Global Energy Provider Gains Greater Visibility into Virtual Environment

As one of the world’s largest energy providers, this enterprise, headquartered in South America, is a global leader, whose size and success were driven by its ability to provide energy to a fast-growing hemisphere. A publicly traded corporation, the energy provider produces and distributes petrochemicals and derivatives, electric energy, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources. Its goal is to be among the top five integrated energy companies in the world by 2020

THE CHALLENGE: VIRTUALIZING WHILE MINIMIZING COSTS, PRESERVING VALUE

In one major South American city alone, this energy provider has invested in nearly 100 ESX hosts and over 1400 virtual machines—not to mention other machines spread around the globe in various remote locations. Their previous system’s architecture had utilized Ixia’s taps to feed traffic into the company’s Compuware data center monitoring appliances.

However, virtualization had changed that architecture—depriving it of the ability to see virtual and inter-VM traffic. The reason was that the flow of traffic no longer accessed the physical network stack due to the vSwitch in vSphere.

PHANTOM VIRTUAL TAP AND PHANTOM HD PRESERVE THE INSTRUMENTATION LAYER

The energy provider had invested substantially in a Compuware instrumentation layer configuration, which was composed of Agentless Monitoring Device (AMD) tools. The provider was committed to maximizing this investment and preserving its value even as it virtualized. Fortunately, the Phantom Virtual Tap™ was able to give the company the visibility in its ESX hosts that it needed. Most importantly, the toolagnostic Phantom HD™ was able to tunnel virtual traffic into the existing Compuware implementation. This approach provided the value that the company was seeking, since it did not then have to purchase any new monitoring tools for its virtual hypervisors.

Another key concern for this energy provider was ensuring that its solution was non-intrusive and would not require agents to be installed on its virtual or physical machines. As a kernel-level implementation on the ESX host, the company did not want its valuable CPU and network resources on the VMs to be downgraded.

PHANTOM HD OFFERED THE UNIQUE ABILITY TO TUNNEL TRAFFIC

The energy provider had been unable to transport virtual traffic from out of its VMware ESX hosts into existing instrumentation layer tools. To date, all of the virtual appliances that the company had evaluated had also required purchase of those companies’ own proprietary physical tools. This was not acceptable to the energy provider, due to its large-standing investment in its Compuware AMD tools and desire to continue benefiting from that investment and implementation. Another concern was that the staff had achieved proficiency with current tools, and a “forklift” change would cause major disruptions in staffing, triggering new training curves, hires and associated costs.

The diagram below shows a simple design of traffic flowing from the ESX hosts (and virtual machines) via encapsulated GRE tunnel with a 1/10GB capacity network switch. The Phantom HD appliance (where the GRE tunnel is decapsulated) takes raw data (layer 2–4) and passes it to xStream. it is then regenerated to multiple ports and ultimately fed into the energy provider’s AMD instrumentation layer tools.

The Compuware solution was a very important part of the energy provider’s network infrastructure. This installation passively monitors all users and transactions all the time and identifies problems with the infrastructure, such as client or network congestion, application design issues, data center processing delays (web services, message queuing), and databases. It helps the energy provider understand key performance shifts and usage patterns as well; so naturally the provider wanted to preserve the substantial value of this solution, as well as continue benefiting from the trained staff that kept it in service.