OVERVIEW
The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual environment to new levels of efficiency, performance and scale.
This guide explains the pervasiveness of virtualized environments in modern data centers, the demand these environments create for more robust monitoring and analytics solutions, and the keys to getting the most out of virtualization deployments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
· History and Expansion of Virtualized Environments
· Monitoring Virtual Environments
· Approaches to Monitoring
· Why Effective Virtualization Monitoring Matters
· A Unified Approach to Monitoring Virtualized Environments
· 5 Key Capabilities for Virtualization Monitoring
o Real-Time Awareness
o Rapid Root-Cause Analytics
o End-to-End Visibility
o Complete Flexibility
o Hypervisor Agnosticism
· Evaluating a Monitoring Solution
o Unified View
o Scalability
o CMDB Support
o Converged Infrastructure
o Licensing
· Zenoss for Virtualization Monitoring
The technology of cloud computing has caught up with virtual desktop infrastructures. Tapping into the agility and flexibility of cloud-hosted infrastructures, Citrix Cloud enables organizations to simplify digital workspace delivery. With many of the critical components of the Citrix delivery infrastructure hosted in the cloud and managed by Citrix, organizations can speed up deployment, lower hardware footprint, increase ROI, simplify IT operations. Despite the many benefits of Citrix Cloud, the performance management challenges still persist, just as they do in traditional on-premises Citrix deployments.
Read this eG Innovations white paper, and understand:
Are you ready to achieve #monitoringglory?
After reading this e-book, "Monitoring 201", you will:
With the EOL of XenApp 6.5, organizations across the world are migrating to the latest version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7. This upgrade comes with radical changes to Citrix architecture, configuration, policies, protocols and deployment models.
With so many changes in effect, traditional methods of monitoring won't hold good. Your monitoring solution should be ready to adapt to the new enhancements in the 7.x product line.Read this white paper by George Spiers, Citrix CTP and EUC Architect, where he explains in detail:
One of the toughest problems facing enterprise IT teams today is troubleshooting slow applications. When a user complains of slowness in application access, all hell breaks loose, and the blame game begins: app owners, developers and IT ops teams enter into endless war room sessions to figure out what went wrong and where. Have you also been in this situation before?
Read this white paper by Larry Dragich, and learn how you can combine and correlate performance insights from the application (code, SQL, logs) and the underlying hardware infrastructure (server, network, virtualization, storage, etc.) in order to:
With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. According to Gartner, hybrid IT (especially with IaaS subscription) enterprises must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM) to gain visibility into their IT landscapes.
The guide provides insight into the IT infrastructure monitoring tool market and providers as well as key findings and recommendations.
Get the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools to see:
Key Findings Include:
If you’re here to gather some of the best practices surrounding vSphere, you’ve come to the right place! Mastering vSphere: Best Practices, Optimizing Configurations & More, the free eBook authored by me, Ryan Birk, is the product of many years working with vSphere as well as teaching others in a professional capacity. In my extensive career as a VMware consultant and teacher (I’m a VMware Certified Instructor) I have worked with people of all competence levels and been asked hundreds - if not thousands - of questions on vSphere. I was approached to write this eBook to put that experience to use to help people currently working with vSphere step up their game and reach that next level. As such, this eBook assumes readers already have a basic understanding of vSphere and will cover the best practices for four key aspects of any vSphere environment.
The best practices covered here will focus largely on management and configuration solutions so should remain relevant for quite some time. However, with that said, things are constantly changing in IT, so I would always recommend obtaining the most up-to-date information from VMware KBs and official documentation especially regarding specific versions of tools and software updates. This eBook is divided into several sections, and although I would advise reading the whole eBook as most elements relate to others, you might want to just focus on a certain area you’re having trouble with. If so, jump to the section you want read about.
Before we begin, I want to note that in a VMware environment, it’s always best to try to keep things simple. Far too often I have seen environments be thrown off the tracks by trying to do too much at once. I try to live by the mentality of “keeping your environment boring” – in other words, keeping your host configurations the same, storage configurations the same and network configurations the same. I don’t mean duplicate IP addresses, but the hosts need identical port groups, access to the same storage networks, etc. Consistency is the name of the game and is key to solving unexpected problems down the line. Furthermore, it enables smooth scalability - when you move from a single host configuration to a cluster configuration, having the same configurations will make live migrations and high availability far easier to configure without having to significantly re-work the entire infrastructure. Now the scene has been set, let’s get started!
In The Forrester Wave: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019, Forrester identified the 13 most significant IASM providers in the market today, with Zenoss ranked amongst them as a Leader.“As complexity grows, I&O teams struggle to obtain full visibility into their environments and do troubleshooting. To meet rising customer expectations, operations leaders need new monitoring technologies that can provide a unified view of all components of a service, from application code to infrastructure.”Who Should Read This
Enterprise organizations looking for a solution to provide:
Our Takeaways
Trends impacting the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team include:
Performance is central to any Citrix project, whether it’s a new deployment, upgrading from XenApp 6.5 to XenApp 7.x, or scaling and optimization. Rather than simply focusing on system resource usage metrics (CPU, memory, disk usage, etc.), Citrix administrators need to monitor all aspects of user experience. And, Citrix logon performance is the most important of them all.
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how you can leverage eG Enterprise Express, the free Citrix logon monitoring solution from eG Innovations, to deliver added value to your customers and help them proactively fix logon slowdowns and improve the user experience. In this webinar, you will learn:
• What the free Citrix logon simulator does, how it works, and its benefits• How you can set it up for your clients in just minutes• Different ways to use logon monitoring to improve your client projects• Upsell opportunities for your service offerings
A great user experience is key for the success of any Citrix/VDI initiative. To ensure user satisfaction and productivity, Citrix administrators should monitor the user experience proactively, detect times when users are likely to be seeing slowness, pinpoint the cause of such issues and initiate corrective actions to quickly resolve issues.
Virtualization technology is being widely adopted thanks to the flexibility, agility, reliability and ease of administration it offers. At the same time, any IT technology – hardware or software – is only as good as its maintenance and upkeep, and VMware virtualization is no different. With physical machines, failure or poor performance of a machine affects the applications running on that machine. With virtualization, multiple virtual machines (VMs) run on the same physical host and a slowdown of the host will affect applications running on all of the VMs. Hence, performance monitoring is even more important in a virtualized infrastructure than it is in a physical infrastructure.
How does one determine what would be the right amount of resources to allocate to a VM? The answer to that question lies in tracking the resource usage of VMs over time, determining the norms of usage and then right-sizing the VMs accordingly.
But how does one track the resource usage metrics for VMs and which ones are important? VMware vSphere comprises many different resource components. Knowing what these components are and how each component influences resource management decisions is key to efficiently managing VM performance. In this blog, we will discuss the top 10 metrics that every VMware administrator must continuously track.