VI and Cloud Monitoring in Dynamic Virtualized Environment
Overview
In last few years, adoption of virtualization technologies has increased rapidly. The key driver for this adoption has been server consolidation. Add to it, virtualization is the base enabler of cloud computing, server based computing, virtual desktop infrastructure technology and their adoption is, in turn, driving adoption of virtualization While virtualization/cloud technologies provide greater flexibility and added features to end users, it has also increased the complexity of managing such infrastructures, which are a mix of physical and virtual systems. To resolve these complexities, administrators require visibility of activities and events in various layers of the entire stack (including physical layers, as well as various layers of virtualization stack). Monitoring across these various layers is very critical to equip the administrator to fix issues related to configuration, performance and capacity in order to ensure the virtualized environment delivers to its potential with minimal administration costs.
Monitoring in Virtualized Environment
Monitoring in virtualized environments involves examination of physical and virtual resources. This includes the detection, tracking of changes to the assets, environment, configuration and the analysis of these parameters over a period of time for multiple purposes.
Virtual infrastructure monitoring includes a range of parameters, such as system performance, application performance, system health, resource inventory, resource configuration, resource capacity, resource utilization and other important changes in a dynamic virtualized environment. Virtualized environments consist of a number of physical and virtual entities, including physical host servers virtual machine monitors (VMMs) /hypervisors, virtual machines (VMs), virtual disks, virtual network and applications (running inside the VMs), etc. All of these elements are associated with each other through complex relationships. Data is captured for analysis by monitoring various attributes of these elements and their relationships.
Challenges
The virtualized world is a complex mix of physical and virtual entities. Although virtualization is a several decades old technology/concept, hypervisor-based virtualization technologies are relatively new and its applications are evolving. Hence, the monitoring needs of the virtualized world are also continuously changing. This constant change poses unique challenges for monitoring a virtual infrastructure. There are many cases where new mechanisms are developed to assist these platforms in order to meet the changes in demand (i.e., VMotion/DRS), but these add to new complexities. As a consequence of increasing complexity/uncertainty, many users of virtualization technology do not fully utilize all of the available performance of the underlying systems. This inefficiency is often further compounded by side effects of virtualization (i.e., virtual machine sprawl). This section details some of the engineering challenges faced by VI monitoring solution vendors as they attempt to make their solution complete, competitive and compelling.
Multiple types of users
There are multiple types of users interested in VI monitoring. The challenge for vendors is that they are interested in different information, presented at varying levels of granularity. This requires the same data to be analyzed in different ways to cater to diverse user requirements. The following summarizes requirements from a number of user constituents:
