VMTN Blog

As you may know, VMware recently began the process of acquiring B-hive, but you may not know much about what B-hive does. From the press release, B-hive "gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies."  Think of it as providing more raw data for both your existing management solutions and for automated tools like DRS, so you can "proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots."

Note also that B-hive is agentless, which means not only do you not have to install software in the guest, but that it is independent of OS, something that fits very well into VMware's philosophy and architecture.

I wanted to share this description of what B-hive does with you. It's fairly detailed yet still high level. (I don't know enough about this space to comment on Bernd's market landscape observations. Again, I don't think VMware is going in to the "application performance management" space, but we just want to give you more and better data to start implementing the dynamic cloud data center of the future. You can also go straight to the source and visit b-hive's site, where you can get a deeper understanding. Their blog is also worth checking out.

Link: Virtualization Management After VMware / B-hive, Who Wins - Who Loses | Bernd Harzog’s "Managing Virtualization" Column.

B-hive - A Quick Look at the Product
The basic idea of an APM or EUEM solution is to measure either applications performance (how fast is the application processing transactions or units of work as they arrive from users or other applications), or the end user experience, which measures how well the application is working in the eyes of its end users. B-hive is not a true end user experience solution since in order to be one of these you have to be able to measure response time from the perspective of actual end users, and B-hive does not do this. B-hive measures response time from the perspective of the presentation tier (the web server if it is a web based system) of an application system, which is exactly the right approach if you want to be a leading edge APM solution (older APM solutions tried to infer applications performance by looking at the resources used by an application, and this approach simply does not work for virtualized applications systems). So, here is a quick overview of what B-hive does:

1. B-hive attaches to a mirror (spanned) port on the switch that supports the servers closest to the users (most often the switch that supports the web servers). This allows B-hive to see all of the transactions that flow back and forth between users and the applications system.

2. B-hive's concept of response time is the time between the arrival of a request from a user, and the reply to that request on the part of the application system. By default these transactions are "atomic" or highly granular and not something that that map to what a user would view as a transaction of interest. But they are representative of the overall response time of the system, and since these atomic transactions can be supported for almost every application with no configuration, they represent the right level of detail for the IT staff supporting the virtual infrastructure.

3. B-hive also understands certain back end protocols like SQL Server and Oracle. So for two-tier client server applications or any application that talks to a database, the request/response time to and from the database server is used as a proxy for response time.

4. The level of the atomic transaction depends upon the nature of the application. For web based applications the atomic transactions are HTTP request/responses. For non-web applications they are lower level TCP/IP request/responses or database request/response times.

5. With additional effort, atomic transactions can be combined into true compound transactions or transactions of interest to applications owners and the business. In fact B-hive is sold in two flavors, one that supports just atomic transactions for the IT staff, and another one that includes the more comprehensive view of higher level transactions which are of interest to applications owners and the business analysts.

6. B-hive will try to get the user ID of the application out of the TCP/IP data stream. For web based applications this is easy. For some applications this is not possible, and the notion of who the user is defaults to the source IP address which is in many cases not unique to a user (due to NAT). This is one area where vmSight has an advantage due to its patented Connector ID technology.

7. B-hive claims to be able to automatically drive actions in the virtualized environment (for example provision a new server or move a VM) based upon its response time measurements. This takes DRS to an entirely different level, since making these kinds of decisions based upon applications response time makes much more sense than does making them based upon CPU or memory usage.