So, you’re looking to purchase a new converged infrastructure environment and are absolutely excited to put diverse workloads on it immediately. There are new capabilities around virtualization, cloud extension and even potentially reducing the data center footprint. However, there are some key aspects to remember when working with a converged infrastructure ecosystem. Yes, newer hardware has more resources, but these resources are still very much finite.
Administrators must adopt good practices in managing and working with their physical resources. Whether your converged infrastructure is located in the cloud or a local data center, your resources must be carefully allocated to both physical and virtual machines. This means planning out a VM or server prior to deploying it. Consider this:
- Planning may include sizing, database considerations and understanding the type of workloads that will be hosted on your converged infrastructure platform.
- With more resources available, administrators must take extra time to plan out their use.
- Too often, an engineer who is unfamiliar with the system will deliver far too many resources in the form of RAM, vCPUs or storage to a given workload. Whenever those resources are not being used, money is being wasted.
- You can intelligently reallocate storage and other resources when working with converged infrastructure. Via policy, storage can be used with a different machine. At the same time, another VM may be in desperate need of extra RAM. In these situations, it’s important to carefully plan where and how data center resources are utilized. Integration with hypervisor and monitoring tools helps alleviate resource control issues.
- Testing workloads and understanding how VMs or physical hosts will be utilized prior to deploying them will help in delivering the right amount of resources.
Oftentimes, training is required to show engineers how and where they should be deploying their VMs and the associated resource set. Storage, RAM and CPU resources can be very addictive and can be distributed far too quickly to workloads that either don’t need them or can be provisioned more efficiently. This is truly where planning can help alleviate a lot of these types of issues and help create a much healthier converged infrastructure solution.
We also now have dynamic RAM and storage provisioning options available, so, for example, a VM will take up only as much space on a disk as it needs as opposed to being assigned as set amount. Similarly, guest VMs can be assigned only as much RAM as they require, leaving additional resources for other machines as needed.
Remember, resource management best practices should always be applied in any environment to help maximize data center efficiency. Consider these best practices:
- Set alarms and thresholds to alert you around resource challenges.
- Map out your resources and create proactive policies that can intelligently de-provision or even re-provision various resources.
- Learn how automation and load-balancing tools can be used when creating converged infrastructure solutions. These software tools allow you to control your convergence ecosystem and the workloads it’s delivering.
Moving forward, organizations will continue to see the benefits behind converged infrastructure. However, as with any physical environment, your resources are absolutely finite. Monitoring your ecosystem will help keep your resource utilization in check and allow your IT environment to continue to effectively enable your business.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.
