Two leading hypervisors, one pane of glass
Is your organization one of the growing number that run both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V? It’s not uncommon for Enterprise Infrastructures to contain multiple virtualization platforms, the two most common being VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. Most are using ESXi as their primary hypervisor and Hyper-V for specific use cases, generally Windows based.
Because Windows is still the most widely used desktop operating system, and C and C++ are still top tier programming languages, it’s a smart move to incorporate Hyper-V into your IT ecosystem, even if VMware is the hypervisor for your back-end environment. Your customers don’t care what hypervisor serves an application. They care that the application performs. Tools that silo visibility make it hard for your IT team to keep pace with customer expectations.
If you are using Hyper-V in a VMware environment that could also mean switching between dashboards, maybe even machines, simply to see what’s going on across the full stack.
Up until now. vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) monitors your VMware infrastructure, including your hosts, VMs, and datastores. Now you can easily add Blue Medora to extend visibility into your compute, network, storage, cloud, application, and database layers of your Hyper-V infrastructure. Simply deploy the management pack for Microsoft Hyper-V, configure connectivity to your Hyper-V Hosts and you will gain visibility into your Hyper-V and VMware environments from one pane of glass.
This management pack for Microsoft Hyper-V contains the adapter, dashboards, reports, smart alerts, and policies related to Hyper-V. The adapter itself connects to the Hyper-V Host via WinRM and pulls objects and metrics.
There are three dashboards for Hyper-V:
- Microsoft Hyper-V Host Analysis
- Microsoft Hyper-V Overview
- Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machine Analysis
Let’s explore the Host Analysis dashboard.
In the screenshot above, the top two widgets list all Hosts and the Virtual Machines (VMs) on those Hosts. The bottom row shows Host Capacity and VM History. Specifically, Host Capacity will show the user his VM and Disk consumption: what’s underutilized, which are optimal, and which are being overutilized. VM History shows the user the status of the VM (off/on) over the past seven days.
The Microsoft Hyper-V Overview dashboard shows your Hyper-V environment in the left pane, Hosts, VMs, and Disks. It also shows alerts for those objects in the top right and Key Performance Indicators in the lower right. These widgets are dynamically populated based on the resource you’ve selected in the Environment Overview widget.
Finally, we have the Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machine Analysis. This dashboard is used to explore VM usage, metrics, and properties.
The heatmap widget in the top left can be configured by CPU Usage, Disk Usage, Memory Usage, or Memory Pressure, giving the user insight into each metric. As the user selects VMs, the other widgets will be dynamically populated to reflect data for that particular VM.
The Blue Medora management pack for MS Hyper-V also provides six reports:
These are CSV and PDF output reports that can be scheduled to run via the vROps scheduler and distributed to consumers via auto-email. They are a good way to monitor and manage consumption of your Hyper-V resources.
The 19 Smart Alerts contained in the Microsoft Hyper-V management pack are shown here. CPU, memory, disk, and other metrics are monitored and alerts are generated based on Symptom Definitions within each Alert.
These alerts are standard in the The Blue Medora Default Policy for Microsoft Hyper-V Adapter, which is added to the vROps Default Policy upon deployment. The user can make adjustments to the specific policy as well as the default policy as desired.
We hope you find this brief overview of capabilities almost as useful as the management pack itself. You can experience the benefits of unified visibility, no matter your hypervisor (Blue Medora also monitors KVM, BTW), for free at https://bluemedora.com/free-trial/. Learn more on VMware Solution Exchange or at www.bluemedora.com.
