Monitoring Virtualized Environments

MONITORING
VIRTUALIZED
ENVIRONMENTS
Ahmad Khalid Nasrat
SERVICE LEVEL
MANAGEMENT
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN
MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION
HERAT UNIVERSITY
COMPUTER SCIENCE FACULTY

Table of Contents
 What is Virtualization
 Virtualization Benefits
 Virtualization Vendors
 Monitoring Virtualized Environment
 Metrics to be monitored
 Monitoring Framework
 Virtualization Architecture
 The eG VM Monitor tool
Monitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
2

What is Virtualization?
 Virtualization allows you, virtually and
cost-effectively, to have two or more
virtual computing environments, running
different operating systems and
applications on one piece of hardware.
3

Physical vs Virtual
4

Virtualization Benefits
 Granular Scaling
 Better utilization of compute assets
 Reduce hardware, power and cooling costs
 Dynamic and flexible
 Faster deployment of new logical servers and
safer/faster migration of application
 Test and try
 Good for students, programmers to Test, Debug
 Better Operation with Automation
 Less overhead with server management
 Reduce Risks with Snapshots and backups
 Aids in disaster recovery
5

Virtual Machines
6

Virtualization Disadvantages
 New, relatively unproven abstraction layers may
introduce potential security risks
 Consolidation of servers as well as storage
virtualization may create a larger, single point of
failure - making it easier to lose significant
volumes of data
 Some vendors do not fully support virtualization
and you may need to reproduce a problem on a
non-virtualized system to facilitate diagnosis
(especially where specialized hardware drivers
are involved).
 Deploying and managing virtualized environments
requires skills that are less common but more in
demandMonitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
7

Virtualization Vendors
 VMware - vSphere
 Citrix – Xen
 Microsoft – Hyper V
 Red Hat – KVM and SPICE
 …
8

Monitoring Virtualized
Environment
 Earlier it was the application, operating
systems, and physical infrastructure, including
storage and networking that were the primary
objects of monitoring.
 A virtualized infrastructure introduces a new
layer that needs to be monitored – the
hypervisor.
 The primary challenge to monitor security and
network and application performance within
virtualized environment is enabling visibility
and access to virtualized traffic and
performance.Monitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
9

10

Metrics To Be Monitored
 Health Monitoring
 Performance Monitoring
 CPU, memory, storage and network performance metrics
 The virtualization-specific metrics specified by
virtualization Technology e.g., the cluster and datacenter
concepts in VMware
 Behavior of other virtualization features also be
measured
 Capacity Monitoring
 Server Utilization: Memory /CPU/resource
 Network Usage: bandwidth
 Storage Utilization
11

Metrics To Be Monitored
 Security and Compliance Monitoring
 VM Sprawl: Metrics to monitor the VM activities
 Configuration metrics: meet standards and
hardening guidelines, detect violations of IT
policy.
 Access Control: role-based access control
enforcement.
 Monitoring For Billing and Chargeback
 start date and end date of VM creation and
allocation
 Software licensing costs.
 VM uptimeMonitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
12

Monitoring Framework
 Ability to collect monitoring data from variety of
sources cutting across
performance, capacity, compliance and
security goals
 Analytical Processing capability to co-relate
data collected from these sources to deliver
better results in comparison to the existing
solutions
 Make the data and the analysis available for
other application using APIs. This is in addition
to having its own reporting and notificationsMonitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
13

Monitoring Framework
Architecture
14

The Virtualization and Cloud
Monitoring Reference
Architecture
15

The SAN and Storage Layers
 Great deal of the performance issues that
arise in virtualized environments have
something to do with storage
 The SNMP data available for most SAN
switches is completely useless
 Products to monitor SAN
 NetApp (Akorri) BalancePoint
 map of which guests are accessing which spindles.
 Virtual Instruments Virtual Wisdom
 use a TAP in the SAN
 Quest vFloglight Storage
16

The Physical
Server, LAN, Switch, Router, and
Virtualization Platform Layer
 Has more products available that monitor
it, extremely challenging task to find the right
products
 Monitoring tools
 eG VM Monitor
 Zenoss
 ManageEngine Applications Manager
 Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer
 Veeam Monitor
 Xangati
17

The Application Layer
 The product should be able to calculate hop-
by-hop and end-to-end response time for the
applications of interest in the environment.
 dynaTrace
 provide deep code-level diagnostics
 BlueStripe
 Correlsense
 Optier
18

Integrating your New Monitoring
Stack
 Different products in different places, still
problem- data are not monitored in one place
 Netuitive has connectors to a wide variety of
monitoring solutions (and can quickly add
more)
 Netuitive has self-learning performance
analysis engine that continuously correlates
data across multiple products
19

The eG VM Monitor
 eG VM Monitor become the best infrastructure
management tool of VMworld 2008 out of a
group of 30 competing products.
 VirtualizationAdmin.com Rating 4.8/5
20

Some of eG VM Monitor
Features
 Completely web-based.
 Extremely configurable.
 Auto discovery of servers, networks and applications.
 Daily, weekly, and monthly automatic trending of
statistics.
 Personalized views and alarms.
 Customizable alarms to send email, SMS, and SNMP
traps.
 Detailed real-time and historical graphing and
reporting.
 Layered modeling for clear problem determination.
 Complete internal and external monitoring of
network, systems, and applications
 Automatic triage using application inter-dependenciesMonitoring Virtualized Environments|Ah. Khalid Nasrat
21

Review the eG VM Monitor
 Demo video about eG VM Monitor on the eG
website http://www.eginnovations.com/
 eG Innovations hosted version of eG VM
Monitor to monitor different applications and
services online
 Install eG VM Monitor, You can try demo
22

Logging
• Different roles for different users.
• SQL Server admin who monitors only the SQL Se
23

Alarms Window upon logging in
 The red item at the top of the alarms window
is very likely the root cause of all or many of
the alarms in the window.
 Red alarm indicates that physical CPU usage
is high
24

25

Pros and Cons of eG
 Pros
 It offers the most complete picture of the
infrastructure – both virtual and physical
 Cons
 Not easy to install
 Costly
26

Conclusion
 Use of virtualization growing and growing
 The performance of virtualized environments
becomes more and more critical.
 Different products in different level of
virtualization architecture
 Integration of monitoring tools in one Netiutive
 Among all eG VM Monitor almost takes care
of everything
27

Reference
 Chandran Midhun, Jayant Walvekar, Monitoring in a Virtualized
Environment, 2010
 Davis David, eG VM Monitor, Dec 2010, online
http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/product-
reviews/eg-vm-monitor.html
 Harzog Bernd, Virtualization Performance and Availability
Monitoring – A Reference Architecture, March 2011, online
http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/virtualization-performance-
and-availability-monitoring-a-reference-architecture-9660/
 Application and Network Performance Monitoring in a Virtualized
Environment- Network Instruments whitepaper
 ca Technologies, the complete guide to monitoring virtualized
environments, 2013, http://www.ca.com
 www.manageengine.com/apm
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Monitoring Virtualized Environments

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