Utilize minimal footprint with maximum scalability

Mix Technologies is a large enterprise company in the Silicon space. It has the following deployment:

5000 servers in the IT infrastructure
1500 servers in a virtual environment using VMware
500 servers in a public cloud environment

Mix Technologies monitors its network devices using events through SNMP. It also uses deep dive network topology tools. The rest of the application infrastructure and servers are monitored with application performance and traditional monitoring tools.The help desk personnel and application owners are responsible for monitoring and managing the servers in the private cloud as well.

Mix Technologies has a strong focus on virtualization and reducing the footprint on its applications. This also applies to the monitoring solution.

Roles required

There are many user roles involved in the deployment, operation, and management of Infrastructure Management. Your company may employ the roles as described below, consolidate them into fewer roles, or divide them into roles with more granular responsibilities and may have other titles for these roles.

The following role is required to complete this use case:

Roger - Distributed Service Operations User

Roger handles the following responsibilities:

Maintaining the ongoing performance and availability of production systems with a focus on server infrastructure
Performing administrative functions on servers and monitoring tools
Monitoring the performance and solving availability, performance, and capacity problems

Achieving minimal footprint with maximum scalability

Mix Technologies requires complete monitoring of its remote data center that contains over a thousand servers. To do this, Roger has been assigned 2 virtual machines (VMs) with 2 virtual CPUs and 2 GB of RAM.

Roger has to:

Provide a fault-tolerant monitoring infrastructure for the remote data center with 2 VMs
Provision the new data center to have over a thousand servers

To accomplish this, Roger must perform the following steps:

Install 1 Integration Service per VM.
Configure the Integration Services using Central Monitoring Administration.
Verify that he has not used more than a 1/3rd of the available resources on the server and Integration Service after everything is connected and configured. Roger can do this by looking at the self monitoring metrics that are automatically monitored for each Integration Service and represented in the Operations Console.
Shut down one of the Integration Service instances by clicking Stop in the Services panel of the operating system. All the agents are now connected to the remaining Integration Service instance. It is apparent that even with the event and data loss, the complete failover did not take more than one minute.
As a last step he now verifies that no performance thresholds have been breached using the self monitoring metrics of the Integration Service instance.
He now restarts the Integration Service by clicking Start in the Services panel of the operating system.

Scaling out the monitoring infrastructure

Over time the number of servers in Mix Technologies grows in the remote data center, and now, it is close to 1200 which is the limit for a single Integration Service. Roger must now expand the data center to be able to handle the growing number of servers. This includes:

Ensuring that the network is still up and running even if a single server instance is unavailable
Roger cannot afford any down time; therefore, he must add a new server during run time.

To accomplish this, Roger must perform the following steps:

Using the VMware vCenter UI, he must provision a new Integration Service from a .ovf file to the same VMware cluster as the other Integration Service instances.
He must start the new instance and perform the initial configuration using the built in web UI on the application.For more information, see the VMware vCenter documentation.
He then logs on to Central Monitoring Administration and adds the new Integration Service to the existing network. He performs all these tasks without any down time of the existing Integration Services.
He now restarts one of the agents on one of the managed nodes and verifies that the load balancing works and that it connects to the new Integration Service.
He also starts the operator console and verifies that the new Integration Service is automatically monitored and represented under the Integration Service monitoring.

Page tree

Roles required

Achieving minimal footprint with maximum scalability

Scaling out the monitoring infrastructure

Related topics