eG Innovations Releases Monitor for VMware

eG Monitor for VMware Infrastructures manages all aspects of virtual hosts, guests, and desktops

• By James E. Powell
• 09/12/2007

eG Innovations has released a new product designed for use in virtualized computing environments. The eG Monitor for VMware Infrastructures (eG VM Monitor) watches and manages virtual hosts and guests.

While the popularity of virtualization is growing (first in servers, then spreading to desktops, networks, and storage), IT will likely soon need total visibility into its VM environment. Managers must know if servers are properly sized, understand user activity (including what application are being used), and must plan for additional servers. Bottlenecks must be discovered and understood -- is the problem at the network, server, VM, or application level?

The task is even more complex because resources (such as CPU, memory, and disk) can be shared across VMs, and resource contention (such as insufficient memory) can occur because of incorrect provisioning, the company told Enterprise Strategies.

eG VM Monitor provides real-time “external” and “internal” performance views from a VMware host's perspective about the guests and what those guests see internally using very few system resources. Using In-N-Out Monitoring technology, eG VM Monitor provides performance insight into VMware ESX Server operations, including the VM kernel, the console operating system, and all guests.

eG agents are used on the ESX Servers but on each guest (which carry higher deployment overhead and licensing costs). eG agents use ESX Server APIs to create an “outside view” of a guest’s performance. The relative resource-usage levels of the guests show where the performance bottlenecks may lie. The view can reveal the CPU load on the ESX kernel, console, and each guest, which network interfaces have the most traffic, and which storage devices have the highest activity.

To complement this view, the eG agent obtains an “inside view” that details the user activity (desktop/VDI), resource allocation, and application mix running inside the guest system. Its virtual desktop monitoring feature can determine which users are logged on, the extent of resources (CPU, memory, desk, etc.) used on each desktop, the typical duration of a user session, peak usage times, and what applications are running on a desktop.

“All the metrics collected by the agents are baselined automatically by the eG VM Monitor, so that IT administrators can be informed proactively of any deviations from the norm,“ said Srinivas Ramanathan, president and CEO of eG Innovations, in a statement. “Coupled with the ability of our eG Enterprise Suite to monitor more than 80 applications, including Citrix, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and more, the eG Monitor for VMware Infrastructures provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual environments.”

The tool goes beyond managing virtualized servers as discrete entities. According to the company, "[Its] end-to-end business service views show the applications and network devices that support each business service and the interdependencies among them. Applications are associated with the virtual machines they run on, and each virtual machine is mapped to the physical machine upon which it is hosted."

The eG Monitor for VMware Infrastructures is available now. Pricing is based on the number of ESX servers monitored, regardless the server's hardware capabilities, number of virtual guests, or the virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25 node VMware-based environment is about $50,000.

More information is available at http://www.eginnovations.com