path to the dark side—a virtualized infrastructure that has no visibility, where you cannot see how one silo is impacting the other, and how one interaction might have grave implications for another. 

If we missed you at the show or you want to learn more about our virtualization management solutions—please, don’t hesitate to contact us. Call, email or tweet—we’re a responsive group! Also, get a taste of last week’s show by viewing our own @njiversen’s VMworld video here.

And—until we meet again—may the virtualization force be with you!

Xangati Hits Jackpot with Lucky Number 7 at VMworld!

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Attention VMworld attendees, vExperts, VI and VDI managers and valued customers and partners – are you looking for a winning hand at VMworld Las Vegas?

Then forget about black jack, walk by the slots, pass the roulette table and go to the one place that will deliver the best odds possible for your virtualization initiatives and your VMworld experience – Xangati’s booth #471!

Xangati has hit the jackpot at VMworld and has seven surefire ways to spread the winnings and make this your best VMworld experience ever! It’s called smart gaming and requires no risk on your part whatsoever.

All you need to do is show up at the Xangati booth to see and experience first-hand these seven unbeatable propositions:

#1 – Go with the house favorite and ensure true odds with the industry’s fastest troubleshooting  solution available. Come by and take a look at the third major release (in less than 12 months!) of our award-winning XMD suite. Already a Best of VMworld Award Winner last year, the XMD now packs even more functionality – reducing time to problem resolution by an astonishing 70 percent! Deeper storage insights, a view into the guest VM via WMI statistics, and support for real-time PCoIP troubleshooting all but eliminate every wild card for performance management. 

#2 – VDI high rollers won’t want to miss an opportunity for a behind-the-scenes tour of VMworld’s VDI vCloud– responsible for supporting thousands of sessions for the show’s hands-on labs. VMworld once again selected Xangati to exclusively manage its vCloud in order to ensure the highest performance possible for conference attendees. Swing by our booth, and Xangati can accompany you with our special VIP pass and give you an inside look at this amazing infrastructure!

#3 – You don’t need beginner’s luck to win with Xangati for vSphere – FREE (formerly Xangati for ESX), the most feature rich free tool on the market! This free tool – consistently named one of the top 10 free tools by Kendrick Coleman and David Davis – was designed to make the installation process as simple as possible, making it easy for experts and novices alike to start benefitting ASAP. And now it provides every bit of functionality found in our award-winning VI and VDI multi-host solutions for a single host. This includes all of the new functionality added in the latest XMD release – again, totally free! Plus, Xangati for vSphere – FREE provides true cross-silo management in one solution – definitely NOT your typical free tool!

#4 – Is your virtualized infrastructure feeling a little sluggish? Come get a free fitness appraisal from one of our knowledgeable sales engineers and make a solid wager on your virtualization health. Our Performance Health Engine tracks all virtual and physical components across a broad spectrum of performance metrics to a scale of 250,000! Xangati can compare real-time data feeds versus performance profiles for each object within four microseconds! Counting cards doesn’t even come close...  

#5 – Comps! Xangati not only has all the tools for VI admins to strike back and win the blame wars, but also has the cool comps to go with them – including limited edition “Blame Wars: The VI Admin Strikes Back” posters and t-shirts. Future VMworld collector’s items? So don’t sit in the keno lounge all day trying to figure out what went wrong while others are pointing the finger at virtualization. Hurry over to the Xangati booth and stop the blame wars now!

#6 – Have you had a little bad luck at the craps table and exceeded your IT betting limit? No worries – Xangati will give you the best payout in Vegas. Xangati offers unbeatable pricing and value with server virtualization at $149/socket and a breakthrough price for VDI at $10/desktop.* And, of course, everything is FREE for Xangati for vSphere – FREE!

#7 –Xangati likes fun! Whether it’s sponsoring the VMunderground warm-up party as a service (WuPaaS.Next), serving bacon or chocolate covered espresso beans, Xangati has a proven reputation for having a good time. Come and join us.  You can certainly expect we’ll have a few jokers hidden up our sleeves at VMworld Las Vegas! 

Come by the Xangati booth (again, #471!) to engage with our extremely knowledgeable yet fun-loving virtualization dealers and take a look at our royal flush! Xangati has essentially closed the circle with 360° visibility and context into all dynamic interactions occurring both in and outside of the VI – and we want to show the whole VMworld! So come on down!

 

* International prices may vary due to exchange/currency rate differences.

Virtualization’s Lucky Number 360 and VMworld Las Vegas

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

Xangati has the lucky number for your infrastructure – 360 – and we’re getting ready to take it on the road to VMworld Las Vegas!

Xangati has just introduced our fourth, significant release of the Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) suite – essentially closing the circle on infrastructure performance management by giving you the ability to track all dynamic interactions within 360 degrees.

