VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

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 »

VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leo Raikhman left me a comment, which lead me to his Leo’s Ramblings blog, which in turn, taught me about another open source monitoring tool for VI3 called Unnoc. In his post Using unnoc to monitor your ESX servers Leo explains why Unnoc is his favorite over other open source monitoring solutions:

“Let me just say that I hate complicated configurations which is why I immediately discarded cacti and nagios – the other two contenders for free ESX monitoring. Also, having used both, the complexity of their data gathering left a lot to be desired. Unnoc is simple and it works because it was designed to do a limited number of things.”

Leo’s post walks you through the installation and configuration of Unnoc on Ubuntu.

Here’s more about the tool From Unnoc.org: Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Bakman from blog.vkernel.com has created an interesting post about the possible performance bottlenecks of an ESX host. Want awesome performance in VMWARE ESX? is a high level strategy for preventing slow performance. Alex says it best in the post:

“To achieve stellar VMware ESX performance you have to remove ALL bottlenecks in your environment. Remember your performance will only be as fast as the slowest “link” in your performance equation.”

The post goes on to list four best practice tips and gives some brief info about each performance factor. Summarizing the list, the four tips are: Read the rest of this entry »

Popular open source enterprise monitoring application Zenoss has a package for monitoring VMware ESX servers. Although I have never used Zenoss personally, I have run across several customers over the years who do. Check out Zenoss.com for more info about the application and the Zenpack package for monitoring ESX hosts.

A preconfigured Zenoss installation is available to download as a virtual appliance from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Here’s some more info from the web site: Read the rest of this entry »