Challenges in Monitoring RHEV

While RHEV eases virtualization adoption and improves operational efficiency at one end, on the other, it introduces new dynamic dependencies - between physical machines and VMs, between applications and VMs, and between the VMs on a hypervisor; these dependencies are difficult to comprehend, manage, and monitor! A single malfunctioning application on a VM can therefore degrade the performance of the applications running on other VMs on the same RHEV hypervisor. To compound the problem, VMs on an RHEV Hypervisor can be migrated from one physical machine to another - under such circumstances, it is almost herculean to keep track of the movement of the VMs and assess their performance impact on each physical host they visit.

The desktop virtualization deployment model of RHEV also poses myriad challenges! For instance, while the server application virtualization approach typically involves a smaller number of VMs running on a physical server, in the virtual desktop approach, tens of desktop VMs run on a physical server. The scale of deployment of desktops makes monitoring and management a pain!

While in-depth monitoring of each of the applications is important in the server application virtualization approach, in the virtual desktop approach, since only client applications are executed on the desktop, monitoring of the desktop need not be as in-depth as in the server application virtualization context. Furthermore, in a virtual desktop environment, it is essential to identify which guest a user is logging on to, for how long the user was logged in, and what applications he/she used. This information is critical for planning the capacity of the virtual desktop environment. Notice should also be taken of the fact that in a virtual desktop environment, virtual desktops may come and go off dynamically (e.g., as a user logs on and logs off, respectively), whereas in a server application virtualization approach, the guest operating systems are likely to be more static (i.e., come on and off less frequently).

To ensure business continuity and user satisfaction in such virtualized environments, you need a solution that can:

  • Auto-discover the VMs on an RHEV hypervisor and identify the applications operating on each VM;

  • Assess the resource usage of the hypervisor host and the VMs, rapidly isolate resource-starved VMs, and precisely point to the application/process on the VM that is causing the resource drain;

  • Automatically determine physical machine - VM, VM - application, VM - VM relationships, intelligently correlate performance in the light of these dependencies, and accurately diagnose root-cause of performance issues;

  • Understand the unique monitoring needs of virtual desktop environments, and automatically shift the monitoring focus from 'VMs' to 'Users';

  • Instantly detect and report the migration of a VM and continuously track the performance ramifications of the migration on each of the destination hosts;

eG Enterprise fulfills all the above-mentioned requirements to ensure high performance of your virtual environment.