To gain the agility and cost advantages from virtualization and cloud computing, organizations must be able to combine historical and current infrastructure performance data with usage forecasts.  That ability enables IT to visualize, optimize, and plan workload placement and future infrastructure investments. The dynamic relationships in a complex IT environment, however,  means that correlating and mapping physical, virtual, and cloud-based elements is beyond the realm of human judgment and spreadsheets. It requires business service intelligence.

Attend a free webinar on Service Intelligence to see HP's exciting new offerings in this area.

At HP Discover, Ryan Granard, Director IT Infrastructure at DreamWorks Animation, and I will deliver session 4562 on Friday June 10 at 11:00AM.

DreamWorks takes virtualization to the next level:
Best practices for building and managing a private cloud

You will learn how they harnessed 55 million render hours to create the visual magic behind Kung Fu Panda 2 and their other hit films.

IT Operations Management is a complex discipline. It had become even more challenging over the past few years with the advent of virtualization and cloud computing. While you can read 1000-page user manuals, dry text books, or ITIL training materials, it has been hard to find a good high-level overview of best practices for managing your IT infrastructure - until now!

BSM is all about monitoring. Comprehensive, consolidated monitoring that starts with the end user experience, and covers applications, servers, networks and storage. In short all the components that comprise a business service.

BSM for cloud is about extending this monitoring approach to cloud environments, whether public, private or hybrid. As you start building out their own cloud environments or purchasing cloud-based services, you need a way to monitor them. Again, from the user experience all the way through the underlying infrastructure.

HP SiteScope 11.10 just released in May.  Here is a recap of all the great stuff from this release.

Implemented some or all aspects of ITIL's "Service Operations" phase, but forgot to include monitoring of your virtualized resources?  And now you need to quickly bring monitoring of those ever-so-precious resources into your centralized monitoring environment?  Did you know that you can do just that with HP SiteScope - in a matter on minutes? Watch this YouTube video to learn more!

HP Software has a comprehensive set of products to manage a Virtualized datacenter effectively. Customers who are already reaping the benefits of HP’s industry leading systems management products, such as Operations Manager, Performance Agents have a new arsenal in their toolkit now – HP Service Health Optimizer – a “Business Aware” Capacity Management, focused on virtualization.

“Almost half of the workloads will be deployed in virtual environments by 2012”*

“Virtual Machine installed base to grow by 5x in 3 years between 2009 and 2012”*

“By 2012, there will be nearly 55M VMs”*

“Average number of VMs per server might explode to 75 by 2012”*

*Various sources, such as IDC, Gartner and Forrester

Pre-virtualization, server utilization was typically under 20%. Now, with virtualization, it's still less than 50%. What is preventing server admins from achieving higher utilization?

Considering agentless monitoring for your virtualized resources, but need more robust features from currently available products in the marketplace?  HP SiteScope now has them ...

One of HP’s partners has addressed one of the biggest complaints I hear from IT Operations professionals - managing infrastructure is complex and virtualization makes the situation even more challenging. The new Insight Operations Appliance packages a consolidated IT infrastructure management solution onto a single HP DL160 server.

2010 was an exciting year for IT infrastructure management. We saw several technology trends accelerate, some new competitors enter the market, many new product releases from HP, and numerous existing customer presentations at the two Software Universe events this year. Not a bad year of innovation and growth for an industry that continues to evolve, sometimes in leaps and bounds, after two decades.

Did you know that a new version of the HP Operations Agent was recently released?  And that this isn't just a release of the Operations Agent, but really a release that combines the features of the HP Operations Agent, HP Performance Agent, and HP GlancePlus together - under one installer? Check out how this release of HP's Operation Agent helps you better address the needs and requirements of ITIL's Service Operations phase!

A small professional services company was recently challenged with lack of visibility across disparate IT domains. By using HP Operations Center products like Operations Manager, SPIs or Smart Plug-Ins, Agents, and SiteScope, they were able to greatly improve collaboration among different groups within their IT organization.

A global 500 telecommunications company was recently challenged with managing multiple monitoring teams for disparate IT domains. By using HP Operations Center products like Operations Manager, SPIs or Smart Plug-Ins, and SiteScope, they were able to reduce the amount of time spent diagnosing a typical IT problem by approximately 1 hour.

I just returned from the HP IT Forum, a recurring series of events hosted by HP’s CIO Randy Mott. My main role was to participate in a panel discussion on virtualization best practices. I was the subject matter expert on best practices in managing virtualization infrastructure.

There were many great questions about how to get started, what sequence to follow when rationalizing applications and virtualizing, how to choose the right hypervisor (yes, there are choices), how to manage business services and applications across the virtual and physical layers, and what specific offerings HP has for creating virtualized environments and private clouds.

I had the pleasure last Friday of attending a short portion of an event in which a group of leading bloggers attended a series of presentations at HP’s Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino.

During one of the breaks I had some very interesting conversations. Here are the highlights...

All too often, all thought and energy around maximizing virtualization benefits is spent on design and implementation.  This article discusses what is often an afterthought in leveraging the most from your virtualized environment.

I’m excited about the upcoming VMworld conference that takes place from August 30- September 2 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. HP is a platinum sponsor; our booth is 1008. 

For management software, we have three software demo pods and five theater presentations during the event. HP also has a keynote session and several breakout sessions.