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virtualization
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | December 200964 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
In many environments, managing a diverse set
of hardware, software, and operating systems
presents daily challenges for IT administrators.
Although using virtualization to consolidate physical
systems can provide a variety of advantages, it
can also increase the complexity of systems man-
agement, including adding to the number of
management tools that administrators must learn,
deploy, and maintain. Some organizations may even
avoid using virtualization in production environ-
ments because of the perceived lack of virtualization
management tools that can interoperate with their
existing management software.
To help simplify management in VMware environ-
ments, Veeam Software—a Dell Independent
Software Vendor (ISV) Certified Partner—and Dell
have teamed up to offer the nworks Management
Pack for VMware. Available directly from Dell, this
management pack is designed to seamlessly inte-
grate VMware event, performance, and configuration
information into Microsoft System Center Operations
Manager (SCOM) 2007. For organizations using
SCOM, this management pack can help accelerate
virtualization adoption and the integration of VMware
platforms into their existing management frame-
works, centralizing and simplifying operations with-
out requiring additional consoles, processes, or
administrator training.
understanding the Microsoft scoM 2007 architectureMicrosoft SCOM 2007 is designed to help administra-
tors measure, monitor, and manage a diverse set of
physical hardware, operating systems, and applica-
tions residing on both physical systems and virtual
machines (VMs). The advantage of this approach is
clear: a single interface that can monitor both hard-
ware and software, with an intuitive health-model
architecture, helps to standardize how organizations
manage their assets and simplify administration.
The SCOM architecture typically consists of an
agent loaded on a physical system or VM, which
reports back to the management server with informa-
tion that is then converted into the health model. With
this architecture in place, however, administrators
may have legitimate concerns about incorporating
separate management tools or consoles. Microsoft
addresses this problem by making the SCOM archi-
tecture available for third parties to develop manage-
ment packs that can fit directly into the system,
helping offer a consistent management view across
the enterprise.
Environments that include VMware virtualization
can introduce additional complexity for enterprise
management. For example, Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers
running VMware ESX or ESXi hypervisors do not sup-
port typical SCOM-enabled drivers for Microsoft
Although VMware® virtualization can offer major advantages, it can also add management complexity for administrators. The nworks Management Pack for VMware from Veeam Software is designed to seamlessly integrate VMware platforms into Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007—helping to centralize and simplify systems management in virtualized environments.
By Mark Carroll
Managing VMware enVironMents inMicrosoft systeMcenter operationsManager 2007
65DELL.COM/PowerSolutionsReprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Windows® operating systems. VMware
ESX is based on a kernel that is accessed
through a console OS (COS), and ESXi
requires remote access only to the kernel,
leaving no place for an agent. In addition,
VMware VMs use memory balloon and
taxing technology in the hypervisor to
allow hosts to approach upper utilization
limits, essentially allowing the VMs to
believe they are running at a utilization
percentage that they may or may not
actually be running at on the physical
system—enabling enhanced attributes like
memory oversubscription that can help
increase physical system performance.
Although this technology can have advan-
tages for overall data center performance,
it can also lead to decisions based on
incorrect data at an operations manage-
ment level when administrators are moni-
toring SCOM agents loaded on VMs.
To help overcome this problem and
provide appropriate hardware and perfor-
mance metrics, monitors or agents must
reside at the kernel level of ESX servers.
But administrators now face several result-
ing problems: How can they add a physical
hardware agent to a system that is not run-
ning a Microsoft OS? And, furthermore,
how can they add an agent to a server like
the Dell PowerEdge R900, which does not
require any OS when configured with
ESXi—a 32 MB kernel without a COS to
incorporate third-party drivers?
Managing vMware environMents with scoM 2007The nworks Management Pack for VMware
from Veeam Software is specifically
designed to centralize and simplify
management in VMware virtualized
environments. Because Veeam software
operates in an agentless mode, it can
manage physical hardware, kernel opera-
tions, and VMs using the VMware applica-
tion programming interface (API) rather
than adding a COS agent or adding an
agent to each VM. This management pack
can also operate in read-only mode,
enabling it to monitor the systems without
affecting system performance.
