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Best Practices: VMware Monitoringwith HP Operations Manager

Written by: Alec King

Senior Product ManagerVeeam Software



Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

Page | 2

Best Practices: VMware Monitoring with HP Operations Manager

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................2

INTENDED AUDIENCE .....................................................................................................................3

DISCLAIMER ...................................................................................................................................3 WHAT INFORMATION IS PROVIDED? ....................................................................................3

QUESTIONS TO ASK ........................................................................................................................3

HOW IS THE DATA GATHERED? ...............................................................................................5

THE WRONG WAY...........................................................................................................................5

THE RIGHT WAY..............................................................................................................................7

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS.....................................................................................................8

CERTIFIED “VMWARE READY OPTIMIZED” ..................................................................................8

HOW IS THE SOLUTION INTEGRATED INTO OPS MANAGER? ...................................8

INTEGRAL VS. CONNECTED............................................................................................................9

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS.....................................................................................................9 HOW DOES THE SOLUTION SCALE? .................................................................................... 10

SCALABILITY FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS.............................................................................. 10

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................11

ABOUT THE AUTHOR .................................................................................................................12

ABOUT VEEAM SOFTWARE .....................................................................................................12

INTRODUCTIONWhen an organization chooses HP Operations Center as its enterprise management

system (EMS), it makes substantial capital and operational investments in order to

reduce downtime and keep the IT environment running smoothly.

Increasingly, that environment includes VMware vSphere (or its predecessor,

VMware Infrastructure). The main objective for deploying vSphere typically is to

reduce costs through increased operational efficiency and capital utilization, and

many organizations have realized these benefits.

However, vSphere also adds complexity and, like anything in the environment,

must be monitored and managed. Ideally, this takes place in the existing EMS. This

kind of integrated approach allows operators to monitor physical and virtualsystems—and the applications and services running there—from the comfort of

the HP Operations Manager (Ops Manager) console. They can quickly identify the

source of a problem and immediately escalate it to the right team, thereby

speeding problem resolution.

Monitoring vSphere with Ops Manager also minimizes additional management

infrastructure and operator training because it uses the framework that’s already in

place and that operators are already familiar with. It not only leverages existing

investments in Ops Manager, it actually protects those investments by ensuring

that Ops Manager is truly the “single pane of glass” it is intended to be.

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-hp-operations.html






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Organizations have several choices for bringing vSphere to the Ops Manager

console. In evaluating these choices, there are four important considerations:

What information is provided?

How is the data gathered?

How is the solution integrated into Ops Manager?

How does the solution scale?

This paper examines each of these in greater detail to provide readers with a simple

but highly relevant set of criteria for choosing the best possible solution. With more

and more mission-critical applications and services running on virtual machines, it’s

an important decision with significant implications for IT and the business.

Intended audience

This document is intended for IT directors, data center managers, and HP OpsManager administrators in organizations evaluating or using VMware vSphere in

their production environment.

Disclaimer

Use this proven practice at your discretion. Veeam Software and the author do not

guarantee any results from the use of this proven practice. It is provided on an as-is

basis for demonstration purposes only.

WHAT INFORMATION IS PROVIDED?HP Ops Manager is a sophisticated framework for monitoring the IT infrastructure,

with advanced alerting, notification, data management, analytics, dashboard, and

other capabilities. But it natively knows very little about the distinct IT elements it

monitors. Instead, it relies on additional plug-in components to provide the know-

how to effectively monitor the various aspects of the IT infrastructure.

How well Ops Manager monitors vSphere depends on the intelligence of the

component that’s gathering, analyzing, and delivering information about the

virtual environment. Therefore, that component should encompass deep vSphere

expertise, including what metrics are available, what metrics are most important,and what thresholds are most appropriate. It should serve as the vSphere “expert in

a box,” capturing and putting into action best practices for vSphere monitoring and

management.

Questions to ask

When evaluating options for bringing vSphere to HP Ops Manager, organizations

should evaluate the vSphere credentials of the vendor and the depth of vSphere

expertise in the solution.








