Virtualization Planning & Reporting with MOM 2005 Reporting

Everyone is familiar with the advantages of server consolidation by now. With the recent announcement of the Virtual Server 2005 R2 MP refresh marks the return of one of the most useful reports you'll find in MOM 2005 - the "Virtualization Candidates Report". This report was pulled from the report xml file long ago when it was discovered it was not "SQL 2005 friendly". This report provides a quick way to identify all those underutilized boxes from the days when deploying a new application meant automatically deployed a server to host it. Essentially, the report parameters ask you to define your criteria for a good candidate. You simply select: Target computer group (e.g. - Windows 2003 Servers) Max and Avg CPU Max and Avg Memory Max number of CPUs present Max physical memory In most cases, you're going to be looking for 1-2 CPU / <= 2GB RAM as easy targets for virtualization Here's a quick screenshot of what I am talking about (sorry if it doesnt come out clear). There are several other reports I really like in this MP as well: VM Machine Details Performance History (CPU/MEM) Disk Usage Sadly, VMWare admins will discover these reports only work for Virtual Server 2005 VMs. :( I still have several MS VMs in production. I have both MS and VMWare in production, so maybe a hybrid version of this report can be hashed out in the community at some point.

VMWare ESX 3.0 Monitoring Options in MOM 2005

Recently I was tasked with conducting a trial to find a workable solution for VMWare ESX 3.0 monitoring in a MOM 2005 enterprise environment. When searching for viable solutions, there were three primary criteria we felt were most important. First, I was looking for a product that can collect a broad range of event, state and performance data and also Deliver the information with some built-in knowledge (threshold and state rules), And finally, deliver well-formatted events to MOM, so wouldn’t have to spend hours writing scripts to transform nasty variable binding from raw SNMP events. The three competing products I put through the paces were: eXc VMWare Management Pack Quest Management eXtensions for MOM nWorks VMWare Events MP for MOM Of the three products in the trial, I found only one really met both of my criteria. Below are some technical insights into the products I tested, some high level details on how data is extracted and presented in MOM, some of shortcomings identified in the trial. 1) ESX VMWare MP The first product I tested was eXc's VMWare management pack. Unfortunately, the most attractive quality of this solution was the licensing. You will pay somewhere in the ballpark of $399(US) per DNS name which means you can run as many of their MP’s as you want against that machine. The first real test I put the test through was on UP/DOWN notifications. The product uses SNMP traps sent from the ESX Host machine and compares those traps against an Access DB and alert based on what the SNMP trap contained. Unfortunately the trap contained a string that included the physical path to the VMX file. This can render the alerts unusable if the ESX administrator does not follow appropriately descriptive naming conventions. The performance collection wasn't much better. It would basically initiate a telnet or SSH session (depending on your configuration) and gather performance data gleaned from output of the ESXTOP utility. This is okay but the MP only collected data on the ESX server as a whole which really doesn't help you that much when trying to figure out which VM is hogging the resources. It also failed the built-in knowledge criterion, because of the poorly formatted alerts, coupled with the fact that all UP/DOWN alerts come across as critical errors. I was also disappointed to learn that eXc doesn’t support their product on a MOM MS running on a virtual server front-end….the very scenario we run in our production environment. 2) Quest Management eXtensions for MOM The next product I tested was Quest Management eXtensions for MOM. This test didn't last very long because the version I was testing at the time didn't even support a VMWare ESX 3.0 host. Unfortunately it took a support call to Quest and three days of waiting for an answer to find this out. Not great response time for a company trying to sell me something 3) nWorks VMWare Events MP for MOM The final product tested was nWorks VMWare Events MP for MOM. nWorks offers two versions of their VMWare Management Pack. One version covers only VMWare events (called VMWare Events Only MP for MOM) at a cost of approx $500 (US) for a 2 CPU license, and a second version covers both events and performance logging called (VMWare Only MP for MOM), at a cost of approx $1300(US) for a 2 CPU license. Upon installation, I was impressed with the amount of data it collected from the ESX Host. It not only collected information about the ESX Host as a whole, but also data on each VM on that host as well. I think the big advantage is that the MP used the VMWare API to pull some of this data, avoiding the decidedly unfriendly SNMP varbind dump to MOM, saving me some scripting time. Granted this application needs to run some VMWare console based utilities using a SSH connection, but the amount of data it returns is very nice. The UP/DOWNS were a refreshing change from previous products because it actually pulled the name of the VM guest from the API and the alert was readable. The nWorks met all my criteria for selecting a ESX Monitoring solution. It provided a broad range of data about the ESX host and provided built-in knowledge through its alerts. nWorks Homepage http://www.nworks.com/index.php eXc Software http://www.excsoftware.com/version3/version3/Default.aspx

Day 7 - VMWare Server 1.x Monitoring with MOM 2005

Virtual Server 2005 is a solid first effort in Virtualization for Microsoft, and with System Center Virtual Machine Manager in the pipeline and the Hypervisor on the horizon, MS is clearly looking to make a dent in the dominent position of VMWare in the virtualization space. But let's face it, VMWare is here now! They have a solid platform that is clearly a few steps in the lead right now, and many of us rely on the VMWare Server 1.x platform, currently available at no charge.   So why should Virtual Server be the only kid on the block with a free management pack? To quote Rush Limbaugh, I say Equal Time! (okay, that's not exactly what he said, but you get my point)   So, on this 7th day of Christmas, here is version 1.0 of a VMWare Server 1.x Management Pack. Although  homegrown and fresh off the line, this MP includes about 140 event rules and a number of features you'd see in a standard MP.   Here's a quick rundown of features: No configuration design (Formula-driven group is auto-populated with VMWare Host Servers so you can import the MP and go back to work. VMWare Server Role in State View ("VMWare") State-aware service monitoring Several event categories, including Guest Events - notifies Virtualization Admins of changes in Guest VM state (starts, stops, suspends, resets) Hardware Issues - alerts on memory, CPU and disk faults directly affecting VM operation. Driver and resource allocation events - Alerts on driver mismatches and errors Corruption and Crash Dump event groups Alert and Event Views in the Operator Console for Guest Events Diagram View to display parent-child relationships of VMWare Host Servers and their VM Guests Virtualization Administrators Notification Group for alert recipients (as always, I recommend MOM 2005 Notification Workflow for the most flexible alert notification possible!) Disclaimer: Although I have been running this in production for a bit and it is fully functional and stable in my experience,  please always run this and all MPs new to your environment through your test environment first. Only the most critical events will raise alerts at a Critical Error or higher severity in this version (Guest Events and Service State in particular - most I left at Warning severity). I'll post an updated version in a few months if necessary after I've had some additional tuning time.   WHERE TO GET IT: Get your copy of the VMWare Server 1.x Management Pack here: http://www.momresources.org/mommps/vmwareserver.zip   FEEDBACK: I dont have a test team or a QA department, so your feedback is always apprecaited. Send feedback via e-mail from my blog or momresources.org email addresses.