Tools

Veeam is pleased to offer a free version of Veeam ONE, its single solution for powerful, easy-to-use and affordable virtualization management. Now everyone can experience the benefits of realtime monitoring, change tracking, documentation and management reporting used by more than 50,000 VMware professionals.

Veeam ONE Free Edition includes all the core functionality of the full version of Veeam ONE, including full data collection, multi-user support, and a Microsoft SQL Server backend. There are no limits on the number of hosts, virtual machines (VMs), users or the size of your data archive. By simply installing a purchased license key, Veeam ONE Free Edition can easily be upgraded to the full version of Veeam ONE to gain these and other additional capabilities:

• Alarm modeling and custom alarms
• Full access to the knowledge base
• Management of guest, host and vCenter processes
• Historical change management beyond the most recent 24 hours
• Microsoft Visio reports for multipathing, network, vMotion and datastore utilization
• Automated report generation and distribution
  
  

VMware Labs is providing public access to the VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2012 to gather real-world feedback from users on a wide range of hardware and software configurations. The VMware Fusion Technology Preview includes changes to the core virtualization engine.

IgniteVM is used by database administrators to ensure service and availability of database instances running in VMware virtual machines. It shows the DBA what the database response time delays are, and what the contributing causes are at the instance, virtual machine, and physical layers. 

IgniteVM is a 24/7 monitoring tool, based on industry best practice Performance Intelligence and Wait-Time analysis methods. IgniteVM supports Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 LUW and Sybase databases across all operating systems, running in VMware vCenter Server or stand-alone ESX/ESXi host environments.

Wait-Time Analysis and Virtualization Visibility

Wait-time analysis is an approach to application and database performance improvement that allows users to see where users are waiting the most. Traditionally, database performance is measured in the number of events and hit ratios. While somewhat meaningful and easy to capture, these statistics do not reflect a relevant view of the end-user experience nor do they reveal with any precision where the problem originated.

IgniteVM gives DBAs visibility to see virtual server operation correlated with database instance wait-time analysis data. Assessing database performance without visibility leaves database administrators (DBAs) guessing about the root cause, hampering their ability to take action to address their most important user-oriented problems.

AlarmVM is used by VMware Administrators to detect problems in the VMware environment and proactively notify administrators. alarmVM is a 24/7 alarm monitoring tool that detects problems in VMware objects, including VMs, hosts, clusters, datastores and vCenter Servers. When alarm conditions are detected, alarmVM notifies VMware Administrators via email and/or SNMP trap.

Key Benefits:

• alarmVM can be installed and set up to monitor a VMware environment in less than 20 minutes.
• It automatically activates out-of-the-box alarms so an entire VMware environment is being monitored simply by registering a vCenter Server.
• By default, alarmVM notifies all configured contacts about each alarm, eliminating the need to set up contacts for each alarm.
• Using inheritable alarm policies, it is easy to change default alarm behavior on entire sets of vSphere objects (e.g. all VMs in a datacenter or all VMs in a folder).
• A 30 day history of alarms is kept, so you can see what happened in the past. During this period, alarmVM shows graphs for metric-based alarms with the underlying detailed data that would not be available in vSphere Client.
• alarmVM shows how alarms are trending so you can see if trouble is easing or mounting in your VMware environment.

alarmVM consists of a multi-tiered architecture consisting of an alarmVM Server, Web Clients, a Repository database and Monitored vSphere Servers.

• alarmVM: The alarmVM Server performs two key functions. First, it collects data from the monitored VMware servers. Second, it presents web pages to alarmVM users and sends notifications (emails and SNMP traps) when alarm conditions are detected. It is installed on a server that has network access to the Repository and each of the monitored servers. Although this process performs many functions, it appears as a single process on the operating system.
• alarmVM Repository: The Repository database instance is accessed by the alarmVM Server, and holds all of the collected alarm information. A default Repository is installed with alarmVM, but alarmVM can be configured to use another database instance for the Repository.
• Monitored Servers: alarmVM’s agentless monitors remotely connect to each VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host and cause less than 1% overhead on the monitored systems. No software is installed in the vCenter Server, ESX/ESXi host or Virtual Machines. A vSphere user (aka monitoring user) with administrator privileges is needed for monitoring.
• Web Browsers: alarmVM users view alarm data in a web browser. From this interface, users register VMware servers, configure alarms and contacts for alarm notification.