virtualization

DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | December 200964 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

In many environments, managing a diverse set

of hardware, software, and operating systems

presents daily challenges for IT administrators.

Although using virtualization to consolidate physical

systems can provide a variety of advantages, it

can also increase the complexity of systems man-

agement, including adding to the number of

management tools that administrators must learn,

deploy, and maintain. Some organizations may even

avoid using virtualization in production environ-

ments because of the perceived lack of virtualization

management tools that can interoperate with their

existing management software.

To help simplify management in VMware environ-

ments, Veeam Software—a Dell Independent

Software Vendor (ISV) Certified Partner—and Dell

have teamed up to offer the nworks Management

Pack for VMware. Available directly from Dell, this

management pack is designed to seamlessly inte-

grate VMware event, performance, and configuration

information into Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager (SCOM) 2007. For organizations using

SCOM, this management pack can help accelerate

virtualization adoption and the integration of VMware

platforms into their existing management frame-

works, centralizing and simplifying operations with-

out requiring additional consoles, processes, or

administrator training.

understanding the Microsoft scoM 2007 architectureMicrosoft SCOM 2007 is designed to help administra-

tors measure, monitor, and manage a diverse set of

physical hardware, operating systems, and applica-

tions residing on both physical systems and virtual

machines (VMs). The advantage of this approach is

clear: a single interface that can monitor both hard-

ware and software, with an intuitive health-model

architecture, helps to standardize how organizations

manage their assets and simplify administration.

The SCOM architecture typically consists of an

agent loaded on a physical system or VM, which

reports back to the management server with informa-

tion that is then converted into the health model. With

this architecture in place, however, administrators

may have legitimate concerns about incorporating

separate management tools or consoles. Microsoft

addresses this problem by making the SCOM archi-

tecture available for third parties to develop manage-

ment packs that can fit directly into the system,

helping offer a consistent management view across

the enterprise.

Environments that include VMware virtualization

can introduce additional complexity for enterprise

management. For example, Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers

running VMware ESX or ESXi hypervisors do not sup-

port typical SCOM-enabled drivers for Microsoft

Although VMware® virtualization can offer major advantages, it can also add management complexity for administrators. The nworks Management Pack for VMware from Veeam Software is designed to seamlessly integrate VMware platforms into Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007—helping to centralize and simplify systems management in virtualized environments.

By Mark Carroll

Managing VMware enVironMents inMicrosoft systeMcenter operationsManager 2007

65DELL.COM/PowerSolutionsReprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

Windows® operating systems. VMware

ESX is based on a kernel that is accessed

through a console OS (COS), and ESXi

requires remote access only to the kernel,

leaving no place for an agent. In addition,

VMware VMs use memory balloon and

taxing technology in the hypervisor to

allow hosts to approach upper utilization

limits, essentially allowing the VMs to

believe they are running at a utilization

percentage that they may or may not

actually be running at on the physical

system—enabling enhanced attributes like

memory oversubscription that can help

increase physical system performance.

Although this technology can have advan-

tages for overall data center performance,

it can also lead to decisions based on

incorrect data at an operations manage-

ment level when administrators are moni-

toring SCOM agents loaded on VMs.

To help overcome this problem and

provide appropriate hardware and perfor-

mance metrics, monitors or agents must

reside at the kernel level of ESX servers.

But administrators now face several result-

ing problems: How can they add a physical

hardware agent to a system that is not run-

ning a Microsoft OS? And, furthermore,

how can they add an agent to a server like

the Dell PowerEdge R900, which does not

require any OS when configured with

ESXi—a 32 MB kernel without a COS to

incorporate third-party drivers?

Managing vMware environMents with scoM 2007The nworks Management Pack for VMware

from Veeam Software is specifically

designed to centralize and simplify

management in VMware virtualized

environments. Because Veeam software

operates in an agentless mode, it can

manage physical hardware, kernel opera-

tions, and VMs using the VMware applica-

tion programming interface (API) rather

than adding a COS agent or adding an

agent to each VM. This management pack

can also operate in read-only mode,

enabling it to monitor the systems without

affecting system performance.

