Managing a virtual world

 By Kay Ewbank

Managing physical servers is tough: make it virtual and it’s even tougher. Kay Ewbank looks at tools that can ease the pain.

HardCopy Issue: 52 | Found In: Systems | Published: 17/05/2011 | Last Revision: 28/06/2011

Things can get scary managing a ‘normal’ server, but at least you can walk down to the server room and have a look. A virtual infrastructure brings a whole range of new problems. At a simple level, the problems start with the potential to get confused about which server you’re administering, and the uneasy feeling that you may not be keeping track of all the servers in your infrastructure. Then you come to the actual work of managing, with tasks such as optimising the way your virtual machines are organised so as to make use of the physical hardware, making sure all the virtual machines are secured and patched, checking you’re backing them all up, and so on. All of this is made worse as by the fact that you can’t use standard SNMP data collection because at best it is only supported by dynamic virtual servers in a limited fashion, and at worst it will return inaccurate information. This means you can end up having to install a completely separate set of server monitoring and management software for your virtual servers, as well as that used for your physical servers. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of products designed to help you get to grips with keeping your virtual servers up and running. Both VMware and Microsoft provide their own management software for controlling virtual infrastructures built on their software. In the case of Microsoft, this comes in the form of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), while VMware provides VMware Management Interface.

Microsoft System Center VMM

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is part of Microsoft’s overall family of System Center applications which provides a single interface for managing Windows servers and server applications. The most recent release of VMM can be used to manage virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server, and VMware ESX. On Windows, you have to run it on Windows Server 2008 64-bit, which may be a problem if you’re running an older or a 32-bit version, but that fits with the way Microsoft is moving its server software. VMM’s familiar interface and integration with other System Center products is perhaps its biggest advantage, but it is also a useful application on its own terms, including support for live migration where virtual machines that are running can be moved from one physical host to another without being stopped. It also supports the creation and removal of virtual machines, along with physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical machine conversions. A feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) gives you the ability to respond if a machine fails, or if poorly configured components are identified in hardware, operating systems or applications. In management terms, VMM shows you the state of your servers in terms of whether they are up or down, along with some minimal data on the utilisation of your virtual machines. If you want more advanced reporting, you need to also have System Center Operations Manager. If this is present, you can see all the reporting and monitoring information for your virtual servers that you would see for physical servers. If you’re using VMM to manage and report on VMware servers, you work from VMM which passes your instructions or requests to VMware’s own management console, then passes the results back and displays them in VMM. If you do want to use VMM then you really need to budget for having Operations Manager as well: without it, the reporting is just too limited.

VMware solutions

VMware has two ways to manage virtual machines. If you’re sitting at the actual physical machine then you can use the company’s Server Console. If you want to work remotely, you can use VMware Management Interface. VMware Management Interface is a Web-based management tool that lets you control and monitor virtual machines and the VMware Server host on which they are running. It lets you power on, suspend, resume, reset and power off the virtual machines on a particular server. Locally, you work from the VMware Server Console, and if you want to carry out actions other than those described above, you use VMware Management Interface to connect to the virtual machine for hands-on management. Management Interface gives you some useful information such as the system summary, hardware information, any connected users, and a log of recent events.

If you want to migrate virtual machines, you use the Server Console. This gives you the ability to move virtual machines from one physical location to another, which can be done while they are still running. You can also move the virtual disks of a powered-on virtual machine to a different data-store without interrupting the availability of the virtual machine. VMware’s management tools don’t work with virtual machines running Microsoft’s HyperV virtualisation.

Novell Platespin

PlateSpin consists of five products that together make up the Platespin Management Suite. The products in the suite work with both 32 and 64-bit Windows as well as Linux. The two original products in the collection are Migrate and Recon. Migrate (based on the old Platespin Convert) gives you the means to convert between physical and virtual servers, or even between virtual and virtual servers. Migrate works with VMware’s ESX Server hypervisor, Hyper-V and Xen. Recon collects inventory and usage data across servers. You can use it to discover the hardware and software assets in your datacentre, and then track performance and usage data. Protect is a disaster recovery tool that makes use of your virtual infrastructure to provide protection for both physical and virtual servers. Protect replicates a physical or virtual machine on a virtual machine, and if the original real (or virtual) server fails, you can recover using the virtual replica. Migrate and Protect can be run on an appliance in the suite called Forge. This acts as the repository for migrated machines and replicated backups. One of the advantages claimed for this appliance is that it lets you take a workload that is failing on one server, move it onto a backup server, repair the first server then move back just the changed data to get back to exactly where you were before, but with up-to-date data. The final element in the suite, PlateSpin Orchestrate, is itself a set of server and storage management tools that used to be called ZENworks. It combines a resource manager, job manager, dynamic provisioning, policy management and accounting and auditing.

