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WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual

Monitor physical and virtual servers from a single console

Includes native support for VMware ESXi

Free 30 Day Evaluation

Accurate and Integrated Virtual Server Monitoring and Management

Virtualization has changed the economics of investment in systems capacity – enabling far greater utilization rates than was safely possible in a physical server environment. As a network or systems administrator in charge of running your datacenter environment, it is likely you have already embraced virtualization or are thinking of doing so. Apart from cost, virtualization also provides you the agility to quickly provision or reallocate server capacity whenever your business or applications so demand.

However, you also realize that managing virtualized environments presents different challenges than running physical infrastructure. For one, dynamic virtualized systems typically don’t support the standard SNMP mode of data collection. Even if they do, they provide only limited or inaccurate information. As a result you are probably compelled to use a different monitoring system for your virtual servers than you do for your physical systems infrastructure, making your job more difficult. And typically virtualization monitoring systems that ship with the software have rudimentary capability at best. You likely miss the breadth and depth of management information and real-time alerting that a full- fledged management system can provide.

Integrated Monitoring and Management of Physical and Virtual Servers in One Single Console

WhatsVirtual is a new plug-in to the WhatsUp Gold core platform that does just that. It allows you to discover, map, monitor and manage your VMware virtual server environment exactly in the same way and from the same console as your physical server infrastructure. And with the power of WhatsUp Gold to manage network and application components as well, you have complete visibility to manage your entire datacenter environment from one management system. You don’t need to look at multiple screens trying to figure out what went wrong or is likely to do so – since WhatsVirtual and WhatsUp Gold bring it all together.

With WhatsVirtual you can:

Automatically discover and map VMware ESXi hosts and their associated guest systems
Collect accurate utilization and resource consumption metrics through the VMware API
View virtual server performance seamlessly along with information from your physical servers
Get alerted in real-time when utilization on host systems or virtual machines breach thresholds
Actively manage virtual machines on demand or on a scheduled basis using VMware tools
Manage your entire datacenter infrastructure and applications from a single console

Key Capabilities Include:

VMware ESXi Role-based Discovery and Mapping

The WhatsVirtual plug-in automatic discovers, maps and documents physical servers and virtual resources --virtual clusters, vCenter server, VMware ESXi host and guest (virtual) machine roles-- so you can fully understand your entire infrastructure. And since WhatsUp WhatsVirtual seamlessly displays the relationship between the host system and its associated VMs at all times, even when they are in suspended mode or after a live migration, you can rapidly traced back root cause of problems anywhere in your infrastructure.

Native Integration with the Powerful VMware API (Includes support for vCenter, VMware vMotion & VMware High Availability)

WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual integrates with the powerful VMware API to collect performance metrics across VMs, virtual clusters and hosts, gain access to key management tasks, or oversee VMware vMotion or High Availability live migrations. WhatsVirtual offers all the tools that you need (real-time maps, alerting capabilities and historical reports) to understand physical to VM mapping at all times, even as VMs move across servers, and simplify troubleshooting tasks. Relying on the VMware API is necessary because SNMP data collection is inaccurate when managing dynamic virtualized infrastructures, where physical resources are notionally shared between multiple guest systems through the virtualization software layer, called the hypervisor. Moreover, for next generation ESXi systems, VMware has stopped providing any performance information via SNMP.

Active Management of your VMware Virtual Environment

The WhatsVirtual plug-in provides powerful capability for controlling virtual machines and virtual clusters through a number of management actions such as: power on, power off, suspend, and reset and virtual machine backup. Further, any of these management actions can be set for recurring execution or triggered on specific device states just like for other WhatsUp Gold Action Library items. For example, new Snapshots (configuration backups) of virtual machines can be triggered over the weekend, or a running VM may be powered down when the utilization falls below set levels.

Workspace Reports for Physical Host Servers, Virtual Machines and Virtual Clusters

WhatsVirtual adds several new workspace reports over and above existing physical server performance monitoring reports, such as Virtual Host lists, Virtual Host attributed or virtual clusters groups. Each of the entities link directly to the individual system device report – whether at a host or virtual machine level – providing exactly the same information as WhatsUp Gold does for a physical server. For example, the new Virtual Host Attributes report displays all the host server details including, the running configuration of the server and its version numbers. And hardware attributes displayed include the number of CPU cores and frequency, memory capacity and other system information.

Seamless Integration into the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center

The WhatsUp Gold Alert Center seamlessly supports alerting, escalation, threshold and response configuration for VMware ESXi hosts, virtual machines, virtual clusters, and vMotion or High Availability migrations -- just as it does for physical servers. Since the Alert Center consolidates availability and performance alert information across networks, servers, virtual resources, application and traffic metrics, WhatsUp Gold provides a single console that can be used by the operations team to manage the entire datacenter and infrastructure assets across the company.

