Virtualisation brings great benefits, but it needs care and attention to perform at its best.
How did we get here?
Virtualisation technologies initially emerged as almost “alchemy” among high-end server vendors like IBM, HP and Sun. The ability to run “multiple” discrete operating systems and application stacks within a single physical platform was originally the preserve of mainframes, but began to appear as a feature of more commodity IT in the form of, LDOMS, pNodes, vNodes…
Today, it’s a ubiquitous technology, with main players: VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix driving the Cloud explosion.
Virtualisation Benefits
Benefits: Cost reduction, reduce over-provisioning, maximise the use of existing IT real-estate, centralized management, rapid provisioning.
Monitoring the Hosts & the Guests
For as long as people can remember, monitoring of IT has been defined at the unit of the device; (server, router, switch..). Agent or agentless solutions are used to monitor the hardware, operating system, network and applications. With the advent of virtualization, the same rules apply, but in addition, there is a need to monitor the stack at the hypervisor level, as well as at the individual virtualised instance.
While it’s important to monitor performance at the level of the virtual machines, the underlying virtualization platform can impact numerous systems if it is not operating within expected norms. By applying configuration best practices from the leading virtualization vendors, and configuring monitoring based on these recommendations, the virtualisation platform shouldn’t become the cause of service impacting events.
As an example of this approach, we have used advice from Citrix to allow for the easy application of ServiceNav monitoring based on their published best practices.
UK ServiceNav Product Development Manager; my priority is to be needful of the particular requirements of all ‘English-speaking’ markets where ServiceNav is sold.
I have over 20 years experience of the IT monitoring field - covering a wide variety of products and technologies.
