VM Monitoring Tools

[Vitaly Tsipris]

I was wondering if there is a monitoring tool that would allow me to monitor VMs. I know I can setup alerts in VC, but they are very limited. What I am looking to do is to setup a monitoring of VMs' disk space, user counts, etc. I would like it to email me if there is VM that's running low on disk space, for example.

Is there such an animal out there? If not, how do you monitor your VMs?

Thank you in advance for any help!!

[admin]

We use NAGIOS, it's free and very flexible, you can set it to monitor pretty much any service (AD, exchange, etc), disk space, cpu load, total processes, zombie processes, total logins etc all through a web interface. It also sends email alerts and recovery messages.

It's nothing to do with VMWare as such, but we run our NAGIOS server in a VM to monitor all of our other VMs (and a load of physical boxes). It just needs an agent on the machines you want to monitor.

Take a look here: http://nagios.org/

[wunderon]

We monitor them in a similar manner to physical servers, with snmp and related tools. (Things like OpenView, MOM, Nagios, SPONG, etc.).

There are MIBs on the hosts which permit enumeration of VM's, their state, and so forth, but it shoulds like you're interested in the view from the VM side.

Of course Virtual Center can do some 'umbrella' monitoring of your hosts and the related VM's.

[Jasemccarty]

We monitor our VM's the same way we monitor our physical boxes.

We have an IBM setup, so we are authorized to put the Director agent on all of our VM's (running on IBM hardware).

It will send e-mail alerts, SNMP traps, etc.

If you have HP, Insight Manager will do this for you, and like IBM, it has a VM add-on.

Not 100% about Dell or any others.

Also Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 will do it with the MOM Agent in the VM (can be pricey, but maybe not when someone figures out the licensing in VM's).

Also Solarwind's Orion will do this too.

Just treat them like physical boxes, and you should be ok.

[earactingi]

whatsup pro is an agentless monitoring tool that will monitor every aspect of your vm (windows and linux) and/or ESX server without installing anything on the client and will send email alerts or status reports to admins and users.

It is not free, but it will do the job perfectly.

Here is how to configure it with ESX & SNMP:

http://edward.aractingi.net/blog/archives/2006/10/monitor_vm_with_whatsup.html

[MYO]

We (will) use a System Monitoring Box, based on NAGIOS, but due to our marginal knowledge of Unix, this box uses more "input/output friendly" Addons and Plugins.

unfortunately, I know only a Reseller in Germany for that one.

and its pretty cheap too if you compare it to other "big" tools.

Just write a pm for website address.

[Vitaly Tsipris]

Thank you guys for your suggestions. We certainly can monitor VMs using usual network monitoring tools. But what I was hoping to get an advice on is this:

How do we manage or keep track of VMs?

We can create VMs very fast and very many in a short period of time. How do we keep track of them so that we don't end up with a thousand VMs out there of which only a handful will actually be used?

Is there a way to track when VM was created and maybe get a reminder of some sort in about 6 mo or so to check if VM is still needed or used?

I hope I make any sense here!

Thank you in advance for your suggestions!

Message was edited by:

Vitaly91

[earactingi]

Most monitoring tools allow you to schedule network discovery for new VMs, Whatsup, nagios, Dell openmanage or IBM director can discover the network and add new machines, and you can create an alert action to send you a message after a period of time.

Virtual Center still the best tool to manage VMs but let us know what monitoring tool you use and we'll give you more details.

Shell scripts or custom scripts can help you discover the network and create a reminder in your outlook calendar after six months for example

[Vitaly Tsipris]

We use WhatsUp to monitor our network along with some other tools.

You mentioned that there are scripts that could be created. Where would I find that info?

[bernysan]

Another option, if you use Microsoft Operations Manager 2007, is to use management packs from Jalasoft, it has both Virtual Center and ESX agents which enable monitoring both from OpsMgr 2007 and have a Distributed Application in OpsMgr where all the infrastructure of a service can be included.