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Avoid Virtual Packet Loss with the ExtraHop System

Virtualization is a mix of technologies that is helping IT organizations achieve on-demand scalability and lower cost of ownership. However, the interaction between the virtualization and network layers also creates new classes of problems that manifest in obscure and hard-to-track ways. Some new performance challenges related to the wide adoption of virtualization technologies include:

  • VM sprawl – With VM technology hitting its stride, users have gotten used to the ease with which they can deploy a virtual machine. Application users continually ask for their own dedicated servers and the number of VMs keeps increasing. This change creates new management complexity for the IT organization.
  • Underprovisioning due to VM interactions – Because server VMs constantly ebb and flow, it is difficult to measure the impact of all these VMs running side by side. Often, server resources are underprovisioned for the number of VMs in use, which directly leads to performance degradation.
  • Virtual packet loss – The underprovisioning problem can manifest as virtual packet loss, when excessive context switching occurs across the VMs. This issue often leads to network latency. If the packets are delayed greatly, the network protocol stack assumes that they are lost. Virtual packet loss can impact both network and application performance in negative and unexpected ways.

With ExtraHop, you can avoid VM performance problems before they occur. ExtraHop can help:

  • Autodiscover the VM environment – After a 15-minutes installation process, the ExtraHop system starts to autodiscover the entire application environment, across both physical and virtual layers. The ExtraHop solution is completely VM agnostic and accurately reports back on all VMs as well as the applications running on them. These features give you an accurate picture of what’s out there to help you manage VM sprawl.
  • Pinpoint cause for virtual packet loss – The ExtraHop system provides detailed metrics to show when virtual packet loss is occurring and what is causing it. This capability arms both the server and network teams with the information they need to commence remediation procedures.
  • Facilitate capacity planning for VM environments – With automatic trending and baselining, the ExtraHop system can help determine when is the appropriate time to spin up new VMs. In addition, with trend-based alerts, the server team can be notified well ahead of capacity bottlenecks that can lead to serious performance issues.

Customer Vignette

Who: Online SaaS Provider

Challenge: Peak-time slowdown for hosted customer-facing application.

The ExtraHop System in Action: Upon investigation, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system showed lots of dropped packets and high retransmission timeouts around some key virtual servers. These problems led to a diagnosis of virtual packet loss. The system was underprovisioned for the amount of VM activity during peak hours. Adding more server resources satisfactorily addressed the problem.

ROI: The customer improved application performance and avoided SLA penalties.