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Relevant questions include:

Is the vendor a virtualization specialist? Or are they a generalist with

limited vSphere expertise?

Why is the vendor offering a vSphere solution? Is this their core

business? Or are they just trying to “check the box” in terms of theplatforms they cover?

How long has the vendor been managing vSphere? What is their

experience in monitoring large production environments? With vSphere

deployments growing in size and importance, organizations cannot afford

to be the learning lab or the proving ground for a product development

team with little vSphere experience.

Is the solution specific to vSphere? Or is it a generalized solution,

addressing the “lowest common denominator” among the various

hypervisors?

What pre-configured monitoring policies does the solution include?

Pre-configured policies help avoid overflowing the Ops Manager console

with unimportant or informational events. While it should be possible to

customize policies (ideally from the Ops Manager console itself), the

solution should achieve at least an eighty percent fit right out-of-the-box.

Does the solution monitor events as well as performance? Some

solutions only capture performance data, ignoring the myriad of vSphere

events that alert administrators to potential security, configuration, and

licensing issues. Failed tasks, cluster configuration issues, and virtual

machine deployment or migration failures are just a few examples of the

events that must be monitored in order to have full visibility of what’s

happening—and what needs attention—in the virtual environment.

What “value-add” does the solution provide? Does it filter, organize, and

present information in the most useful way possible? Does it provide

derived metrics in addition to what’s available natively from vSphere?

What supporting information does the solution provide? Does it simply

present metrics and events, or does it explain their meaning, outline next

steps, and suggest corrective action? Can it shorten the learning curve for

operators who are new to virtualization? Does it elevate front-line support

staff by providing readily accessible VMware knowledge?







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HOW IS THE DATA GATHERED? At first glance, various methods exist for collecting data about the virtual

infrastructure. However, further examination reveals the shortcomings of many of

these methods.

The wrong way

Common technical approaches include the following:

Ops Manager agent in the Virtual Machine Guest Operating System

(OS): For OS and application health monitoring, Ops Manager uses the Ops

Manager agent. The assumption is that through OS monitoring, the Ops

Manager agent can determine the utilization of the underlying hardware.

However, with virtualization, there’s not a one-to-one relationship between

the OS and the underlying hardware. So an Ops Manager agent running inthe OS cannot determine the performance of the underlying hardware

system. Only the hypervisor can provide a true picture of hardware

utilization and the resources provided to the VM (virtual machine) and the

guest OS. An Ops Manager agent inside the guest OS provides a skewed

picture, since the Ops Manager agent treats the VM as a physical machine.

In addition, vSphere-specific metrics from the hypervisor layer—for

example, balloon memory and CPU ready and wait times—are not visible

to the Ops Manager agent. Likewise, important components of vSphere—

ESX(i) hosts, clusters, and vCenter—are not visible to the Ops Manager

agent. And important vSphere features such as VMotion, perhapscontrolled by DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) and/or HA (High

Availability), are also invisible. Without visibility of vSphere as a whole, it is

impossible to monitor host performance, physical hardware status, VM

status and configuration, and other critical aspects of vSphere.







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Ops Manager agent in the ESX Host Console Operating System (COS):

Another method of collecting data from vSphere is to deploy a Linux

monitoring agent in the ESX host’s Console Operating System (COS).

However, the COS is not truly Linux, and the COS is not truly the ESX

hypervisor. Thus, an agent monitoring the COS provides a limited view of

hypervisor performance.

An agent running in the COS also gives only partial visibility of many

vSphere aspects such as clustering, DRS, HA, DPM (Distributed Power

Management), and vCenter licensing, configuration and security.

COS-based agents also have the potential to impact the hypervisor.

Hypervisor instability has far-reaching consequences, affecting every VM on

the host—and even other hosts and their VMs in the cluster—and should

be avoided.

Finally, COS-based agents should be avoided because they have no long-

term viability. VMware’s stated direction is to deprecate the role of the COS,as they have already done in ESXi. Thus, any solution based on installing

components in the COS has no future.

