Managing VMware with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Looking for a way to integrate day to day management of your VMware VI3 infrastructure into Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and System Center Operations Manager 2007? At first glance it might seem you only have three options:
- SNMP – Provides only basic information about the health and performance of your VMware
infrastructure and would essentially require you to build and maintain your own custom solution. - Agents in the Console OS of the ESX servers – besides the fact that adding any software to the console OS would jeopardize it’s stability you’re still not going to get the information you need about VMware itself.
- Agents in the Guest machines – The guests can not see outside of the resources they have been assigned, i.e. they can’t tell you about the health and performance of the underlying ESX server. In addition, any time based metrics in the Guest will not report correctly.
The fact is, VMware anticipated this requirement and built in programmatic interfaces that provide access to detailed information about the virtual environment. The nworks Connectors leverage these interfaces.
The nworks Management Pack for VMware, from Veeam Software – use VMware’s API and SDK to remotely gather information and events from your virtual infrastructure, and from a VMware perspective this is completely agentless technology. The nworks Connectors provide access to over 300 VMware specific metrics – data like CPU, memory, disk and network utilization by host and guest. They give you access to VMware specific health and performance metrics like CPU % Ready and Balloon Memory and can provide composite information around VMware clusters and resource pools. The nworks Connector also provide access to the event stream from Virtual Center, VMware topology and configuration information and a dynamic service map of your virtual environment.
The nworks Management Pack for VMware is more than just data collection instrumentation; it is a comprehensive integration that include tools to help you confidently integrate day to day management of your virtual infrastructure. Included with the install packages for the management servers are:
- A full set of customizable rules/polices for monitoring performance and events.
- Integration with the management maps to provide visual overview of your virtual environment
- Integration with alerting mechanisms
- Integration with reporting systems
From an architectural standpoint, the nworks Connectors can be divided into two basic pieces – the Collector, which gathers the data, and the installation package for the management server. The Collector is a .net application that runs in either a virtual or physical environment and in smaller installations can be collocated with the VirtualCenter server or the management server. The Collector gathers the data from your virtual environment using VMware’s API and SDK and publishes it to the local performance agent.
The nworks Connectors, from Veeam, support the following integrations:
Microsoft Integrations
- MOM 2005
- Systems Center Operations Manager 2007
VMware Solutions
- ESX Server 2.X and 3.X
- VirtualCenter 1.X, 2.X