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Confidential

VMware’s Journey to the Cloud: Leveraging Hyperic for Portal Infrastructure Monitoring

March 2012

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Leveraging Hyperic for Portal Infrastructure Monitoring

VMware’s IT department leveraged Hyperic for monitoring TCServers on VMs.

• Solution provided visibility into multiple metrics, including VM load average, threads, JVM resources, disk usage, VM memory usage and CPU usage.

• Monitor provisioning has been greatly simplified and sped up through the creation of Hyperic monitoring defaults.

• 57% application growth over a one-and-a-half year period resulted in no increase in administrative headcount due.

• Early warnings and alerts from Hyperic allow the administrative team to proactively resolve potential issues before they result in outages affecting customers.

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Proactive, Scalable Monitoring Needed

A dynamic, fast-growing environment required an easily implemented and scalable solution.

Other solutions required too steep a learning curve to implement.

• Dedicated administrative resources would be required to support other solutions.

A scalable, low maintenance and easy to implement solution was required.

• Needed the ability to automatically configure monitoring for new resources.

• Customization for certain resource types also required.

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Solution

Hyperic’s “Hub and Spoke” model allowed for automatic configuration through infrastructure discovery.

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Implementation Details

Central Hyperic Server Monitor Defaults Hyperic Agent

• Install Hyperic Agent on VM and configure agent to communicate with central Hyperic server.

• Resources are automatically detected and monitors are created from monitoring defaults.

• Configure monitoring defaults for each type of resource.

• Assign appropriate escalation schemes to each alert.

• Create clearing alerts to automatically recover from alerts.

• Install central Hyperic server for each environment (Development, QA, Production, etc.).

• Configure users, roles and escalation schemes.

One day for installation and configuration

One week to configure

Included in Linux VM build, so less than an hour to

configure

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Benefits

Automatic configuration of monitors and alerts for new resources

Proactive monitoring and alerts that enable the administrative team to resolve issues before they result in loss of service

Able to grow the number of applications administered by 57% while keeping the same headcount on the administration team

Increased application stability and availability for VMware’s internal and external customers

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Future Plans

Leverage Hyperic’s ability to run scripts in response to alerts by running a script to restart TCServer instances

Use Hyperic’s groups to provide meaningful metrics to management

Leverage Hyperic’s dashboard functionality to give real-time monitoring information to stakeholders on projects

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For more information

• Grant Nowell, gnowell@vmware.com

• David Heffelfinger, dheffelfinger@vmware.com