Legacy management protocols: This includes SNMP trapping, “screen-

scraping” the ESX COS via SSH (to capture the limited metrics the COS can

request from the hypervisor), and Syslog monitoring. These approaches

suffer from many of the same shortcomings as an agent running in the

COS, including limited visibility of the complex vSphere environment and

the potential to impact hypervisor stability.

For the above reasons VMware developed a secure remote management API

(application programming interface) to communicate directly with the hypervisor

and with vCenter to gather accurate and detailed data about the virtual

environment.







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The right way

The VMware vSphere API (previously known as the VI API) allows for secure, efficient,

and effective monitoring of the virtual environment and eliminates the need to

deploy agents to hosts or virtual machines.

An agentless approach is of special importance since deploying an HP Ops Manager

agent in the ESX COS has been known to impact the stability and performance of the

hypervisor. Even COS agents from hardware vendors (the only kind approved by

VMware to run in the service console) must be re-certified for every VMware patch and

upgrade, and add additional management overhead. Using the vSphere API eliminates

the additional operational costs and the risks associated with COS-based agents.

In addition, agent-based monitoring is impossible for ESXi, which doesn’t have a COS

in which to deploy an agent. The vSphere API allows for safe, efficient, and accurate

monitoring of ESXi hosts in the same manner as ESX hosts.

The vSphere API also allows for agentless hardware monitoring. VMware needed toprovide such a method when they eliminated the COS in ESXi. vSphere implements

the CIM-SMASH hardware model (see www.dmtf.org) to publish data about fans,

power supplies, temperature sensors, and the like. Solutions that use the vSphere API

have access to CIM-SMASH data for any version of ESXi and for ESX 3.5 Update 2

onwards.

In an enterprise environment, scalability and overhead must also be considered. The

vSphere API is the most efficient method for gathering data about the virtual

environment. It uses highly effective data summarization and data packaging

techniques, and minimizes overhead and consumption of network bandwidth.

vCenter Server itself is built on the vSphere API.The vSphere API is exposed as a web service on vCenter servers and ESX(i) hosts, and

can be accessed using the vSphere Web Services SDK (previously known as the VI SDK).

Only the vSphere API presents a comprehensive picture of the health of all vSphere

aspects and their dependencies. Thus, any viable monitoring solution for VMware

must employ the vSphere API.







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Additional considerations

In addition to using the vSphere API to collect data, the monitoring solution should

allow administrators to configure the monitoring connections to vSphere. This

makes it possible to satisfy the broadest variety of requirements and scenarios—

now and in the future. It should be possible to:

Connect to multiple vCenter servers.

Collect data only for certain hosts or virtual machines in a given

vCenter.

Connect directly to ESX(i) hosts. This eliminates vCenter as a potential

“single point of failure” for the gathering of monitoring data, and also

allows monitoring of hosts that aren’t managed by vCenter (as may be the

case in remote branch offices).

Certified “VMware Ready Optimized”With the success of VMware, the number of vendors participating in the VMware

market has gone from tens to thousands in a few short years, and it is in vogue for

software companies to say they support the VMware Infrastructure. But which

vendors are actually qualified to make such an assertion? Which have played by the

rules set forth by VMware? Which are executing a strategy in line with VMware’s?

VMware created the VMware Ready Optimized program to address these

questions. It is the highest level of VMware certification for software products.

Products bearing the VMware Ready logo provide optimized levels of integration,

functionality, and performance that strictly adhere to VMware’s architectural,supportability, and future-proofing requirements, including use of the vSphere API.

To ensure the stability of the production environment, the reliability of the

information and alerts provided, and the long-term viability of the solution itself,

any monitoring solution for VMware should be certified VMware Ready Optimized.

HOW IS THE SOLUTION INTEGRATED INTO

OPS MANAGER?As previously discussed, monitoring VMware with HP Ops Manager provides a

number of compelling benefits:

Leverages the management infrastructure that’s already in place

Reduces the amount of training operators need in order to provide 24x7

front-line monitoring for VMware

Shortens problem resolution time by providing operators with full

visibility of the entire IT infrastructure

Protects the integrity of the Ops Manager “single pane of glass”

These benefits are most fully realized when VMware monitoring is implementednatively in the core Ops Manager architecture. And HP facilitates such an approach.







