VDI Monitoring and Capacity planning choices (Part 1 of 5)

The past few days I have been setting up some evaluations of various tools used to monitor a VMware View implementation. I thought I’d share what I’ve seen so far. These are not full technical reviews of the products, in fact I’ve linked to quite a bit of external content that I’ve found, but rather these are some high-level observations of the products. Please note – this is not an exhaustive list of available monitoring tools, this is just the few that my current client chose to look at. These happen to be in order of IP address of my evaluation servers – I don’t have a preference (yet). As such, this is not a recommendation of any product above another – these are just some options for you to consider.Note – the following series of my blogs are list prices, and do not factor in volume discounts of any kind. Socket is defined as physical processor chip, not cores.

vmSight Application Profiler

http://www.vmsight.com

A detailed product review with some screen shots is available here. (An online product brief is not currently available, as the website is being restructured due to a recent acquisition by Liquidware Labs)

vmSight is priced at $50/user, list price.

Evaluation licensing is for a single host.

You have to register with their website in order to gain access to the download, which will come in the form of a link in an email. What you end up downloading is a certified virtual appliance, with minimal configuration needed. You should also be able to download directly into vCenter, but my hosts are behind restrictive firewalls so I was unable to do so. The appliance expects two network connections – one to the normal network, and one that sits on a vswitch configured in promiscuous mode to sniff the traffic. Because of this, each ESX host in the environment must have one of these appliances, which come in two flavors. There is a primary ‘vmSight Center’ that is the management server, where all licensing is, and then all other hosts get a ‘Monitoring Station’ that reports back to the primary. There is an additional component, their patented “Connector ID” technology that goes as far towards the end-users as you like. It can go into the VDI desktops, and down to the thin-client or physical desktop level. This gives you end-to-end monitoring from a user perspective. All management, aside from initial installation, is browser-based. If performance monitoring was all that you needed, I think this is a slick end-to-end product, and could be very powerful in maintaining the user experience. However, with the exception of some highly-customized reporting, it does not have any specific trending or capacity planning functions. Next up, Quest vFoglight.

-Bruce Heavner, GlassHouse Senior Consultant

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