Six reports not to miss for smart VMware vSphere monitoring

Greg Shields,Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert

What’s in?

Fighting with Complexity: when VMware monitoring becomes a tough job

Why VMware’s in-built monitoring is not enough?

6 critical reports that VMware is missing

Fighting with Complexity

Every virtual infrastructure tends to scale upwards.

The bigger it gets, the bigger the challenge to monitor and manage it effectively.

No Human Alive

One day the infrastructure achieves such a degree of complexity that no human alive can cope with monitoring its performance without extra assistance.

The solution is simple and logical:

complex virtual networks require complex solutions for monitoring and management

Automation: the two-edge sword

Though additional automation (e.g. removing manual steps from building & managing servers, enabling VMware HA & DRS, etc.) may seem a good remedy for making virtual experience easier, it also contributes to raising of complexity.

Automation: the two-edge sword

One day those layers of complexity grow to the point where activities become harder instead of easier:

● How do you determine capacity when it is spread across a great many hosts?

● What about storage consumption and utilization when SAN connections are numerous?

This is when it’s time to rethink your reporting system.

Rethinking your reporting scheme

When automation becomes your permanent headache, it actually indicates that you are ready for the next level of automation.

6 reports you might be missing

The result of the additional automation will most likely include 6 categories of most-needed reports that you miss using vSphere alone.

#1 Enterprise Visibility

Once your vSphere environment reaches an enterprise size, getting your hands across your virtual assets becomes quite a task and requires extra reporting capabilities across those assets.

Heads-up display of all objects under management helps to identify where the problem is

#2 Resource Consumption & Performance

Understanding the behaviors of virtual assets – clusters, hosts, VMs, and so on – requires drilling down into the details of their resource consumption and performance.

This figure shows how host and cluster CPU and memory resources can be analyzed across many assets at once.

#3 Storage Utilization & Consumption

Two most crucial storage issues that VMware alone can’t resolve:

Cost. With SAN dollars-per-gigabyte, storage is the most expensive virtual environment’s resource Targeting the heavy consumers brings big bang for the buck!

Performance. Poorly-performing storage – a common source of unacceptable VM performance – is difficult to root out with vSphere’s native tools alone.

#3 Storage Utilization & Consumption

You need a single pane of glass report that highlights your storage:

● its breakdown● top consumers● areas where performance failures are killing your VMs

…to see your biggest utilization issues.

#4 Heads-Up Change Management

An environment that lacks change management is an environment that IT does not control.

Troubleshooting an uncontrolled environment is way more difficult.

vSphere lacks a mechanism to integrate configuration data into a centralized CMDB and thus can’t fit into the rest of your change management infrastructure.

#5 Quantitative Capacity Management & Planning Virtual resource utilization is extremely dynamic.

Using VMware alone you miss a report providing quantitative look at your resources under management in comparison with those consumed.

Such report can be visualized to provide a layout across all assets (as shown below for memory, CPU, and storage capacity)

#6 Business Relevance

Virtualization represents IT’s new ability to meet the needs of business at the speed of business.

VMware lacks a report tailored for a non-technical line of business person like the one shown below

This figure shows an example of a heads-up display that’s tailored for the non-technical line of business person.

#6 Business Relevance

What we covered?

Once your environments hits that “invisible threshold” where VM management starts getting complicated – it’s time to rethink your monitoring policy.

Not all of the multiple VMware monitoring tasks can be fulfilled by VMware alone.

You need additional VMware monitoring tools for:

● Heads-up display of all your objects● Resource consumption & performance report across all assets● Storage utilization & consumption report showing biggest utilization

issues● Heads-up change management display● Business-oriented report for the use of non-IT part of business

Need more details?

If you want to get more details on the subject, please, request our free featured White Paper

“VMware Monitoring: Six Reports You Might Be Missing”

Questions on related topics?

If you have any questions concerning:

virtualization monitoring and management VMware and Hyper-V VM backup and recovery and related matters

please, refer to educational portal for virtualization experts BackupAcademy.com

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