Virtualization demands an understanding about all of the relationships and interactions that exist between highly individual but connected elements over a shared infrastructure. Everything is tied together and must be viewed as a whole entity in order to see how issues in one segment can create performance ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.

The XMD was designed from the start to provide cross silo visibility—encompassing network, storage, servers, client devices, desktops and applications.  But with this new release, we’ve added more depth and breadth to give you almost peripheral vision into everything occurring in the infrastructure—plus the context that you need to resolve problems.

In our fourth release we’ve added:

• a deep dive into storage so you can quickly identify storage latency issues that you just couldn’t see before;
• inside guest functionality—pulling in Window Management Interface (WMI) statistics to give more context as to what processes are driving resources than ever before; and
• live and continuous views into PCoIP performance within a VDI environment through a technology collbaboration with Teradici.

That’s not all. As of today all of our functionality—including the above new capabilities—will be integrated into our free single host tool—Xangati for vSphere - Free (formerly Xangati for ESX). Now—for the first time—you have a solution that includes every single feature and capability found in our VI and VDI multi-host solutions—at absolutely no cost. Including our Performance Health Engine, all interactions are continuously tracked and analyzed, giving you unprecedented context through our health index for the fastest time to problem resolution possible.

With context, everything suddenly makes sense. Parts of your infrastructure that were in the dark are suddenly illuminated, giving you confidence to accelerate your initiatives—whether in the VI or VDI.

But context isn’t something that’s only found on a screen.

Xangati wants to engage with you live—and establish some one-on-one context—at VMworld Las Vegas.  Just as understanding the relationships within our infrastructure is vital to its health—so, too, are the relationships that we cultivate within the industry.

And what better way to start cultivating those relationships than by attending the VMunderground warm-up party as a service WuPaaS.Next?

The VMunderground event literally kicks off VMworld on Sunday evening enabling people from across our entire industry—attendees, vendors, vExperts—to make connections that facilitate knowledge sharing; introduce a different technology POV; or simply engender comradeship through a shared pint. Xangati is honored to be selected as a first time sponsorfor VMunderground being held this year at Nine Fine Irishmen, the premier Irish pub in Las Vegas.

If we can’t hook up with you at VMunderground, please stop by the Xangati booth #471. We’d be happy to demonstrate the new features we’ve added in the XMD suite or help you download the full functionality Xangati for vSphere - Free. Or simply talk about your particular infrastructure needs. Our team has a tremendous amount of combined knowledge and experience, and we’re always happy to share our insights.

If you have ever taken advantage of VMworld’s hands-on labs, you’ve already benefitted from Xangati’s management expertise. Xangati’s VDI solution is being used for the 2nd time by VMware to support and manage its vCloud at the show, ensuring the incredibly high performance needed to successfully run its lab sessions.

In the larger picture, VMworld is all about connections—creating a forum where companies, vendors and partners can meet to learn about the technologies and put them into context as to what they mean for our future. It’s about having a 360 degree view into everything that’s going on right now within our industry combined with context.

360 gives more than just visibility. It also gives vision—making it virtualization’s luckiest number at this year’s VMworld Las Vegas.

Bringing Confidence in Performance

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

At the start of the year, I proclaimed Xangati’s 2011 New Year’s resolution—to obliterate virtualization stall.  Now that we’re about midway through the year, I’d like to check in and give you a quick update on how we’re doing.

In business, strategists often talk about boosting company performance one customer at a time. Well, at Xangati, we focus on accelerating your virtualization initiatives—one installation at a time—by removing the obstacles that create virtualization stall.

Since Xangati is actually averaging over 10 installations a day, we’re currently removing these obstacles at an even brisker pace! In fact, we’re moving so fast that Q2 represented our best quarter ever for customer acquisition and overall sales.

I believe that each of Xangati’s installations represents a step forward in the obliteration of virtualization stall. And this is achieved in one way and one way only—by bringing confidence in performance.

As you roll out any new technology, the key question is always ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ This question is the same whether you’re looking at migrating your core business applications to a virtualized infrastructure or deploying a VDI initiative to a distributed workforce.

Unfortunately, you can’t guarantee that something will always work. But you can bring confidence in performance with tools that allow you to quickly identify when the system isn’t working, easily assess the problem and pinpoint it so accurately that fixing it becomes as effortless and streamlined as possible.

As you implement virtualization technologies, performance management is critical. Xangati reduces the operational challenges and complexity of managing these systems, allowing you to fully benefit from your investment.

CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) recently selected Xangati for VDI to manage its global virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative. You can take a look at the announcement here. As a leader in using innovative technologies for competitive advantage, CBRE has been an earlier adopter of virtualization.