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Wanting Ops Manager to be a true enterprise monitor but knowing it could not

itself address everything that might encompass, HP encouraged third parties to

develop specialized domain-specific monitoring and provided a mechanism to

deliver that in Ops Manager using Smart Plug-ins (SPIs). Thus, the use of third-party

SPIs has become an integral part of Ops Manager deployments.

Integral vs. Connected

The alternative—a separate monitoring platform specifically for VMware, with its

own console, database, and alerting and notification system—is costly and

disruptive. Introducing another monitoring framework results in “console sprawl”

and requires further investments in staff training and redesigned management

processes. Even if the additional monitor includes a connector to Ops Manager, it

often provides only basic information or alerts. Only a truly integrated solution

allows all the features of Ops Manager to be employed and all the benefits of

monitoring VMware with Ops Manager to be realized.

Additional considerations

In addition to the fundamental question of SPI versus connected monitor, the

degree of integration with HP Ops Manager should be evaluated. The best solution:

Enables all standard EMS functions including performance, event, andstate monitoring; reporting and auditing; notifications; and so on. It enables

all the management functionality that operations staff expect to see and

use when something is monitored in Ops Manager.

Integrates directly with the Ops Manager Service Map . It builds a

detailed topology of the virtual environment that shows component

connections and dependencies, allows for targeted monitoring, and assists

with root-cause analysis.

Includes pre-defined remedial actions such as tools and tasks to allow

direct interaction with virtual machines and hosts (if operators have the

necessary permissions, of course).







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Can be configured from the Ops Manager console to lower

management costs and allow administrators to work in the environment

they are familiar with.

Integrates with HP Operations Center reporting. This includes HP

Reporter, HP Performance Manager, and HP Performance Insight. Thesereporting components are part of the standard Operations Center ”toolkit”

for performance and configuration analysis, historical reporting, and

capacity planning. The solution should enable this reporting functionality

to realize all the benefits of the HP platform.

A solution that offers these capabilities—and includes built-in VMware expertise,

uses the vSphere API, and is configurable and scalable — will deliver solid value

now and in the future.

HOW DOES THE SOLUTION SCALE?Scalability may not be the most exciting aspect of a software evaluation, but it is

key to the success of the solution ultimately selected and deployed to production.

Even the best functionality is of little value if the solution fundamentally can’t

support the environment. And no one wants to invest time and effort to deploy a

solution they quickly outgrow—that is simply too expensive and too disruptive for

today’s cost-conscious, service-oriented IT department.

Scalability may not be the most exciting aspect of software development, either.

It’s a thankless task, garnering attention only when there’s a problem, with little

acknowledgement—from users or, in the case of a commercial software product,

from the market—of a job well done. It’s also a difficult task, requiring deepknowledge of system internals, solid architecture design skills, and patience to

develop, execute, and analyze repeated load tests. And the cost of failure is high:

there’s typically no quick fix when something goes wrong, and a significant system

redesign—which is disruptive to users, administrators, and project schedules—is

often the only solution.

Scalability is especially a concern with new software. What works well on paper

doesn’t necessarily work well in practice. It takes experience, production run-time,

and typically several product releases to get it right.

Scalability for Virtual Environments

The virtual infrastructure is complex, with many moving parts and dependencies.

So the amount of information about the virtual infrastructure is immense.

Monitoring will suffer in the near-term if the solution can’t handle all the data. And

a solution that works today might not work tomorrow if the virtual environment

continues to grow.

For VMware monitoring with HP Ops Manager, scalability must be addressed on

two fronts:

Collecting the data from vSphere

Feeding the data to Ops Manager







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The vSphere API is the most efficient method to gather the data, and use of the

vSphere API helps to ensure the scalability of data collection.