The VMware API enables ESX or ESXi

kernels to export Dell server hardware data

using the Intelligent Platform Management

Interface (IPMI), Common Information

Model (CIM), and Systems Management

Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH)

standards. The nworks Virtual Enterprise

Monitor (VEM) system can gather informa-

tion from multiple VMware ESX, VMware

ESXi, or VMware vCenter™ Server systems,

consolidate this information, convert it to

the Microsoft SCOM 2007 database for-

matting, and forward it through a SCOM

agent loaded on the VEM system (see

Figures 1 and 2). The VEM is typically a

physical server or VM running a Microsoft

Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server®

2003, or Windows Server 2008 OS with a

VEM servernworks collector service

nworks configuration interfaceMicrosoft SCOM 2007 agent

MicrosoftSCOM 2007

management server

VMwarevCenterserver

VMwareESX server

VMs

VMwareESX server

VMsManagement packhealth-model data

VMwareAPI data

Figure 1. Monitoring architecture for the nworks Management Pack for VMware from Veeam Software

Figure 2. Monitoring information for virtualized servers in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007

virtualization

DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | December 200966 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

single processor and 1 GB of RAM or more.

The architecture of the SCOM agent

(which is designed to collect information

from a single Windows-based server

rather than dozens or hundreds of VMs)

means that although there is no defined

limit on the number of hosts or VMs that

each VEM system can support, best prac-

tices recommend a configuration of up to

50 ESX or ESXi hosts per collector or up

to 1,000 VMs per collector, depending on

the specific environment and VEM configu-

ration. Large enterprises can incorporate

multiple VEM servers into their environ-

ments, which can then work together to

support additional capacity.

After configuring the VEM system,

administrators can begin monitoring and

managing data from the physical hosts

and VMs the same way they do for

Windows-based physical servers. Within

the SCOM monitoring tool, the monitoring

information is displayed similarly to infor-

mation from other management packs,

and device integration and associations

occur just as they did previously. For

organizations where the systems opera-

tion staff also handles virtualization, the

nworks Management Pack for VMware has

integrated functionality that supports

VMware Infrastructure Client operations

such as putting servers into maintenance

mode, turning on VMs, and suspending or

shutting down VMs. This functionality also

integrates with VMware user policies,

enabling organizations with defined user

roles to provide operations teams with

appropriate levels of access.

Administrators can also use the

SCOM console for trend analysis and

monitoring based on current and histori-

cal data. Utilization modeling enables

administrators to compare individual

ESX servers to help identify whether cer-

tain systems are performing at the

appropriate capacity level, and whether

the VMware Distributed Resource

Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High

Availability (HA) capabilities are aggres-

sive enough. Administrators can also

drill down to individual hardware sen-

sors to identify, for example, whether

ambient temperatures or fan speeds

may indicate a failing component—pro-

viding a warning before a systems

outage occurs (see Figure 3).

Monitoring and alerting are also key

elements of managing VMware environ-

ments in SCOM. The VMware kernel

includes definitions to create associations

with hardware events, but those defini-

tions may not necessarily match the way

a specific organization wants to set

thresholds for actions. Administrators can

use the SCOM interface to modify action

thresholds by adjusting the preset defini-

tions just as they would adjust other

thresholds in SCOM.

siMplifying virtualization ManageMentAlthough virtualization can offer benefits

ranging from reduced hardware costs to

increased energy efficiency, some orga-

nizations may have avoided implementing

it because of a perceived increase

in management overhead. The nworks

Management Pack for VMware from Veeam

Software enables administrators to imple-

ment VMware virtualization in their envi-

ronments while still taking advantage of

their existing investments in Microsoft

SCOM 2007—helping them to gain the

advantages of virtualization while still

maintaining a centralized, simplified con-

sole for systems management.

Mark Carroll is a solution architect for

Veeam Software. He has a bachelor’s

degree in Management Information

Systems from Baylor University, and has

previously worked for both the Dell IT

Group and VMware.

Figure 3. Temperature and fan metrics for virtualized servers in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007

QuicK linKs

Veeam Software:www.veeam.com/powersolutions

Dell and Veeam:DELL.COM/Veeam