Monitoring VMWare

[Steve Shipway]

> Has anyone had any success in monitoring VMWare virtual servers. I can
> monitor the ESX but how do we get details of the virtual servers that
> are hosted on ESX so that data bears some resemblance to 
> reality. If we monitor from the virtual servers then obviously things
like 
> CPU readings are useless.

Yes, we are monitoring a lot of ESX servers, using the check_esx2 plugin
(written by myself, so I admit to some bias).  If you go to VMWorld06 in
November in LA, you should be able to attend a workshop showing how to
implement this.

For the benefit of other readers, it is true that CPU and any other
time-based stats acquired from the VM are useless.  This is because of
the way VMWare affects the virtual server clock and the way the sharing
is managed.  Not only that, but collecting these stats from the VM will
noticeably impact performance due to it causing kernel calls.  The best
way to gain these stats is either from SNMP on the Service Controller
(through the VMware agentx plugin for snmp), or from the /proc/vmware
tree on the Service Controller (this is how the vmkusage addin for
vmware does it).

You can obtain check_esx2 (v2.4) from www.nagiosexchange.org.  This will
allow you to alert on various things, including excessive ReadyTime (the
key CPU usage indicator), total CPU usage, and also on Memory active and
balloon/vmswap activity.  The check_esx2 script can also run in MRTG
mode in order to allow it to be used for MRTG graphing.

There is also an additional script which will generate RRDTool files and
dummy MRTG .cfg files that can be passed to a MRTG frontend such as
routers2 to display numerous summary graphs, but this is out of scope
for this mailing list.

See www.steveshipway.org/forum for the discussion forum for VMWare
monitoring using these tools.

Steve

--
Steve Shipway
ITSS, University of Auckland 
(09) 3737 599 x 86487
s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz


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