Cirba adds vSphere intelligence  

Cirba says that organisations relying on VMware® vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS) for real-time virtual machine (VM) rebalancing can achieve intelligent, policy-based control of infrastructure by pairing the solution with Cirba.

Cirba’s analytics software provides true software-defined control over compute resources. Cirba programmatically codifies an organisation’s operational policies and applies advanced analytics to determine the optimal VM routing and placement decisions for the purpose of maximising density and avoiding performance risk. The solution has been proven to drive increased automation and substantially higher VM density, saving customers millions in infrastructure hardware and software. vSphere DRS is a tool used by most VMware customers to monitor utilisation and move VMs to avoid short-term over stacking of physical hosts. In order to add intelligence to this process, Cirba integrates with vSphere DRS to synchronise vSphere DRS rules with Cirba’s infrastructure control policies. Using Cirba’s policies and analysis results to define how vSphere DRS makes VM moves, gives customers both real-time control and confidence that comes from having an intelligent control system actively and automatically optimising the environment.

“Real time VM rebalancing as provided by tools like vSphere DRS should be used as a safety net, not an optimisation strategy. Using deeper analytics to drive VM placements translates into higher VM density, lower software costs, and reduced VM movement within an environment. The ability to react to changing and unforeseen conditions is still important, but constant motioning is an indication of a poorly managed environment,” said Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-Founder of Cirba. “Combining Cirba and DRS gives customers the best of both worlds – intelligent predictive analytics that know exactly where VMs should go and how resources should be allocated, alongside a tool providing real time response when anomalies occur.”

Global 2000 enterprises use Cirba’s award-winning Control Console to achieve unprecedented visibility into opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce capacity-related performance risks. Also, by using Cirba organisations are able to achieve their automation goals with next generation infrastructure by eliminating any manual processes in determining where workloads should be placed, not only at the host level but also across the entire enterprise. Having this global view is critical in order to make more efficient use of hardware and software resources.

“There is a huge misconception in the market right now that virtual infrastructure can be optimised in real time. It cannot – these environments are far too complex to be able to assess all the required permutations and combinations in real time. It takes powerful analytics to understand how to balance infrastructure supply with application demand, especially in enterprise scale environments, which have complex operational policies and constraints,” added Hillier. “I would caution anyone looking at software that claims to do this in real time to take a deeper look, because in all cases we have examined, the logic and approach is flawed and leads to serious repercussions in terms of performance of the environment.”