VM Management & Monitoring: a best practice tool

During my presentation last week at the Spring Conference for the Association of Information Technology Professionals I spoke about putting a virtualization strategy together and the some of the best practices I have for that.  One thing that I didn’t get a chance to get to was one of the biggest challenges that organizations face today; management of those virtual environments.

In the Enterprise Architecture Group here at Alliance we use vCharter Pro from Vizioncore.  There are other products from the Vizioncore family, but from a management perspective vCharter is the one.

Some of the great features that vCharter provides are:

Single web-based “pane-of-glass” view shows activity and performance at the VirtualCenter, data center, resource pool, cluster, ESX Server, virtual machine and storage levels

Scales to support thousands of virtual machines and multiple VirtualCenter deployments

Automated alarms and alerts on performance issues and potential bottlenecks

“Understands” components of the VMware platform and can “roll-up” problems at lower levels into higher-level alarms

Datastore predictive monitoring helps determine when more storage will be required

“Raw” metrics can be combined into “derived” metrics for higher-level information

Database of metrics provide historical trending.

vCharter is powered by Quest Software’s Foglight.  If you are familiar with that product you can guess how powerful vCharter is for your virtual environments.

“Organizations implementing virtualization often start small then accelerate the pace and scale of deployment as they see the significant benefits the technology delivers,” said Chris Akerberg, Vizioncore President and Chief Operating Officer. “As customers build fully-virtualized enterprise data centers, performance and manageability become key concerns for users, who often don’t have the time or resources to understand and address everything that is going on in their environment. vCharter Pro delivers a wealth of metrics on activity and performance at different levels within the virtualized infrastructure and alerts customers on potential issues and bottlenecks, as well as ways to address these problems. As an increasing amount of critical, highly transactional workloads are virtualized, performance issues are only likely to increase, and we see this as a compelling case for a product like vCharter Pro.

You can check out vCharter and the other products from Vizioncore at http://www.vizioncore.com

Cheers
Michael

~ by Michael Keen on April 29, 2008.