Is Your Monitoring Solution “Virtualization 2.0 Ready”? Here’s How To Find Out

The first phase of virtualization was concerned with high availability and reliability, but the emphasis has shifted from functionality to the core monitoring and management challenges that physical IT infrastructures have tackled for decades.  Welcome to "Virtualization 2.0."

In Virtualization 2.0, the management emphasis is shifting from virtual machine (VM) management to business service management - i.e., knowing how a business service is performing, and which domains (network, server, VM, applications) are working and which are not.  So it is no longer sufficient to just monitor the uptime or resource usage levels of virtual machines and physical servers and believe that the entire IT infrastructure is working well.

The challenge in managing virtualized infrastructures is that there are various layers of software - the applications, the protocol layers, the operating systems in the virtual machines (VMs) and the virtualization platform - that have to work together to ensure the proper functioning of the business service.

Many of these software layers are outside the scope of the virtual infrastructure itself and knowing when a problem happens, whether it is being caused in the virtual infrastructure, or in the applications, or in the network is crucial. The faster the problem can be diagnosed, the shorter the service downtime and better the overall service performance

What to Look for in a Virtualization 2.0 Ready Monitoring Solution

A Virtualization 2.0 Ready management solution must offer superior automation and root-cause diagnosis to enable administrators with limited expertise to be effective in spotting problems and taking the proper corrective action quickly.  The following is what a Virtualization 2.0 Ready monitoring and management solution should be able to do.