One of the biggest challenges of managing your infrastructure is simply figuring out who you need to contact when there’s a problem. It isn’t always easy to determine if the failure is caused by the network, storage, server, or application, meaning you can waste time figuring out who to call for support. Vendors can point the finger at each other. No one takes responsibility for the overall functioning of your system, because you created the system through a myriad of component choices.
Hyperconverged infrastructure eliminates this major management headache, because you aren’t the one hooking different components together. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides a predefined architecture of compute, networking, and storage components certified and integrated to work as a unit, with the vendor taking responsibility for their product. When a problem occurs, there’s no question who you need to call, so you can get help rapidly.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Changes Data Center Management
Hyperconverged infrastructure simplifies other management challenges, too, and it also brings some new challenges, or at least a new way of doing management.
Management Simplified
The design of hyperconverged infrastructure alone provides lots of simplification to your management process. Because they’re built with clusters of nodes and replication, high availability is built-in, and systems failover automatically when a node goes down. The management software that comes with the infrastructure often includes support for backups and recovery, eliminating data protection headaches. You’ll have an operational dashboard that shows you the status of all your infrastructure elements at a glance. If you see you need additional capacity, adding an additional standard component is straightforward.
Management Changed
Managing hyperconverged infrastructure changes your focus and management strategy, and requires fewer personnel.
You will still manage virtual machines (VMs) and storage, by defining policies applied to pools of resources. The policies enumerate rules for how the resources can be used. You don’t need to create a new policy for each VM, but you need to invest time in defining standard policies that can be applied across machines. Once policies are established, much of your management effort will consist of responding to policy exception alerts.
You’ll also still need to monitor and manage networking. The hyperconverged infrastructure’s storage traffic generally uses 10 gigabit Ethernet, which may be shared with management and VM traffic.
While extending capacity is easy, knowing when you need to do that still requires monitoring to recognize the need. Because resources are in shared pools, this is more critical than before, as resource shortages can impact multiple applications.
Managed Nutanix services from dcVAST simplify managing hyperconverged infrastructure even further. Our experienced team can plan your initial implementation, as well as provide proactive oversight and monitoring of deployed instances. 24×7 support ensures problems are quickly recognized and resolved. With dcVAST’s services, your IT team can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine day-to-day operation of your data center. Contact usto learn more about using hyperconverged infrastructure and managed services from dcVAST.
