InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity: How AI simplifies HCI, Part 4 – Deep dive into Virtual Machines

EzmeralExperts · ‎01-09-2020

In this fourth and final installment, blogger Matt Haron explores virtual machines (VMs), and how the information HPE InfoSight provides can make IT administrators the masters of their hyperconverged realm.

It is the moment I’m sure you have all been waiting for: the final part of the InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity blog series. As you might remember, in Part 2 and Part 3 I focused on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hosts and clusters, and how HPE InfoSight predictive analytics simplifies the job of IT administrators. In this fourth and final part, I will go deep into virtual machines (VMs) and how the information provided can make IT administrators the masters of their HPE SimpliVity realm.

Beauty in simplicity – thanks to AI

By now you know how excited I am about this new HPE SimpliVity feature. Built-in artificial intelligence (AI) reveals details you need and expands on the details you always wanted but may not have had easy access to in the past. HPE InfoSight provides that access from hosts to clusters, and all the way down to VMs.

As an IT admin, you know that VM details are key to making sure everything is healthy in your environment. In an HPE SimpliVity environment, InfoSight can display those details, summarized on the VM overview page.

The first column contains a list of VMs by name. The next set of columns display the logical space being occupied by VM data, the backups, and the total data stored. The backup information indicates the number of backups for each VM, and whether they are local or remote.

The I/O in the past 24 hours is also displayed on the right side of the screen, including reads and writes. I/O reporting is a valuable piece of information, so I will dig deeper into a VM to give you a closer look.

I/O simplifies troubleshooting in your hyperconverged environment

Clicking on a virtual machine name on the overview page provides a deeper look into that specific VM. The deep-dive page presents a summary of the VM, including the backup policy and data store name. Logical Space is displayed in the middle, showing the overall use of VM data, local backups, and remote backups. Finally, you are presented with the VM performance for the past 24 hours. This is critical information for troubleshooting, and while looking simple, it is actually very detailed.

The I/O data that is displayed represents a change from the original release of InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity. The initial release gave a daily average of I/O per second (IOPS) for the virtual machine. As IT admins, you and I know that not all VMs are busy 100 percent of the time. There can be times during the day that the VM is idle, or times when there is parallel processing going on, and in those cases the daily average can be so small, the VM appears to be inactive. If the average IOPS of a specific VM is .0115 in a given 24-hour period, for example, this will of course round to 0. In the initial software release when InfoSight was reporting average IOPS, VMs with very little I/O were often being reported as 0, which wasn’t exactly accurate.

Now that the reporting has changed, you get the total I/O for a 24-hour period. This gives you a correct output of the actual I/O for a specific SimpliVity VM. This is especially helpful for being able to understand the performance of VMs that have very low activity.

The I/O report makes troubleshooting easier. Are you getting reports of performance issues from developers? With a glance, you can look at the performance of VMs over the 24-hour period and easily spot non-ordinary performance issues.

When you scroll down on the page, you are presented with the Logical Space view for the VM.

This detailed view gives the complete breakdown of VM data, local backups, and remote backups. This information is really a snapshot of how the space for a specific VM is distributed, and lets you manage VMs accordingly. For example, what if you are seeing a large number of local backups for a specific VM, taking up a large amount of storage? You may want to move those local backups to secondary storage. If you see unexpected amounts of backups in a remote location, you can adjust those backups, too. HPE SimpliVity has you covered.

Speaking of secondary storage, with the release of the HPE SimpliVity 4.0.0 software, you are able to backup directly from HPE SimpliVity to HPE StoreOnce with no additional software needed. I will share more information on this in a future blog.

Thank you and goodnight

In this 4-part blog series, I intended to show how InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity truly simplifies the work that IT admins do. I started my career in IT, working my way up from the Helpdesk to leading an infrastructure team. My experience has helped me contribute to making better solutions for those IT admins still out in the field. I have always been a firm believer in what I call “Lazy IT.”

“Lazy IT” is all about efficiency – if I have to do something repeatedly, seems to me it should be automated. InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity is super-efficient in that respect. Through AI and monitoring capabilities, it helps IT admins automate repetitious functions, so we can focus on bettering our hyperconverged environments, rather than searching to find issues before they happen. We can finally be proactive, not reactive, from the cluster level right down to VM management.

On a related note: You might be interested in this lightboard video. Vinay Jonnakuti provides a simple technical discussion of how HPE SimpliVity works, and how HPE InfoSight spans the whole HCI environment. He packs a lot of information into the 10-minute video.