Monitoring Solutions for VMware Server Farms

VMware virtual server technologies provide companies with the ability to do more with less resources. However, for a technology that is supposed to make computing easier, virtualization is becoming quite complicated to monitor and manage. Effective monitoring and management is critical for these environments to be adequate replacements for traditional hardware-based infrastructures.

The eG Monitor for VMware infrastructures (the eG VM MonitorTM), part of the eG Enterprise Suite, is a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing all aspects of virtual hosts and guests, whether the infrastructure is used to support server or desktop applications. Coupled with the ability of the eG Enterprise Suite to monitor over 80 applications, including Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others, the eG VM Monitor – with its patent-pending In-N-Out MonitoringTM technology -- provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual IT infrastructures

Server-based Computing Environments

Challenges in Monitoring VMware Infrastructures

Since a single VMware® ESX Server is used to host multiple virtual guests, a single malfunctioning application on a guest can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other virtual machines. Besides resource contention among virtual guests, applications executing on the VM console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure. Performance degradations could also occur if a virtual guest is not configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. Furthermore, VMware® Virtual Center and other SNMP-based monitoring solutions measure the resource usage levels of the virtual machines but do not look in-depth into each guest operating system to detect abnormalities. Deploying agents on each guest machine to track its operation is a time-consuming task, has a higher resource overhead, and involves additional cost.

Monitoring VMware Guests: eG agents track the performance of each guest relative to shared infrastructure resources (outside view) as well as the workload and application mix of the individual guest themselves (inside view).

In-N-Out VMware Server Monitoring and Root-Cause Diagnosis using eG Enterprise

The eG VM Monitor extends the unique eG single agent technology to virtual environments. Using a patent-pending In-N-Out MonitoringTM approach, the eG VM Monitor provides a comprehensive view of the ESX Server, including the performance of the VM kernel, the console operating system and all of its virtual guests. eG agents only have to be installed on the ESX Servers -- not on individual guests. Using ESX server APIs, the agents provide an “outside view” of a guest’s performance. The relative resource usage levels of the guests show where the performance hogs may lie. To complement the outside view, the eG agent obtains an “inside view” that details the user activity, resource allocation and the application mix running inside the guest operating system. All of the metrics collected by the agents are baselined automatically by the eG VM Monitor, so that IT administrators can be informed proactively of any deviations from the norm. No other virtualization monitoring or management solution offers this combination of features.

Monitoring and Reporting of ESX servers: Using a custom ESX Server model, the eG VM Monitor correlates performance across the host and guest VMs. Extensive pre-built reports enable rapid identification of bottlenecks and streamline capacity planning.

From a monitoring and management standpoint, the eG monitor for VMware infrastructures goes well beyond managing virtualized servers as discrete entities. End-to-end business service views show the applications and network devices that support each business service, and the inter-dependencies among them. Applications are associated with the virtual machines they run on, and each virtual machine is mapped to the physical machine upon which it is hosted.

The dependency of the virtual machines to physical machines is determined dynamically, so as to support the VMware VMotion® Live Migration technology. A patented root-cause diagnosis engine analyzes the service topology graphs and the virtual-to-physical machine mappings to pin-point where the problems areas in the infrastructure lie.