Advanced Capabilities for VMware Virtual Server Monitoring

WhatsVirtual is a newer plug-in to the WhatsUp Gold core platform that allows you to discover, map, monitor and manage your VMware virtual server environment exactly in the same way and from the same console as your physical server infrastructure, applications and network devices. Key features include the following –

WhatsVirtual Basics

Fully integrates into WhatsUp Gold versions – Standard, Premium, and Distributed v14.3 and upwards for single console operation of all infrastructure and applications
Natively integrates with the VMware API ( based on the VMware vSphere Web Services SDK) to manage VMware ESXi v3.5 and upwards
Oversees health, availability and performance of VMware vCenter Servers, the heart of your VMware investment
NEW VMware vCenter, vMotion and High Availability support
Seamless discovers all physical and virtual resources deployed in your environment
Displays virtual server performance seamlessly along with information from your physical servers
Tracks live virtual machines migrations in real-time, and understand virtual to physical relations at all times
Automatically groups and maps ESXi hosts and all associated virtual machines for easy visualization of relationships
Supports all existing WhatsUp Gold Alert Center workflows and threshold configuration capabilities for rapid problem identification and resolution anywhere in your infrastructure

WhatsVirtual Reporting

Virtual Host List report details the name and IP address of the VMware ESXi host machine and all associated virtual machines.
Virtual Host Attributes report displays all the host server details including running configuration of the server (for example, VMware ESXi and its version), the build number and boot time
Extends individual server performance reporting including CPU, Memory, Disk and Network Interface utilization metrics to virtual machines
New workspace reports by resource shows resource (e.g. CPU, Memory, Disk, Network Interface) allocation and consumption by the host and associated guest machines

WhatsVirtual Management Actions

Supports new VMware actions for multiple management tasks including –

Power On
Power Off
Suspend
Reset
Shutdown Guest
Reset Guest
Take Snapshot (back up of virtual machine image)

New WhatsUp Gold Action library elements to support automated and schedule execution of VMware management tasks

Others

WhatsVirtual is backed by the WhatsUp Gold technical support team (via phone or email)

Harness Virtualization Benefits with Minimum Management Hassle

Easy to use, centralized and consolidated management of physical and virtual server infrastructure – no “swivel chair” operations required
- Saves time, effort and complexity of coordinating between and managing multiple monitoring tools
Accurate and up-to-date reporting of performance and availability information of virtual server infrastructure ensuring the right decision support for operations
- Native integration with the VMware API (including support for vCenter, VMware vMotion & VMware High Availability) ensures that the right metrics and VM to physical server relationships are discovered, monitored and reported
Powerful management actions that ensure higher uptime, reliability and lower costs
- The ability to start/stop/suspend and reset virtual infrastructure ensures that server workloads stay in tune with application demand
Single console monitoring, alerting, reporting and management of the entire datacenter infrastructure enabling faster correlation and resolution of infrastructure issues
- Including physical and virtual servers, network devices, applications and traffic monitoring and analysis
- Faster and proactive resolution saves valuable time and money and enables network and system managers to focus on other critical tasks

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is the abstraction of computing resources decoupled from their physical capacities. Server virtualization enables running one or more “virtual machines” (commonly called a ‘guest’) on a single physical server (commonly called the ‘host’). A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of the server that acts just like a real machine.

How does Virtualization work?

Each virtual machine (VM) operates just like an independent server with its own guest operating system (Windows or Linux as examples) running one or more applications, with a designated amount of CPU, memory, disk and network resources. Each of the VM’s is isolated from one another other; so for example, if one of them crashes, it does not affect any of the other VM’s running on the same host server.

The VM’s and their guest operating systems run on the top of a specialized software called the “hypervisor” or the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor). The hypervisor acts as a sandwich layer between the VM’s and the physical hardware. It is responsible for intercepting calls from the guest operating systems of the VM’s to the hardware and managing them in a way, that each VM sees itself running independently on the allocated hardware resources. A hypervisor can provide the virtualized abstraction of the physical hardware including CPU, memory, storage and network I/O resources as well as access to all necessary system drivers.

Why doesn’t SNMP monitoring work in Virtualized environments?

SNMP was originally designed to manage hardware devices with a well defined MIB structure and definitive resource capacities. In a virtualized system, capacities are elastic (they can be made to grow or shrink dynamically) and full VM’s can be started/stopped or migrated from one hardware to another while maintaining their system state. In this dynamic environment, the rigid MIB and OID structure of SNMP is not suitable.

Further, the use of an intermediate hypervisor layer hinders the view into actual VM resource consumptions. For example, more memory may be allocated to VM’s than is physically available – through “Memory Over Commitment” or “Transparent Page Sharing” features provided by VMware. Hence, SNMP based reporting, whether through agents or in agent less modes report incorrect results of resource performance metrics and have only limited or no management information support from virtualization vendors. In fact, VMware has discontinued SNMP based performance data publishing altogether in their next generation ESXi systems. Monitoring of ESX servers with SNMP has other complications and needs detailed configuration as even the limited SNMP information is not published via the standard snmpd port.

What Virtualization Platforms does WhatsVirtual Currently Support?

WhatsVirtual currently supports the VMware ESXi 3.5 and later virtualization host systems. These are available free from VMware (for example, ESXi can be downloaded for free) and can also be purchased as part of their vSphere offering which provides robust capabilities for provisioning and maintenance of virtual server infrastructure.

Future versions of WhatsVirtual will support additional vendor systems providing heterogeneous support of virtual infrastructure.

What version of WhatsUp Gold do I need to use WhatsVirtual?

WhatsVirtual is a separately licensed plug-in and is available to customers for either evaluation or purchase. The plug-in requires the latest version of WhatsUp Gold as a base system.