VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

This VMworld 2009 session took place Thurs at 9:30 am in room 134

Points made by the presenter worth remembering.

• Physical failure is unavoidable, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• There is a 50% chance that pieces of an ESX Cluster will fail and take down critical services and servers.
• You’re not usually staring at a monitoring screen, and you want to be notified as the hardware degrades not afterwards.
• You want as much hardware info about a host, from multiple different vendor platforms, and on a single screen
• Physical failure is a fact of virtual life
• Be proactive about hardware failure and use DRS + hardware monitoring + Alarms

An interesting demo in this session showed the use of  the built in vCenter 4 host hardware temperature status alarm generating SNMP traps as well as automatically putting a host in maintenance mode so an administrator can investigate. This action instigated a VMotion evacuation of the VMs on the impacted host and effectively isolated the hardware issue in the environment with minimal or zero impact.

My key take away of this session is that numerous “out of the box” vCenter event based alarms can be leveraged during the warning phase of hardware failures. This includes alerts covering power, fans, cpus, memory, batteries, etc. The ESX host hardware monitoring feature is detected and available automtically in vSphere 4.

My notes: Read the rest of this entry »

free Veeam tool unwrapped

The VMware administrators holiday gift from Veeam has been revealed. As promised, I received an email this morning announcing that a new free version of Veeam Monitor 3.02 is available for download. A description of the tool can be found on the products web page:

“Veeam Monitor is an easy to deploy, framework-independent VMware monitoring solution that was created expressly to help you better manage the health and performance of your VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) environment. Veeam Monitor provides support for troubleshooting and issue resolution, as well as trend reporting and capacity planning – equipping you to proactively manage ESX / ESXi infrastructure system health and performance today and over the long term.”

The product’s Release Notes reveal the limitations of the free version:

Veeam Monitor 3.0.2 features a new free functionality mode which is automatically enabled if you install the product without a license, or if your your license expires. Veeam Monitor Free Edition has the following limitations compared to the full version:

• Performance history lookup is limited to 24 hours
• Number of alarms is limited to ten
• Performance and trend reporting is disabled
• Alarm modeling is disabled
• Guest OS process management functionality is disabled.

Veeam Monitor requires a SQL 2005 database or installs SQL 2005 Express by default. It is my understanding Read the rest of this entry »

what could it be?

The more readers handle the free VMware administrator mystery present from Veeam the more the wrapping paper is getting torn. All that present shaking and examining trying to guess what it could be has been bad for the intended surprise by the folks at Veeam, or has it? Honestly, I have no inside information, and I am just as stumped as the rest. I do have a guess I’ll share, however.

First, to see a full size image of the present with the latest rips in the wrapping go to boche.net’s post Further unwrapping of the free tool from Veeam.

As for my guess on what it could be – well, based on the fact that the latest paper rip reveals some monitoring information and that Veeam recently purchased nworks which is known for it’s system monitoring tools, Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to attend a live demonstration of the new Hyper9 virtual infrastructure search and monitoring tool this week, and as a result a limited number of VM /ETC readers will be lucky enough to have access to the currently closed Hyper9 beta program in the near future. Stay tuned to VM /ETC for information on signing up for access to the exclusive beta program, but for now, this post provides a first look at some of the features demonstrated to me. I’ve also been given permission to provide some screen shots.

Hyper9 was announced publically back in September, and then caught the attention of many VMworld 2008 attendees. Scott Lowe, Edward Haletky, Eric Siebert, and Keith Ward are some of the many that have already written about their impressions of this tool’s capabilities. In general, Hyper9 is a search based management tool that promises to “rock your world” of virtual infrastructure management. Hyper9 can be used to query for information at the hardware, hypervisor, and VM operating system levels.

So, what exactly is Hyper9 and what’s so special about a tool that can search against all objects in your virtual infrastructure? Read the rest of this entry »

I first heard that the new VMware Administrator Portal (VCAP) for consolidated management of multiple VirtualCenter Servers (VC) would soon be released as a free product during VMworld 2008. True to their promise, VMware provided a technology preview version for download at the end of last week. I found out it was released when Yellow-bricks.com posted about it and then the VMTN Blog and Mike D posted about the Yellow-bricks.com update. So, I downloaded the virtual appliance and did some basic testing this weekend. Although I do not have multiple VCs or a lot of VMs to test with, the following is a summary of my notes and thoughts while setting it up. Read the rest of this entry »

A Google Group discussion thread asking for help with hung tasks in VirtualCenter points out an important Service Console configuration best practice. Killing tasks on vcenter starts off by asking if there is a way to kill several VirtualCenter tasks that are bogging down the management server. Although the method for killing individual tasks is never realized, understanding potential reasons for the problem is the more important take away. Fixing the VirtualCenter performance problem results after correcting ESX host resource issues. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first started VM /ETC by live blogging from VMworld 2007 last September, I posted a few entries about what I call “ton of bricks” moments. This happens to me usually when I am talking to vendors or other engineers about virtualization technologies, strategies or designs and I learn something new that is so simple but so important that it hits me like a ton of bricks. VMware’s Partner Exchange 2008 first such moment happened not because of a single conversation or breakout session, but because of a collective of virtual infrastructure security discussions.

Virtual Infrastructure presents some unique security challenges to administrators. Sure, virtual machines are networked servers just like physical servers and traditional security monitoring and intrusion detection products and processes can be deployed as usual. However, consolidation of servers has changed the attack surface from physical networking to virtualized networks contained within virtualization hosts. If a hacker were to compromise one of your VMs could your current security monitoring alert you of any suspicious activity? What if the activity never reached the core network switch or even the physical NICs of the host server, but instead was kept internal to the host by only attempting to compromise the VMs that shared the virtual switches? What if an intruder brought his own VM and started it up on one of your virtualization hosts, would you know it ever happened?

I have talked with several vendors this week that have solutions to provide visibility and monitoring of the internal virtual network activity and inter-VM communications. These solutions Read the rest of this entry »