The VMware API enables ESX or ESXi
kernels to export Dell server hardware data
using the Intelligent Platform Management
Interface (IPMI), Common Information
Model (CIM), and Systems Management
Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH)
standards. The nworks Virtual Enterprise
Monitor (VEM) system can gather informa-
tion from multiple VMware ESX, VMware
ESXi, or VMware vCenter™ Server systems,
consolidate this information, convert it to
the Microsoft SCOM 2007 database for-
matting, and forward it through a SCOM
agent loaded on the VEM system (see
Figures 1 and 2). The VEM is typically a
physical server or VM running a Microsoft
Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server®
2003, or Windows Server 2008 OS with a
VEM servernworks collector service
nworks configuration interfaceMicrosoft SCOM 2007 agent
MicrosoftSCOM 2007
management server
VMwarevCenterserver
VMwareESX server
VMs
VMwareESX server
VMsManagement packhealth-model data
VMwareAPI data
Figure 1. Monitoring architecture for the nworks Management Pack for VMware from Veeam Software
Figure 2. Monitoring information for virtualized servers in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
virtualization
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | December 200966 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, December 2009. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
single processor and 1 GB of RAM or more.
The architecture of the SCOM agent
(which is designed to collect information
from a single Windows-based server
rather than dozens or hundreds of VMs)
means that although there is no defined
limit on the number of hosts or VMs that
each VEM system can support, best prac-
tices recommend a configuration of up to
50 ESX or ESXi hosts per collector or up
to 1,000 VMs per collector, depending on
the specific environment and VEM configu-
ration. Large enterprises can incorporate
multiple VEM servers into their environ-
ments, which can then work together to
support additional capacity.
After configuring the VEM system,
administrators can begin monitoring and
managing data from the physical hosts
and VMs the same way they do for
Windows-based physical servers. Within
the SCOM monitoring tool, the monitoring
information is displayed similarly to infor-
mation from other management packs,
and device integration and associations
occur just as they did previously. For
organizations where the systems opera-
tion staff also handles virtualization, the
nworks Management Pack for VMware has
integrated functionality that supports
VMware Infrastructure Client operations
such as putting servers into maintenance
mode, turning on VMs, and suspending or
shutting down VMs. This functionality also
integrates with VMware user policies,
enabling organizations with defined user
roles to provide operations teams with
appropriate levels of access.
Administrators can also use the
SCOM console for trend analysis and
monitoring based on current and histori-
cal data. Utilization modeling enables
administrators to compare individual
ESX servers to help identify whether cer-
tain systems are performing at the
appropriate capacity level, and whether
the VMware Distributed Resource
Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High
Availability (HA) capabilities are aggres-
sive enough. Administrators can also
drill down to individual hardware sen-
sors to identify, for example, whether
ambient temperatures or fan speeds
may indicate a failing component—pro-
viding a warning before a systems
outage occurs (see Figure 3).
Monitoring and alerting are also key
elements of managing VMware environ-
ments in SCOM. The VMware kernel
includes definitions to create associations
with hardware events, but those defini-
tions may not necessarily match the way
a specific organization wants to set
thresholds for actions. Administrators can
use the SCOM interface to modify action
thresholds by adjusting the preset defini-
tions just as they would adjust other
thresholds in SCOM.
siMplifying virtualization ManageMentAlthough virtualization can offer benefits
ranging from reduced hardware costs to
increased energy efficiency, some orga-
nizations may have avoided implementing
it because of a perceived increase
in management overhead. The nworks
Management Pack for VMware from Veeam
Software enables administrators to imple-
ment VMware virtualization in their envi-
ronments while still taking advantage of
their existing investments in Microsoft
SCOM 2007—helping them to gain the
advantages of virtualization while still
maintaining a centralized, simplified con-
sole for systems management.
Mark Carroll is a solution architect for
Veeam Software. He has a bachelor’s
degree in Management Information
Systems from Baylor University, and has
previously worked for both the Dell IT
Group and VMware.
Figure 3. Temperature and fan metrics for virtualized servers in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
QuicK linKs
Veeam Software:www.veeam.com/powersolutions
Dell and Veeam:DELL.COM/Veeam