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Monitoring Solutions for Citrix XenServer Farms |
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Virtual server technologies are now being adopted for mainstream IT deployments. From being deployed primarily in QA and development environments, virtual server technologies (Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere/ESX, Microsoft Virtual Server, etc.) are being used now to support mission-critical business services in production environments. Effective monitoring and management technologies will be a key to ensuring that virtualized infrastructures deliver the cost savings and performance benefits envisaged, and serve as adequate replacements for traditional hardware-based infrastructures.
Furthermore, as organizations seek to get the most out of their resource investments, over provisioning of virtual infrastructures is a thing of the past! Efficient capacity planning and resource allocations can produce significant cost savings and return on investment.
The eG VM MonitorTM, part of the eG Enterprise Suite, serves as a one-stop-shop for monitoring and managing heterogeneous virtualization environments.
Administrators can use a common web-based console to monitor server applications and desktops running on Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere/ESX, Microsoft Virtual, and other virtualization environments. Coupled with the ability of the eG Enterprise suite to monitor over 80 applications, including Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others, the eG VM Monitor provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual IT infrastructures.
Administrators can use the eG VM Monitor to monitor the performance of their physical and virtual infrastructures, troubleshoot problems to determine where the root-cause lies, assess where capacity bottlenecks are, and plan the usage of their servers and applications to optimize the utilization of the physical and virtual resources. The key customer benefits of this solution include higher uptime, better end-to-end performance, and operational cost savings through more effective utilization of key IT staff.
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Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!
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Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery. |
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Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses |
Since a single VMware® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.
While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.
Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers. |
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