WhatsUp Gold Technology
Complete Virtualization Management
Discover, map, monitor, alert and manage virtual and physical resources through a single console
As a network or systems administrator, it is likely you have already embraced virtualization or are thinking of doing so. Virtualization reduces hardware costs and overall total cost of ownership, and it gives you tremendous amount of flexibility to quickly provision server capacity whenever your business or applications so demand. In addition, you can even perform live migrations using VMware vMotion™ , or rely on VMware High Availability to re-start or move a running virtual machine (VM) to another server in the event of hardware or operating system failure for complete failover protection.
Apart from its multiple benefits, the dynamic nature of virtualization introduces a new set of management challenges such as how to:
- Discover and document both physical and virtualized resources
- Maintain an accurate physical to VM mapping at all times
- Reduce the risk of virtual sprawl, or the rapid proliferation of virtual servers
- Ensure that applications perform at optimal pre-virtualization levels
- Integrate alerting, escalation and response procedures across your entire infrastructure and VMware and non-VMware administrators
- Rapidly locate the true root cause of a performance problem
To address these challenges, and efficiently manage dynamic virtualized infrastructures, you need to discover, map, monitor and control your network devices, server, applications, virtual resources, network traffic and log files from a SINGLE console. After all, if you are using multiple management consoles you will have to examine multiple reports and interfaces to correlate information across hundreds of virtual machines and physical servers. And having to perform manual tracking tasks can severely hinder troubleshooting efforts and increase MTTR (mean time to resolution), making your job much more difficult and time consuming.
Integrated Monitoring and Management of Physical and Virtual Resources in One Single Console
WhatsVirtual is a newer plug-in to the WhatsUp Gold core platform that allows you to discover, map, monitor and manage your VMware virtual server environment exactly in the same way and from the same console as your physical server infrastructure, applications and network devices. You don’t need to look at multiple screens trying to figure out what went wrong or is likely to do so – since WhatsVirtual and WhatsUp Gold bring it all together. And because it discovers, monitors, and controls all virtual resources through VMware vCenter™ Server, the foundation of your VMware deployment, you can be assured of complete monitoring accuracy and reliability.
With WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual you can:
- Automatically discover and map VMware ESXi hosts and their associated guest systems
- Monitor health, availability and performance of VMware vCenter Servers, the heart of your VMware investment
- View virtual server performance seamlessly along with information from your physical servers
- Track live virtual machines migrations in real-time, and understand virtual to physical relations at all times
- Get alerted in real-time when utilization on host systems, virtual machines or virtual clusters breach thresholds
- Actively manage virtual machines on demand or on a scheduled basis using VMware tools
- Manage your entire datacenter infrastructure and applications from a single console
Single Point of Control across your virtual and physical resources
Key Capabilities Include:
VMware ESXi Role-based Discovery and Mapping
The WhatsVirtual plug-in automatic discovers, maps and documents physical servers and virtual resources --virtual clusters, vCenter server, VMware ESXi host and guest (virtual) machine roles-- so you can fully understand your entire infrastructure. And since WhatsUp WhatsVirtual seamlessly displays the relationship between the host system and its associated VMs at all times, even when they are in suspended mode or after a live migration, you can rapidly traced back root cause of problems anywhere in your infrastructure.
Native Integration with the Powerful VMware API (Includes support for vCenter, VMware vMotion & VMware High Availability)
WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual integrates with the powerful VMware API to collect performance metrics across VMs, virtual clusters and hosts, gain access to key management tasks, or oversee VMware vMotion or High Availability live migrations. WhatsVirtual offers all the tools that you need (real-time maps, alerting capabilities and historical reports) to understand physical to VM mapping at all times, even as VMs move across servers, and simplify troubleshooting tasks. Relying on the VMware API is necessary because SNMP data collection is inaccurate when managing dynamic virtualized infrastructures, where physical resources are notionally shared between multiple guest systems through the virtualization software layer, called the hypervisor. Moreover, for next generation ESXi systems, VMware has stopped providing any performance information via SNMP.
Active Management of your VMware Virtual Environment
The WhatsVirtual plug-in provides powerful capability for controlling virtual machines and virtual clusters through a number of management actions such as: power on, power off, suspend, and reset and virtual machine backup. Further, any of these management actions can be set for recurring execution or triggered on specific device states just like for other WhatsUp Gold Action Library items. For example, new Snapshots (configuration backups) of virtual machines can be triggered over the weekend, or a running VM may be powered down when the utilization falls below set levels.
Workspace Reports for Physical Host Servers, Virtual Machines and Virtual Clusters
WhatsVirtual adds several new workspace reports over and above existing physical server performance monitoring reports, such as Virtual Host lists, Virtual Host attributed or virtual clusters groups. Each of the entities link directly to the individual system device report – whether at a host or virtual machine level – providing exactly the same information as WhatsUp Gold does for a physical server. For example, the new Virtual Host Attributes report displays all the host server details including, the running configuration of the server and its version numbers. And hardware attributes displayed include the number of CPU cores and frequency, memory capacity and other system information.
Seamless Integration into the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center
The WhatsUp Gold Alert Center seamlessly supports alerting, escalation, threshold and response configuration for VMware ESXi hosts, virtual machines, virtual clusters, and vMotion or High Availability migrations -- just as it does for physical servers. Since the Alert Center consolidates availability and performance alert information across networks, servers, virtual resources, application and traffic metrics, WhatsUp Gold provides a single console that can be used by the operations team to manage the entire datacenter and infrastructure assets across the company.