VMware Monitoring

VMware Monitoring

Monitoring VMware Environments


The Problem


From a security standpoint, centralizing multiple applications on a single box creates a single point of failure, both for the physical server itself, and in its network connection. When a virtualized server crashes, or its network connection slows or breaks, it impacts all the applications on that box.
VMWare monitoring provides vital information for planning, testing and monitoring virtualized environments.

PRTG Network Monitor is a VMware monitor that helps the administrator identify if insufficient resources have been allocated to a specific virtual machine. The software also indicates if the virtual infrastructure is adversely affecting the network in terms of traffic and degradation, and will monitor the virtualized environments in real time.
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Advantages of VMware Monitoring

1. Virtualizing systems without knowing their usual CPU/Memory load, disk usage and network usage is risky. With PRTG Network Monitor you can analyze your system prior to virtualization in order to know how much load it will put on your VMware Host servers. Systems with high load may not be suitable for virtualization at all.
2. Once the servers are virtualized, you need to ensure that there are not too many VMs running on a single host, potentially causing overloads across the virtualized systems. VMware monitoring helps keep the server's utilization at 75%.
3. You might also wish to avoid running too few VMs on a host, as this might involve wasted resources on unnecessary host servers.
4. The mid/long term network monitoring results before and after virtualization provided by PRTG Network Monitor help to ensure that quality of service doesn't suffer.
5. The performance of all virtual systems on a host usually suffers from one virtual system running amok, or running into a performance/load peak. A good VMware monitoring software discovers such events quickly.

Ceritfied VMware Monitor


As a VMware partner, Paessler AG not only uses VMware solutions in its own environment, but also integrates device templates for VMware monitoring into PRTG Network Monitor. The sensor types for VMware monitoring are:

• VMware ESX Host Server: monitors a VMware ESX Host Server
• VMware Virtual Machine: monitors a single Virtual Machine on the host server

While the ESX Host Server sensor only works directly with an VMware ESX 3.x server as its parent device, you can use the virtual machine sensor in two ways:

• Use it to directly communicate with a VMware ESX 3.x Host Server to monitor virtual machines running on this server.
• Use it to communicate with a VMware Virtual Center installation to monitor all virtual machines managed by this virtual center.

This is the only option that supports virtual machines running on VMware Server 2.x and virtual machines under control of VMware's VMotion feature.

How to Setup The VMware Monitor


Setting up VMware monitoring is as easy as 1-2-3 with PRTG Network Monitor. After installing PRTG you can quickly create the ESX or Virtual Center Server as a new device as follows:

1. Choose "add sensor"
2. Add a device based on the respective host/ virtual server
3. Select VMware Servers
4. Select a sensor type
   • "VMware Virtual Machine" to add sensors for the virtual machines
   • "VMware ESX Host Server" to ad a sensor to monitor values of the ESX server itself
5. The VMware ESX Host Server sensor only works if the device is an ESX Server! This sensor does not work on Virtual Center Servers.

You can find more information on setting up PRTG for VMware monitoring in our knowledge base.

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Free VMware Monitoring

You can test our VMware monitoring software with the 30-Day-Trial-Edition. The Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use and may be downloaded at no cost.
The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than ten sensors. Licenses for our VMware monitor PRTG start at $380.

Related Topics

• MRTG Windows
• Networkanalyzer
• Web site monitoring
• Network monitoring tool
• Network monitor software

Source: http://www.paessler.com