In terms of delivering the data to Ops Manager, experience shows that the Ops

Manager API or other data injection methods aren’t the best approach. The Ops

Manager API is not designed to handle the volume of data coming from the virtual

environment, which may have hundreds or even thousands of objects, with many

different metrics and events. And if Ops Manager gets bogged down, all

monitoring is affected—not just monitoring of the virtual environment.

A better approach pairs the collector with an Ops Manager agent that feeds the

data to Ops Manager. Multiple collector/agent pairs can be deployed as necessary

to handle the data load. This kind of distributed architecture provides virtually

unlimited scalability and leverages Ops Manager’s Management Server ”back-end,”

which is designed to support multiple agents.

Of course, once you have multiple collectors, you need to a way to manage them.

Although the collectors ultimately feed data to a single central point (OpsManager), the collectors themselves must be configured and managed. To do this

one collector at a time would add significant administrative overhead and

opportunity for errors. In addition, it should be possible to coordinate the work of

multiple collectors. For example, it should be possible to balance the load among

collectors, and have the collectors serve as backups for each other (high availability

monitoring). The result is a centrally managed, distributed architecture that can

easily grow as the monitored environment grows.

While scalability may not be the most exciting aspect of a software evaluation, it is

absolutely critical to success. Often, the most scalable solution is the most mature

one: it’s gone through several iterations, it includes sophisticated configurationoptions, and it’s been proven in real production environments. Product maturity

and vendor experience not only affect the depth of vSphere expertise in the

solution (as previously discussed), but they also affect scalability and are important

considerations for product selection.

CONCLUSIONFor organizations that have standardized on HP Operations Center, the benefits of

monitoring VMware with HP Ops Manager are clear. What may not be so clear is

how to bring VMware to the Ops Manager console. This white paper suggests fourcriteria for evaluating the alternatives. In doing so, the white paper addresses three

rather distinct audiences with three rather distinct sets of needs:

The Ops Manager team, which is responsible for the integrity of the EMS

and the delivery of monitoring data for all business-critical infrastructure

The virtualization team, which is responsible for the performance and

availability of the virtual environment

The business as a whole, which is responsible for costs and for service to

customers, employees, and other users







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Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware is one alternative worthy of

consideration. Developed in close collaboration with VMware and certified

“VMware Ready Optimized,” the nworks SPI is proven in more than 300 real

customer installations and more than 5 years of production use. It fully embraces

the vSphere API from VMware as well as the Ops Manager framework from HP, to

provide best-in-class monitoring for VMware. And because it’s from Veeam, aleading virtualization specialist, it encompasses deep knowledge and extensive

experience with VMware to provide the most effective monitoring of your virtual

environment and the most comprehensive support for your operations staff. For

more information about the nworks SPI, visit www.veeam.com/spi.

ABOUT THE AUTHORAlec King is a Senior Product Manager at Veeam Software. He has many years’

experience in enterprise systems management with a variety of companies,including Siemens and the British Broadcasting Corporation. He can be reached at

[email protected].

ABOUT VEEAM SOFTWAREVeeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member

of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for

managing VMware vSphere 4 and Virtual Infrastructure 3. Veeam offers an award-

winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including:

Veeam Backup & Replication: #1 for Virtualization Data Protection

Veeam Reporter Enterprise: for VMware performance, storage, and

capacity reporting and chargeback

Veeam Monitor: for vSphere performance monitoring and alerting across

multiple vCenter Servers

Veeam Configurator: for complete host configuration management

Veeam Business View: for business-aligned management of virtual

machines, independent of the virtual infrastructure

With its acquisition of nworks in June 2008, Veeam's products also include thenworks Smart Plug-in and the nworks Management Pack , which incorporate

VMware data into enterprise management consoles from HP and Microsoft. Learn

more about Veeam Software by visiting www.veeam.com.



http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-reporting_enterprise.html





http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring.html

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-configure.html

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-business-view.html





http://www.veeam.com/vmware-microsoft-esx-monitoring.html



http://www.veeam.com/vmware-microsoft-esx-monitoring.html



http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-configure.html

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring.html


http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html

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