Ipswitch WhatsVirtual

If you need to manage VMware virtual infrastructures, Ipswitch has a plug-in for its Whatsup products that integrates with vSphere to provide management of ESX and ESX boxes. WhatsUp is a network management and monitoring application for Windows, Linux and UNIX servers. WhatsVirtual shows the virtual machines in the same console that the physical servers are displayed in, and shows the ESX or ESXi hosts at the top level with the option to drill down to the individual virtual machines. The plug-in first lets you discover and map your virtual servers. You can look at the infrastructure to see virtual clusters, vCenter server, VMware ESXi host and guest machines, alongside the relationship between the host system and its associated VMs. This information is available no matter what state the machines are in, included suspended mode. Once the machines are mapped you can see real-time reports, and carry out VMware actions and management tasks. WhatsVirtual provides accurate reports of the usage and resource consumption using the VMware API to collect the data. You can set up alerts so you’re shown if usage on the host machines or virtual machines breaches the thresholds you’ve defined, so you know that things are going well unless you’re told otherwise. However the options provided by WhatsVirtual go further than simply reporting. You can carry out management actions such as powering virtual machines and clusters up or down, suspend, reset and backup the devices. These actions can be triggered on particular device states or set to run on a schedule. For example, you could set up a machine to be backed up over a weekend, or power down a virtual machine if the overall usage falls below set levels.

Quest Software

Quest Software’s range of virtualisation management software started life with Vizioncore which the company acquired in 2008. The range includes vFoglight monitoring software and vConverter for converting between physical and virtual environments. Replication and backup are supported with vRanger and vReplicator, and optimisation with vOptimizer.

A snapshot of your virtual infrastructure as presented by Quest vFoglight.

Quest vFoglight is the package that you use to monitor VMware ESX and Hyper-V based virtual servers. In addition to monitoring your virtual infrastructure, it can be used for capacity planning and chargeback. A further option is offered by vFoglight Storage, which can be used to monitor the use of your virtual storage to check for any I/O problems, capacity issues, and mismatches between the physical storage layer and its virtual infrastructure. Quest vConverter provides the means to convert from physical systems into virtual images, or from virtual images to physical storage. It also supports moving virtual images between hypervisor platforms. The ability to take images and convert them to physical systems means vConverter can be used for disaster recovery. More direct backup is provided by vReplicator’s support for VMware ESX replication and disaster recovery. This creates exact replicas of your virtual machines either locally or remotely, and images can be relocated to offsite centres on a schedule of your choosing. vReplicator fits closely with vRanger which offers VMware backup and restore and an option for VMware replication. The one-pass ESX/ESXi backup lets you restore entire systems, or more granular data including files, objects and applications. vOptimizer Pro is an interesting extension in that it lets you reclaim disk space and improve I/O performance by aligning data with 64K partitions. You can use it to reclaim virtual storage that you’ve over allocated by shrinking virtual disks, and there’s an option to automate the resizing of your virtual machines according to usage data.

Veeam Management Suite

The Veeam Management Suite is designed for managing VMware and has products for management and backup. The suite has five products covering backup and replication, reporting, monitoring, file copying and an application to let you create business views of your infrastructure. The fact that Veeam is VMware specific could be a disadvantage for organisations with hybrid solutions, but it also means the software is optimised for VMware. Veeam Backup & Replication has been designed for use with VMware vSphere to provide backup and recovery for ESX/ESXi virtual machines. It lets you recover anything from an entire VM down to individual objects within the file system or applications from an image level backup.

Particularly useful graphs and reports from Veeam ESX Reporter.

