Accurate and Integrated Virtual Server Monitoring and Management
Virtualization has changed the economics of investment in systems capacity – enabling far greater utilization rates than was safely possible in a physical server environment. As a network or systems administrator in charge of running your datacenter environment, it is likely you have already embraced virtualization or are thinking of doing so. Apart from cost, virtualization also provides you the agility to quickly provision or reallocate server capacity whenever your business or applications so demand.
However, you also realize that managing virtualized environments presents different challenges than running physical infrastructure. For one, dynamic virtualized systems typically don’t support the standard SNMP mode of data collection. Even if they do, they provide only limited or inaccurate information. As a result you are probably compelled to use a different monitoring system for your virtual servers than you do for your physical systems infrastructure, making your job more difficult. And typically virtualization monitoring systems that ship with the software have rudimentary capability at best. You likely miss the breadth and depth of management information and real-time alerting that a full- fledged management system can provide.
Integrated Monitoring and Management of Physical and Virtual Servers in One Single Console
WhatsVirtual is a new plug-in to the WhatsUp Gold core platform that does just that. It allows you to discover, map, monitor and manage your VMware virtual server environment exactly in the same way and from the same console as your physical server infrastructure. And with the power of WhatsUp Gold to manage network and application components as well, you have complete visibility to manage your entire datacenter environment from one management system. You don’t need to look at multiple screens trying to figure out what went wrong or is likely to do so – since WhatsVirtual and WhatsUp Gold bring it all together.
With WhatsVirtual you can:
Key Features include:
VMware ESX/ESXi Role-based Discovery and Mapping
The WhatsVirtual plugin enables the automatic discovery and mapping of VMware ESX/ESXi host and guest (virtual) machine roles. Visual maps show the connections between the host system and its associated virtual machines, even those in suspended modes. Further, host systems are automatically assigned a dynamic group which also includes its running virtual machines. The role assignment also drives the provisioning of standard active and performance monitors for server resources including CPU, Memory, Disk and Network interface among others – at both the host and guest (virtual) machine levels.
Native Integration with the Powerful VMware API
WhatsVirtual integrates with the powerful VMware API for collection of monitoring information and execution of multiple management tasks. This is necessary as SNMP data collection is inaccurate when managing dynamic virtualized infrastructures where physical host system resources are notionally shared between multiple guest systems through the virtualization software layer, called the hypervisor. Moreover, for next generation ESXi systems, VMware has stopped providing any performance information via SNMP. On the other hand, integration with the VMware API provides full visibility to monitoring metrics and provides direct access to several key management tasks as well.
Active Management of your VMware Virtual Environment
The WhatsVirtual plug-in provides powerful capability for controlling virtual machines through a number of management actions. Right click on any host or guest entity, on the map or group lists provides direct access to several management actions including power on, power off, suspend, reset and virtual machine backup. Further, any of these management actions can be set for recurring execution or triggered on specific device states just like for other WhatsUp Gold Action Library items. For example, new Snapshots (configuration backups) of virtual machines can be triggered over the weekend or a running VM may be powered down when the utilization falls below set levels indicating idle operation.
New Workspace Reports for Physical Host Servers and Virtual Machines
WhatsVirtual adds several new workspace reports over and above existing physical server performance monitoring reports. The Virtual Host List report details the name and IP address of the host servers and its virtual machines. Each of the entities link directly to the individual system device report – whether at a host or virtual machine level – providing exactly the same information as WhatsUp Gold does for a physical server. The new Virtual Host Attributes report displays all the host server details including, say, the running configuration of the server and its version numbers. Hardware attributes displayed include the number of CPU cores and frequency, memory capacity and other system information. Further, individual resource level reports, say, for CPU utilization, also provide accurate visibility into its consumption and distribution between different virtual machines at one glance.
Seamless Integration into the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center
The WhatsUp Gold Alert Center seamlessly supports alert display, escalation and threshold configuration for VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and virtual machines just as it does for physical servers. Network and systems managers can thus take coordinated action regardless of the kind of resource that they are managing. Since the Alert Center consolidates availability and performance alert information from across the entire infrastructure including networks, servers, application and traffic metrics – it provides a single, comprehensive console that can be used by operations team to manage the entire datacenter and network assets across the company.