Infront Enterprise Virtual Machine Discovery MP

In monitoring, differentiating of virtual and physical servers can be important. With Operations Manager 2007 and 2012, there are a few annoyances that come up frequently with regards to monitoring virtual machines, including:

-Only VMs are MS virtualization platforms are discovered and reflect VM=true
-Physical servers cannot be easily grouped without inclusion of cluster virtual servers
-In some cases, a clear indicator is not provided when a VM is moved to a new host
-Visibility is limited for organizations running VMware without Virtual Machine Manager 2008 / 2012

These issues are resolved in the Infront Enterprise Virtual Machine Discovery Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 / 2012, which is available at no cost to the System Center Community. A description of functionality is shown below

Download

Request a copy of the management pack by completing the download form HERE.

Description

The Infront Enterprise Virtual Machine Discovery Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 R2 and 2012 (SCOM) extends SCOM to accurately identify Microsoft and third party virtual machines and important properties of virtual machine guests, including.

• Virtualization platform on which that guest resides
• If virtual machine tools installed and version of the installed tools. 
• If dynamic memory* is enabled for the discovered virtual machine
• Discover when a Hyper-V virtual machine has been moved to a new host and update the host property of the virtual machine*

Dynamic Groups

The management pack also includes dynamic groups for use in SCOM reporting and tuning activities, including.

• Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2)
• VMware (ESX 3.x, vSphere 4.x, vSphere 5.x and ESXi)
• Citrix XenServer 5.x
• Physical Servers (minus cluster virtual server that is included when grouping in the Operations Console UI)
• Cluster Virtual Servers

Supported Hypervisors

The platforms tested with this version of the management pack are:

• Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2)
• VMware (ESX 3.x, vSphere 4.x, vSphere 5.x and ESXi)
• Citrix XenServer 5.x
• Xen Hypervisor (xen.org) 3.x and 4.x

Of general concern for all platforms is the interpretation of baseline memory usage pattern. This is challenging since it is unknown how much RAM has been handed back to the parent via an inflated balloon driver. The concern is remedied in this management pack through discovery of a dynamic memory flag as a visual indicator to administrators to take into account the parent’s performance collection rather than solely the data collected by the client.

Why are these important?

To facilitate dynamic discovery, monitoring and management of the virtualization platforms in your organization, you must first be able to identify these systems, there important characteristic and then organize them into groups for easy administration. The Infront Virtual Machine Discovery MP makes this possible with no manual configuration. Because the memory-related properties of a virtual machine will change frequently when dynamic memory is in use, the potential for config churn** exists if not considered in management pack design. The Infront Virtual Machine Management Pack is designed to safely discover Hyper-V virtual machine guests with dynamic memory enabled.