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

By Srinivas Ramanathan
published: Sunday, February 22 2009

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.

• Provide a single view of virtual and physical infrastructures.  Most enterprises are moving to virtualization in a phased manner.  To provide an integrated view of the target infrastructure, the monitoring and management system needs to be able to manage virtual and physical machines equally well, providing a single integrated interface.
• Support multiple virtualization technologies.  Administrators now have a choice of virtualization technologies based on their business needs and preferences (e.g., VMware, Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc.). Most large infrastructures will include a mix of these technologies, and it is important to monitor them through a single unified dashboard.
• Track physical resource availability, configuration and usage by VMs.  While monitors designed for conventional physical machines can be used on individual VMs, they have no specialized capabilities for virtualized environments.  Having visibility into the hypervisor, which VMs are powered on, what resources they are using and if the physical server can handle this workload are among the critical requirements that only a specialized virtualization monitoring solution can deliver.
• Provide an inside view of virtual machines with clear problem identification.  It's not enough to have an "outside view" of a VM to track resource usage levels (CPU, memory, disk, network) of each VM on a physical server.  You also need an "inside view" to track such dynamics as end user activity, resource allocation for each application and the application mix running inside the VM guest operating system. Look for a monitoring solution that offers both "inside" and "outside" views.
• Automatically establish performance baselines and norms.  To save time and mistakes, look for a monitoring solution that can automatically determine the right performance baselines for your infrastructure.  This capability is also key to being able to monitor your infrastructure proactively. This means comparing current performance with respect to the baseline and generating alerts in advance to help avert potentially serious problems.
• Perform automatic correlation for true root-cause diagnosis.  Analyzing alerts and determining where the root-cause of a problem lies is tough enough in a physical infrastructure. The addition of virtualization makes things even harder because a problem in any one layer or domain of the infrastructure typically affects the performance of other components in ways that are difficult to recognize.
• Scale as the infrastructure monitored grows.  A large deployment can grow to hundreds of physical servers and thousands of VMs that require monitoring. In fact, as virtualization for desktops becomes popular, the ratio of VMs to physical servers could be as high as 30:1. Your monitoring solution must be able to scale to handle such large infrastructures.
• Support for virtualized desktop environments.  Virtual desktops have different characteristics (connection brokers, terminal access controllers, etc.) than server-based environments. Your monitoring solution should handle the diverse requirements of both environments.
• Offer personalized views for the various stakeholders in an organization to enable collaborative management.  Virtualization administrators, application experts, database admins, infrastructure architects, helpdesk personnel, and capacity planners may require different views of the infrastructure in keeping with their roles and responsibilities. Your monitoring system must be flexible to meet the needs of each stakeholder.

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