CBRE recognized that a poor end-user experience is devastating to VDI. In order to move its VDI initiative to operational scale, it needed more reassurance in its ability to identify and resolve potential issues. Xangati for VDI gave CBRE that reassurance—reducing its time to problem resolution by an astonishing 70 percent!

Xangati now has more than 4000 installations worldwide and reaches 40 countries on five continents. And you can expect to hear even higher numbers from us shortly as we capitalize on some exciting developments in Europe, as well as Down Under.

As thousands of companies transform their data centers, they are turning to Xangati to integrate performance management for their physical and virtual infrastructures.

In just the first six months of 2011, Xangati has offered the following solutions—all providing a solid foundation for maximizing confidence in performance:

• Xangati for ESX — two significant releases for our free tool with expanded functionality making it even more powerful—still at absolutely no cost. Download your copy today: Xangati for ESX
• Xangati for VDI — the first solution able to comprehensively track all elements impacting VDI performance both in and outside the virtual infrastructure and available right now for a free trial: Xangati for VDI

These products, as well as our Xangati for VI—also available for free trial—all feature our Performance Health Engine—a patent-pending, memory-based engine that can track and analyze the health of the virtualized infrastructure within mere microseconds. Our Performance Health Engine can alert you to potential problems before they even occur!

More is on the way for Q3 and Q4. VMWorld Las Vegas is around the corner, and Xangati will be there with new winning solutions. Feel free to place your bets now and get started with Xangati today. I’d say the odds are in our favor—and yours!

May’s Great VDI Giveaway Winner Is…

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Congratulations to Dario Gnaccarini from SIDIN (www.sidin.it) for winning a Xangati VDI Dashboard! Dario was one of many, many entries we received that simply registered for a free trial of our newest product and was lucky enough to be the winner. Even though we can only have one winner, every person that entered still benefitted by seeing the first solution to comprehensively track all key infrastructure components that affect VDI performance.

The Xangati VDI Dashboard gives Dario—and all the entrants— live, continuous, to-the-second visibility across all silos: clients, desktops, networks, servers, storage and applications without requiring any agents.

If you didn’t win, don’t be discouraged. You still have one more chance to win for our June winner. If you haven’t registered for a VDI Dashboard trial yet, do so today. Who knows, you could be as lucky as Dario.

Four Words for Desktop Virtualization

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

The worldwide Citrix Synergy 2011 conference is in San Francisco this week, and one of its key themes revolves around the Citrix® Desktop Transformation Model – where the ‘wow’ meets the ‘how’ of desktop virtualization.

When I first heard the phrase “From Wow to How,” it sounded like typical marketing lingo. But I have to say that this phrase has really grown on me. I believe that – in just four words – it aptly describes what’s needed for the success of desktop virtualization and neatly sums up of the purpose of the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model. Plus, it’s kind of catchy!

Well, today, I’m excited to share that Xangati will be contributing its own special ‘wow’ and ‘how’ and adding value to the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model. Xangati will be helping customers with their operational needs including monitoring and management tools . The  operational tools are critical for Citrix customers to successfully plan and implement desktop virtualization.

When you look at the possibilities of desktop virtualization, you can’t help but be struck by the wow factor. Consider the business promises. Secure access to corporate data and applications from almost anywhere and from any device.  Streamlined operations. Maximum flexibility for future growth as needed. Increased user productivity and minimized costs.

With so much potential wow to be experienced, there is certainly ample inspiration to develop the technologies that enable the how. The Citrix Synergy conference is a platform that provides us with even more inspiration. The effect that you have together is much greater than the effect you can have by yourself. By gathering with other desktop virtualization experts,  hearing directly from users about their day-to-day challenges and listening to some of the most prominent thought leaders in the industry, we achieve a higher synergy.

We are on the cusp of another technology transition – where methodologies are shifting and changing the way that we conduct our business and go about our everyday lives. The model that Citrix has developed understands that a change is occurring and is focused on making the transition as successful and as easy as possible for its customers and partners.

The Desktop Transformation Model leverages broad industry partnerships and tens of thousands of supported products to give customers the confidence that they need to implement desktop virtualization. With the addition of the Xangati VDI Dashboard, customers now have the ability to frame the entire desktop environment – both in and outside of the virtual infrastructure – to a scale not previously possible – and with real-time and continuous health assessments that visually alert the team to any potential problem area. To borrow again from Citrix, it’s a big ‘wow’ and a ‘how.’

As part of the Desktop Transformation Model, the Citrix XenDesktop® with Flexcast™ delivery technology allows customers the choice and flexibility to choose the desktop technology that best meets the needs of each particular group of users – whether they need a mobile desktop virtualization solution or the ability to work from home.

Although their specific needs are different, Xangati can ensure that each end user operates in perfect harmony by providing the most comprehensive infrastructure performance management solution available.

Xangati will continue to make our technologies available to you in the broadest way possible – through participation in programs such as the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model that not only move our own solution forward but also the entire industry.

There are many different pieces that bring about the how. But don’t underestimate the motivational power that from understanding the impact that you can make in this changing technology ecosystem.  At Xangati we are very focused on that impact.

Help Us Get the Synergy Party Started!

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Our anticipation for next week’s Citrix Synergy 2011 conference in San Francisco was already high, so you can imagine how thrilled we were to learn that Xangati has been chosen as a finalist for the Best of Synergy Awards! That’s right! The Xangati VDI Dashboard has been selected as one of three contenders in the “Best Partner Solution for Virtual Data Centers” category. 

And you’ve been invited to help the judges select the final winners! Voting is open now until Wednesday, May 25 at 1:00 p.m., so don’t wait. 

Just click here and cast your vote for Xangati.

We’re certainly getting in the Synergy spirit here at Xangati and hope that you are, too. The Xangati VDI Dashboard marks a significant achievement not only for Xangati but also for the industry as the first – and only – performance management solution that can provide a comprehensive and concentrated look at the entire VDI in a single pane of glass. Plus, with our unique and patent-pending Health Performance Engine, VI administrators can continuously monitor the VDI to an unrivaled scale of 250,000 objects – including desktops and clients!

Our entire team has devoted tremendous effort to developing and bringing to market this product, and it’s rewarding to receive this industry honor less than two months after its introduction.

So – please – help us get the Synergy party started and celebrate Xangati’s latest achievement for virtualization! Vote today!

New Kid on the Block

Russel Wilkinson, Director Field Product Management, Xangati

I joined Xangati as a field product managemetn director about one month ago. Despite being the new kid on the block, Xangati has made me feel right at home.

And what a great time to join the Xangati team! The timing of my coming on board practically collided with the introduction of the Xangati VDI Dashboard! The energy and excitement surrounding the launch of this breakthrough product has been incredible—and with good reason.

Xangati has once again raised the bar for virtualization and cloud computing management with the first infrastructure performance management (IPM) solution that can fully track and support VDI to operational scale. The response to the product has been phenomenal—especially in regards to its Health Engine.

I’ve been a strong proponent of Xangati’s solutions for some time now—another reason why being here at Xangati feels so right. I was first introduced to Xangati’s solutions as a Desktop Specialist at VMware, where I worked with both engineering and sales teams.

While at VMware, I had read a blog written by a former colleague about the Xangati solution. I was looking for a way to extract more performance data from some of our VMware View 4 pilots and decided to give Xangati a shot. After evaluating the solution, I was sold!

With Xangati’s live-to-the-second views, we could characterize PCoIP, its load on the network, and compare it to what other traffic was sharing in the same network infrastructure. Seeing how these resources were interworking across the WAN gave us incredible insight, so that we could more rapidly identify and troubleshoot potential performance issues.

Following that initial experience, I had the pleasure of engaging further with the Xangati team on a number of internal and external projects. VMware leveraged the Xangati toolset for several customer events, as well as to manage the hands-on-labs at both VMworld San Francisco and VMworld Copenhagen. The Xangati solution was key to allowing us to track all of the VDI lab sessions end-to-end as they traversed the network.

I enjoyed more than six amazing years at VMware—at a time of incredible change in the industry—and certainly had no immediate plans to leave. But sometimes you come across an opportunity that’s just too good to be true, and you have to grab onto it. That’s how I feel about my move to Xangati. It’s professionally invigorating to be on a forward-thinking team with the engineering prowess and agility to develop and quickly bring to market these innovative solutions that contribute so significantly to the successful implementation of virtualization technologies.

The Xangati engineering discipline is amazing!

What can you expect from me? For starters, my attention will remain highly customer-focused. I’ve always paid close attention to real-world business needs at VMware and before that at Citrix.

At Xangati, we want to be sure to keep a close look on how we can continue to add the most value for you. We’re doing a pretty good job already, so we have a head start, but there’s always room for improvement. We want to make it even easier for the VI administrator to understand everything that’s occurring in the infrastructure—to help you succeed.

With a home base in Detroit, I’ll be moving around a lot—working closely with the Xangati sales team wherever I’m needed—and meeting frequently with you—our customers and partners. I want to get to know your unique business requirements, so that we can provide you with the best technology solution to meet them. 

Feel free to contact me! I’d love to hear from you and see how Xangati might be able to assist with your particular virtualization initiatives. You can also follow me on twitter @VirtualRussel.

I’m thrilled to be here and adding yet another role in my life—Dad to two awesome girls, husband to a wonderful wife and—now—new kid on the Xangati block!