Oracle vBox VM Details Test

This test auto-discovers the desktops operating on a VirtualBox and reports the powered-on state, the resource allocations, and the resource usage of each discovered desktop. In the process, the test promptly points administrators to unavailable or resource-intensive desktops.

Target of the test : An Oracle VirtualBox

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each desktop on the Oracle VirtualBox being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter Description

Test period

How often should the test be executed

Host

The host for which the test is to be configured.

Port

The port number at which the specified Host listens to.

Oracle Hypervisor
User

Specify the name of the user who has the right to access the VirtualBox via SSH.

Oracle Hypervisor Password

Provide the password of the oracle hypervisor user.

Confirm Password

Confirm the password by retyping it here.

Sudocmd

This test executes certain privileged VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) commands to pull out the desired metrics from the VirtualBox. To enable the test to run these commands, you first need to install a sudo package on the VirtualBox host. The procedure for installing this package is detailed in Pre-requisites for Auto-Discovering VMs and Obtaining their Outside View. Once the package is installed, you need to specify the full path to the install directory of the sudo package in the Sudocmd text box.

Ignore VMs Inside View

Administrators of some high security virtualized environments might not have permissions to internally monitor one/more VMs. The eG agent can be configured to not obtain the 'inside view' of such ‘inaccessible’ VMs using the Ignore VMs Inside View parameter. Against this parameter, you can provide a comma-separated list of VM names, or VM name patterns, for which the inside view need not be obtained. For instance, your Ignore VMs Inside View specification can be: *xp,*lin*,win*,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside view of all VMs on an Oracle VirtualBox host by default.

Note:

While performing VM discovery, the eG agent will not discover the operating system of the VMs configured in the Ignore VMs Inside View text box.

Exclude VMs

Administrators of some virtualized environments may not want to monitor some of their less-critical VMs - for instance, VM templates - both from 'outside' and from 'inside'. The eG agent in this case can be configured to completely exclude such VMs from its monitoring purview. To achieve this, provide a comma-separated list of VMs to be excluded from monitoring in the Exclude VMs text box. Instead of VMs, VM name patterns can also be provided here in a comma-separated list. For example, your Exclude VMs specification can be: *xp,*lin*,win*,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside and outside views of all VMs on a virtual host by default. By providing a comma-separated list of VMs/VM name patterns in the Exclude VMs text box, you can make sure the eG agent stops collecting 'inside' and 'outside' view metrics for a configured set of VMs.

Ignore WINNT

By default, the eG agent does not support the inside view for VMs executing on Windows NT operating systems. Accordingly, the Ignore WINNT flag is set to Yes by default.

Inside View Using

By default, this test obtains the “inside view” of VMs using the eG VM Agent. Accordingly, the Inside view using flag is set to eG VM Agent by default. The eG VM Agent is a piece of software, which should be installed on every VM on a hypervisor. Every time the eG agent runs this test, it uses the eG VM Agent to pull relevant 'inside view' metrics from each VM. Once the metrics are collected, the eG agent then communicates with each VM agent and pulls these metrics, without requiring administrator privileges. Refer to Configuring the Remote Agent to Obtain the Inside View of VMs for more details on the eG VM Agent.

Domain, Admin User, and Admin Password, and Confirm Password

By default, these parameters are set to none. This is because, by default, the eG agent collects 'inside view' metrics using the eG VM agent on each VM. Domain administrator privileges need not be granted to the eG agent if it uses this default approach to obtain the 'inside view' of Windows VMs.

Report By User

While monitoring a VirtualBox, the Report By User flag is set to Yes by default, indicating that by default, the guest operating systems on the VirtualBox are identified using the login of the user who is accessing the guest OS. In other words, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_virtualmachinename. If this flag is set to No, then the guests will be identified using the host name of the guest OS. In this case, the test will report measures for every virtualmachinename.

Report Powered OS

This flag becomes relevant only if the Report By User flag is set to ‘Yes’.

If the report powered os flag is set to Yes (which is the default setting), then this test will report measures for even those VMs that do not have any users logged in currently. Such guests will be identified by their virtualmachine name and not by the username_on_virtualmachinename. On the other hand, if the Report Powered OS flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those VMs to which no users are logged in currently.

Detailed Diagnosis

To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG Enterprise embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option.

The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled:

  • The eG manager license should allow the detailed diagnosis capability
  • Both the normal and abnormal frequencies configured for the detailed diagnosis measures should not be 0.
Measurements made by the test
Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation

Is virtual machine powered on?

Indicates whether this desktop is powered-on or not currently.

 

The table below displays the States that can be reported by this measure, and their numeric equivalents:

State Value
Off 0
On 1

Note:

By default, this measure reports one of the States listed in the table above. The graph of this measure however will represent the VM status using the numeric equivalents - ‘0’ or '1’.

Total RAM size

Indicates the amount of memory allocated to this desktop.

MB

 

RAM utilization

Indicates the percentage of allocated RAM been utilized by this desktop.

Percent

Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A high value is indicative of excessive memory consumption by a desktop. In the event of a slowdown, you can compare the value of this measure across desktops to identify the desktop that is memory-intensive, and could hence be causing the slowdown.  

Video memory

Indicates the total amount of video memory allocated to this desktop.

MB

 

This sets the size of the memory provided by the virtual graphics card available to the guest, in MB. As with the main memory, the specified amount will be allocated from the host’s resident memory. Based on the amount of video memory, higher resolutions and color depths may be available.

Balloon memory

Indicates the configured balloon memory for this desktop.

MB

Normally, to change the amount of memory allocated to a virtual machine, one has to shut down the virtual machine entirely and modify its settings. With memory ballooning, memory that was allocated for a virtual machine can be given to another virtual machine without having to shut the machine down.

When memory ballooning is requested, the VirtualBox allocates physical memory from the guest operating system on the kernel level and locks this memory down in the guest. This ensures that the guest will not use that memory any longer; no guest applications can allocate it, and the guest kernel will not use it either. VirtualBox can then re-use this memory and give it to another virtual machine.

The memory made available through the ballooning mechanism is only available for re-use by VirtualBox. It is not returned as free memory to the host. Requesting balloon memory from a running guest will therefore not increase the amount of free, unallocated memory on the host.

Effectively, memory ballooning is therefore a memory overcommitment mechanism for multiple virtual machines while they are running. This can be useful to temporarily start another machine, or in more complicated environments, for sophisticated memory management of many virtual machines that may be running in parallel depending on how memory is used by the guests.

Number of VCPUs

Indicates the number of virtual CPUs allocated to this desktop.

Number

 

User CPU utilization

Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent by this desktop on user processes.

Percent

If the CPU utilization of a desktop appears to be increasing consistently, then, you can use the value of this measure to figure out where the CPU time is being spent - on system processes? or user processes?

Kernel CPU utilization

Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent by this desktop on kernel processes.

Percent

If the CPU utilization of a desktop appears to be increasing consistently, then, you can use the value of this measure to figure out where the CPU time is being spent - on kernel processes? or user processes?

CPU utilization

Indicates the percentage of the allocated CPU resources used by this desktop.

Percent

Compare the value of this measure to identify the desktop that is running CPU-intensive applications. Once the desktop is identified, then, you can use the User CPU utilization and the Kernel CPU utilization measures to know where the desktop is spending maximum CPU time - on kernel processes? or user processes?