Veeam Reporter is quite an extensive package that will find all the machines in your virtual infrastructure, analyse the way they’re set up, and create reports that you can then use. Once it’s found the machines, it maintains a history of all the objects, settings and changes, shows you the performance trends, and predicts future usage. The reports can be displayed in both technical and business terms, so you can view the machines in terms of data centres, clusters and hosts. Alternatively, you can see the machines categorised by service-level agreement (SLA) or application type, or report on what resources particular departments or business units are using. The information is stored in a SQL Server repository that you can use with your configuration management database. Because Reporter stores details of all changes, it’s easy to audit who’s made changes, what changes have been made, and put right problems that have arisen. VMonitor goes alongside Reporter to provide monitoring and alerting and shows the performance of your infrastructure. Veeam Business View is one of the more interesting products in the suite, letting you view your VMware environment in terms of the way your business works. You can group, view and manage VMs by business unit, department, location, service level, or any criteria you define.

StorageCraft ShadowProtect

Backup and recovery software has traditionally not handled virtualised systems and storage particularly well, so if you move to a partially virtualised infrastructure you’ll need to make sure your software keeps you safe. StorageCraft ShadowProtect provides disaster recovery, data protection and system migration. It can be used to recover between virtual and physical environments, including bare metal and dissimilar hardware. You can recover the entire system or down to individual files and folders, as well as backing up and recovering applications such as SQL Server and Exchange. Its VirtualBoot technology lets you carry out quick failovers to virtual servers: you just right click on any ShadowProtect backup image file and boot it into a virtual environment using Oracle VirtualBox technology. ShadowProtect also includes a converter tool to convert to VHD or VMDK virtual disk formats.

SolarWinds

SolarWinds has a range of software for managing virtual servers and storage. SolarWinds Virtual & Server Profiler shows you both physical and virtual servers, including VMware cluster, host and virtual machine performance. Used alongside SolarWinds Storage Profiler, Virtual & Server Profiler maps your physical and logical storage to the virtual operating systems and applications so you can see which machines and storage are being used together. Another SolarWinds product, Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM), can be used to manage and overcome performance problems on both virtual and mixed networks. It shows you your network in graphical real-time views and dashboards, alongside dynamic network topology maps. It has automated network discovery so you know all the devices on your network are being mapped. If you have VMware servers, they are included in the monitoring, and it automatically tracks VM performance through VMware’s vCenter. Virtual SANs are also monitored and you can set threshold alerting and reports.

Starwind Enterprise

Storage Area Networks (SAN) were once only affordable by large companies; for everyone else they were too expensive and too hard to manage. ISCSI has changed all that by enabling you to set up disks in a SAN and have them appear as local to server applications using your existing Ethernet network. Starwind Enterprise Server is an ISCSI storage virtualisation product that can be used on any 32-bit or 64-bit system running Windows 2000 or later, and lets you share not just disks but devices such as disks, tape drives, VTLs (Virtual Tape Libraries), CD/DVD burners and RAM drives across your network without having to use any additional hardware. It lets you take snapshots of the data on your disks so you can rollback if problems occur, provides synchronous data mirroring and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) as well as remote replication over an IP network or WAN. Storage managed using Starwind Enterprise can be used as networked storage for VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. It provides particularly good support for VMware, letting you use features including VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, DRS and VCB.

Acronis Backup & Recovery

As the name suggests, Acronis Backup & Recovery is a disaster recovery suite aimed at different scenarios, including virtual systems. The version that covers virtual systems is Advanced Server Virtual Edition. It can be used to back up and restore VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Parallels. You can use it to migrate your virtual environment to physical or cloud-based systems, or to another virtual environment. You can also recover to any hardware or hypervisor platform no matter which platform the backup was originally made from. Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server Virtual Edition can be used alongside Backup & Recovery 10 Deduplication to reduce the amount of redundant data that is backed up, so minimising your storage costs and making better use of your disk capacity. It also works with Backup & Recovery 10 Online so you can create offsite storage backup. As you can see, there is a wide range of solutions available, targeting a wide range of platforms, and businesses of all shapes and sizes. Look at all the options and you should be able to find something that suits your needs and your budget.

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