Monitoring VMWare Virtualization Platform

    Colleagues, welcome!
    In my work, I am faced with the tasks of virtualizing infrastructure services based on VMWare software.
    And to create a full-fledged IT infrastructure on a virtualization platform, it is necessary, at a minimum (such a trend has been observed for the last 2-3 years), to supplement it with a monitoring system. At the same time, it is necessary to monitor not only infrastructure services, but also the virtualization platform itself.
    I would like to talk about this, to hear the opinions of other specialists. How and how to monitor VMWare? I will not talk about monitoring systems from vendors such as IBM, HP, if only because I do not deal with them, I propose to stop at Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (this is not a hidden advertisement).
    The logical question is: why bring in third-party vendors when VMWare has its own VMWare vCenter Operations product (I’ll still say something about it later)?
    The fact is that VMWare vCenter Operations is designed to monitor only the virtual environment, that is, monitor the status of virtualization hosts, virtual machines only in terms of RAM loading, processor availability, network interface performance and disk subsystem. At the same time, the issues of operability of infrastructure services, for example, the state of the operating system in the virtual machine, the state of the AD DS service, etc., are not addressed.
    For an Enterprise organization, comprehensive monitoring is needed, allowing you to monitor not individual infrastructure components, but entire business processes, building dependencies between components. For example, the state of the hardware component (physical server - host), virtualization platform, OS inside the virtual server, SQL Server, IIS service - a combination of all of the above will allow you to understand the status of the service (web site) as a whole, and when a failure of individual components occurs. Therefore, I propose to consider the monitoring option as a kernel based on MS SCOM 2007 R2 + third-party management packs.
    Microsoft itself does not have a management pack or basic functionality for monitoring VMWare for obvious reasons, but it refers to its partners who have these packages (or additional solutions) and that integrate perfectly with SCOM. Among them are, for example, Quest Software, Solarwinds, Veeam, Jalasoft. I have an idea to briefly talk about the products of these manufacturers in the following posts, maybe this will help someone make the right choice when building a monitoring system (with a virtualization platform).
    A little bit about VMWare vCenter Operations. Currently, 3 editions are available, differing in a set of features: Standard, Advanced, Enterprise.
    Comparison of the editions is given on the vendor's website at the link:http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/editions_comparison.html
    Standard Edition can be downloaded and used within 60 days, how to download and deploy is described in the article http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2011/04 /26/get-started-with-vcenter-operations.aspx
    The product description is available at http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/overview.html , as well as a short general description at http: // virtualizationreview.com/articles/2011/05/04/how-vcenter-operations-can-help-you.aspx

    Yes, just in case, I’m very interested in your opinion!

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