Want to learn how to manage and grow your IT infrastructure without having to buy another server? There is useful little article floating around the web, titled Practical Steps for Building and Managing an Internal Cloud, by one of our network managers, Stephen Dalgar, and our Director of Product Marketing, Marina Gil-Santamaria.

By now we’ve all recognized the importance of virtualization and its growing prevalence among IT professionals. Moving to a virtual environment significantly reduces hardware costs and complexity, while increasing server utilization and reducing the overall cost of ownership. Here at WhatsUp Gold, we not only provide tools to monitor your virtual environment, we also share our best practices for virtualization with you. After all, we haven’t purchased a single server in almost three years of sustained network growth, so read on to learn how we achieved this.

When making a move to virtualization, there are steps you can take in order to stay organized and maintain efficiency. According to Dalgar and Gil-Santamaria, the following checklist proved indispensible when building our cloud:

1. Properly scope your virtualization project, objectives and goals, as well as success metrics
2. Get buy-in from all key stakeholders (sponsoring, business and technical)
3. Put a policy in place for how physical to virtual migrations are to be executed
4. Put strict controls in place to allow for VM creation
5. Closely monitor physical resources, cpu, interface, memory, and disk utilization.
6. Use Resource pools allowing production servers to take precedence over hardware.
7. Look for a management tool that offers single console monitoring across network devices, servers, applications, virtual resources, network traffic and events and log data
8. Inventory your physical and virtualized environments on an on-going basis
9. Overlay compliance and data security policies and organizational and management requirements
10. Don’t forget to monitor, alerts and report on critical vCenter alerts, there are actually 300+ vCenter events

You should also establish set infrastructure management strategies for when the cloud is in place.

WhatsUp WhatsVirtual is precisely the tool to help with the virtualization process with one console to manage both your physical and virtual environments. Once you have WUG you simply refresh your license to get automatic discovery, mapping and documentation of the physical servers and virtual resources that make up your entire infrastructure. WhatsVirtual also integrates with VMware API to collect performance metrics, gain access to key management tasks, and oversee VMware vMotion or High Availability live migrations. When your environment is in place you have the ability to control virtual machine actions like power on, power off, suspend, reset, and backup as well. Additional capabilities include workspace reports for physical host servers, virtual machines, and virtual clusters; and seamless integration into the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center.

Learn more about WhatsUp WhatsVirtual or download your free 30 day trial!

Now through August 15, buy WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual at a Special Introductory Price!

To learn more about building and managing a virtual environment, view the full article. 

By Ennio Carboni

It is likely my own employees will approach me with confused expressions and ask why I would take time to defend Solarwinds’ earning announcement yesterday. My product management and development teams can point to the deliberate design differences WhatsUp Gold is built with that make it more usable than Orion and my sales staff will argue that the WhatsUp Gold pricing model with unlimited monitors per device is a higher value and better integrity solution than the exploitive SolarWinds model of charging per instance of a monitor per interface. I enthusiastically agree with my product and sales teams! We are a better choice but that war is won in the field, within the network environments of all size companies. Today, what is more important to me is addressing the macro issue of transformation the network management and performance market is undergoing. It is a revolutionary change and companies like Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold and SolarWinds are leading and the market will not be the same again.

Wall Street Process Has No Regard for the Road Less Traveled
Wall Street reacted negatively to SolarWinds’ earnings for Q2 and forecast for Q3 and 2010. That’s what Wall Street does – mathematicians and bean counters dedicated to predicting the economic fate of companies like SolarWinds. The decision to go public is filled with sexy connotations of wealth and power and for some those dreams are realized. For others however, the aspirations of money and parallel the 2 wheel car driving the mountain road designed for four wheel drive trucks. You set out and quickly discover the ride is going to be hellish and there is 90% chance you will break down before your reach the destination. SolarWinds lowered its earnings outlook but I think they still represent a model business in terms of growth and profit. Public markets are demanding and when you show up to the game having the reputation of hitting home runs every time you’re at bat; solid singles and triples get you boo from the street. Solarwinds will be fine. They will acquire accretive businesses to boost growth numbers while sacrificing margin and the Wall Street critics will continue their predictable judgments. In all this drama, the fact that the marketplace has and is undergoing a huge shift in the way it buys and uses software will be lost to the financial noise of Wall Street.

“No One Gets Fired Anymore for Not Buying HP Openview”
Up until the genesis of the recent recession, the famous line thrown around by some buyers was “no one gets fired for buying HP”. I am sure it’s still true that the IT management teams of the upper echelon of F250 companies still feel this way and who can blame them – heck, with all the golf outings and high priced dinners they receive from the HP, CA and IBM guys, it’s real hard to say no.

However, this recession and the ongoing humility brought by global markets have changed the IT landscape forever. Budgets are slashed and we (Ipswitch) predict based on our prospective interviews with thousands of IT buyers that budgets are permanently reduced but most importantly; for the first time in many of their careers, IT staff is expected to look at non-Big 4 solutions specific to network and performance management. The strong, double digit growth both Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold and Solarwinds are experiencing is proof positive that IT buyers are not only looking outside the big 4, they are buying outside the big 4. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold and SolarWinds have had their best financial years in recessionary years.

“Solutions are Replacing Platforms”
There is no magic nor any tricks. We are selling more because we have designed solutions that are replacing existing platforms – Yes it is that exciting and that powerful. The notion that large firms have more complexity is true. The notion that the complexity can be managed with more complexity is not true. Solutions can now replace platforms. And…a side but important benefit has also been realized. Because buyers can buy best in class solutions from different vendors, the onus in now on every vendor including Ipswitch to build the best in class solution in every area we compete on or our buyers will go to a different a vendor. That is a world of difference away from yesteryear when you bought the HP platform and then were forced to buy ONLY HP plug-ins at a high cost and low usability standard.

Wall Street will continue its ferocious review of SolarWinds and others and the consequences will be seen in attractive headlines on yahoo finance and the WSJ. Take a step back and look beyond the boundaries of Wall Street’s cares. The network management and performance space is officially changed and Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold and SolarWinds will be leading that change by bringing the simplicity that enables management over complexity.

And…don’t fall victim to the idiotic and verbose statements made by the on sleuth of new entrants looking to cash in to the opportunity in this new market. Hardware solutions are the wrong alternative. The MSP space is alive simply because usability by vendors including us was too lax for a little while but we are back with better than ever usability that enables every company of every size the opportunity to manage and drive the sacred network assets.