Monitoring Microsoft Virtual Servers

eG Enterprise offers a 100% web-based Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (see Figure 1) monitoring model, which provides ‘In-N-Out’ monitoring of the Microsoft Virtual Server.  A single eG agent deployed on the virtual server is capable of monitoring the resource usage of the guests in relation to the physical resources available to the virtual server host (which makes up the “outside” view). The same agent can also send probes into the individual virtual machines to monitor how effectively each guest uses the allocated resources (this makes up the “inside” view). Both these views enable administrators to proactively identify potential resource inadequacies, while accurately isolating the root-cause of the resource crunch – is it the virtual server host? or is it owing to one/more guests?

Figure 1 : Layer model of the Microsoft Virtual Server

The eG agent deployed on the virtual server executes a variety of the tests on the host and the guests, and extracts a plethora of statistics pertaining to the health of the virtual server host and its VMs. These tests and the metrics they report are mapped to the layers depicted by Figure 1 above.