A technical study of charge back and monitoring systems in virtual environment

Abstract

In the recent years the shared services concept has become an integral part of business. These shared services can be in the form of information technology, engineering and lot more. Service providers spent huge amounts of money to build an infrastructure that can provide efficient and valued services to the customers. In IT business these services varies from providing basic consultancy and managing the IT operations of the customers to running high priority business processes,(online banking). Customers of these services pay for these services, so a mechanism of resource usage metering is required to accurately charge the users and at the same time a monitoring mechanism is required to have a check on the services being provided to the customers for any resource contention and service degradation and future capacity planning. If a service provider is unable to develop an accurate charge back and monitoring mechanism then the equation of service provider and customer becomes a point of frustration for both sides. charge back and monitoring systems developed for physical environment are not capable to measure the resource usage in virtual environment because in virtual environment (Z/VM) resources are shared between users and it becomes difficult to measure the resource usage by a specific user. Until now a few tools have been developed that provides efficient resource metering and monitoring in virtual environment (Z/VM) but every business has its own requirements and system setup so mostly these tools need some customizations to fit into the business. This work mainly concentrated on what kind of resource utilization data is available on Z/VM and on LINUX guests running on Z/VM to effectively charge the customers running there guest Linux Operating systems in virtual environment (Z/VM based) and to monitor the cpu and memory utilization to check whether the estimate of memory allocation for linux guests running different applications made by system (PWSS) is a good estimate or require some optimizations. Because memory utilization is considered more expensive in virtual environment in the context of system performance. The study also includes a comparison between this technique of charge back and some commercial products from IBM and CA (Computer Associates) that provides charge back and monitoring facility in Z/VM based virtual environment, and provides some benefits of this work in the proposed environment.