WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual
Monitor physical and virtual servers from a single console
Includes native support for VMware ESX & ESXi
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is the abstraction of computing resources decoupled from their physical capacities. Server virtualization enables running one or more “virtual machines” (commonly called a ‘guest’) on a single physical server (commonly called the ‘host’). A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of the server that acts just like a real machine.
How does Virtualization work?
Each virtual machine (VM) operates just like an independent server with its own guest operating system (Windows or Linux as examples) running one or more applications, with a designated amount of CPU, memory, disk and network resources. Each of the VM’s is isolated from one another other; so for example, if one of them crashes, it does not affect any of the other VM’s running on the same host server.
The VM’s and their guest operating systems run on the top of a specialized software called the “hypervisor” or the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor). The hypervisor acts as a sandwich layer between the VM’s and the physical hardware. It is responsible for intercepting calls from the guest operating systems of the VM’s to the hardware and managing them in a way, that each VM sees itself running independently on the allocated hardware resources. A hypervisor can provide the virtualized abstraction of the physical hardware including CPU, memory, storage and network I/O resources as well as access to all necessary system drivers.
Why doesn’t SNMP monitoring work in Virtualized environments?
SNMP was originally designed to manage hardware devices with a well defined MIB structure and definitive resource capacities. In a virtualized system, capacities are elastic (they can be made to grow or shrink dynamically) and full VM’s can be started/stopped or migrated from one hardware to another while maintaining their system state. In this dynamic environment, the rigid MIB and OID structure of SNMP is not suitable.
Further, the use of an intermediate hypervisor layer hinders the view into actual VM resource consumptions. For example, more memory may be allocated to VM’s than is physically available – through “Memory Over Commitment7rd or “Transparent Page Sharing” features provided by VMware. Hence, SNMP based reporting, whether through agents or in agent less modes report incorrect results of resource performance metrics and have only limited or no management information support from virtualization vendors. In fact, VMware has discontinued SNMP based performance data publishing altogether in their next generation ESXi systems. Monitoring of ESX servers with SNMP has other complications and needs detailed configuration as even the limited SNMP information is not published via the standard snmpd port.
What Virtualization Platforms does WhatsVirtual Currently Support?
WhatsVirtual currently supports the VMware ESX 3.0 and later and VMware ESXi 3.5 and later virtualization host systems. These are available free from VMware (for example, ESXi can be downloaded for free) and can also be purchased as part of their vSphere offering which provides robust capabilities for provisioning and maintenance of virtual server infrastructure.
Future versions of WhatsVirtual will support additional vendor systems providing heterogeneous support of virtual infrastructure.
What version of WhatsUp Gold do I need to use WhatsVirtual?
WhatsVirtual is a separately licensed plug-in and is available to customers for either evaluation or purchase. The plug-in requires the presence of WhatsUp Gold v14.2 and above as a base system.