Bryan Semple, VKernel CMO, spent some time with me last week reviewing some of the new features and improvements in their Capacity Management Suite (CMS). According to Bryan, there are three improvements users should hear about in the new release. These are:
- Scalability
- Analytics
- Automation
We’ll review the improvements in these areas in more detail below
Here’s a shot of the dashboard:
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Figure 1: CMS 2.0 Dashboard
The VKernel CMS is composed of four components that can be mixed and matched. Together these form the entire suite. If you’re not already familiar with the various components please visit the VKernel site and take a look at the full feature list, as I’m just highlighting some of the new functionality. These components are listed below with some of the recent improvements:
- Capacity Analyzer 5.0: Nuanced analysis allows fine tuning of what resources are reported on and which systems to exclude
- Optimization Pack 2.0: Automation and scheduling enable fine grained and extensive reclamation and recovery activities
- Chargeback 2.0: Report on allocated or utilized resources for VMs
- Inventory 1.0: Inventory, index, filter, document, annotate the environment and configuration
One of the additional improvements we discussed was streamlined installation. This comes from the fact that the entire suite is now integrated into a single VM with licensing activating the various modules. This helps improve the performance, scalability, and manageability of the product by reducing the footprint and inter-component communication necessary.
VKernel has also been working hard to improve the UI. When dealing with 100s or 1000s of VMs the quality of the UI has a huge impact on the utility of the product. From what I’ve seen, the new interface reduces time and clicks when reviewing and optimizing your environment using VKernel’s custom groups. When this is coupled with the ability to exclude vms, hosts, clusters, and run analyses only over custom time ranges it provides a new level of accuracy in reporting.
One great example of this is that most VMware admins have a test cluster or a dev environment (or both if you’re lucky). We don’t want those older GHz which are frequently idle to count against us for production machines when reporting to the CIO. With the VKernel suite it is a simple matter to exclude these systems from the analysis and reports.
All together, these improvements add up to an increased ability to monitor the resource utilization as you wish to see it while concurrently capturing configuration data. This is important as you have correlated historical configuration data to review as you tune your environment. This can be a real lifesaver should you need to back out config changes in your environment at a future date.
Finally, the real killer feature here is the fine grained control and scheduling ability to recover and reclaim wasted resources. This really leads to a more self-tuning environment where the automation delivers actual ROI by providing more available resources for more VMs or enhanced capacity for existing systems.
August 26th, 2010
Posted by
Jae Ellers |
3rd-Party, Uncategorized, integration, management |
2 comments
I had the chance recently to work with Tripwire and get a good look at their new product, vWire.
What is vWire?
Here’s Tripwire’s description from the user manual:
vWire is a comprehensive management solution that gives virtualization professionals full control
over their virtual environments. To optimize the health and performance of your virtual
infrastructure (VI), vWire:
- Monitors your virtual inventory for critical events and configuration anomalies
- Correlates this data to provide informative insights and context about potential issues
- Acts to prevent and resolve problems.
Consequently, vWire:
- Illuminates and demystifies the state of your VI
- Reduces downtime and operational costs
- Simplifies the maintenance and management of your VI
- Inspires confidence in virtualization across your organization.
In other words, vWire is a tool for quickly locating unusual behavior or configuration issues and creating a process for dealing with those.
What is the vWire interface?
The vWire user interface runs as a web server or VIC plugin. Both instances look and behave identically in supported browsers as well as VIC 2.5 as a plugin. Here’s a shot of the web interface right after login:
How’s it work?
You can see the modern, clean interface with a well designed work flow. The dashboard screen shows you the alerts that need to be acknowledged or dealt with and the severity of those issues. It also provides a nice scrollable timeline view so you can see when those events triggered . The vWire Community pane provides the latest articles from the vWire forums, and finally a quick search pane to access the vms or hosts.
The next tab to work with is the Alerts tab. Here you can see the list of alerts that need to be dealt with.
I have issues
Storage is filling up. That’s good to know, but I have a handle on that. Let’s see what those Network Security issues are. We try pretty hard to harden our ESX systems, so I’m interested in what the problem is.
Correlating issues to root cause
After drilling into the issue I can see that the issue exists only on two hosts. One is a Lab Manager host and the issue pertains to the promiscuous mode of the Portgroups. Another is a recent default build of ESX 4.0 during our vSphere roll-out. All explainable events.
Let’s see some other tabs. Here’s the Search tab in action. I searched for the vm housing my vWire install. I knew I had some snapshots from the installation work. Here I’m using vWire to call PowerShell actions to get the snapshot size for this VM.
Configuring alerts
In the workbench you can configure and tweak the rules of the game. Here are just a portion of the Alert Rules that come preconfigured with vWire.
Time for action
Here are some of the default actions you can take on a vm, either manually or in association with a rule. The intent here is that you can use the canned actions and add your own to deal automatically with events as they happen.
Assessment
Overall I was pleased with the product’s interface, stability, and good feature set. vWire quickly identified multiple, complex issues that would not have been exposed using vCenter alone. vWire let me view critical events, correlate those to the configuration of my environment, and then take actions to remediate the issues.
Tripwire has provided a valuable tool at a reasonable cost and I’d encourage everyone to get a trial copy and see how it works for you. http://www.vwire.com/download/
Be advised that the release version of vWire does not officially support vSphere 4. However, in my testing it did a good job coping with vCenter and ESX 4.0 and support is expected in an upcoming release.
June 9th, 2009
Posted by
Jae Ellers |
management, tripwire |
no comments
