Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Mike Resseler Veeam Product Strategy Specialist, MVP, Microsoft Certified IT Professional, MCSA, MCTS, MCP Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Introduction Running a virtual infrastructure is and always has been a big challenge for IT teams. After initial setup and configuration of your hardware, networking, storage and virtualization layer, you need to maintain, manage and monitor it. The lifecycle of your environment is the part that costs the most and is sometimes ignored when implementing a solution. In an ideal world, you would implement a solution that would run solid for its lifetime and you would not need to manage, monitor or update it. But this ideal world doesn’t exist, and you need to have a good management solution. The Microsoft System Center suite delivers a perfect solution that allows you to maintain, update, manage and monitor your environment. One of the components of System Center is Operations Manager ‒ a management and monitoring framework. Operations Manager is extensible through management packs (MPs), which contain the knowledge, rules, monitors, graphical views, reports and more to manage and monitor your infrastructure. There are many MPs available. In fact, Microsoft provides System Center MPs to manage and monitor Microsoft solutions such as DNS, DHCP, AD, SQL, Exchange and others. Other MPs are from third-party hardware vendors such as IBM, HP, and Dell and allow you to monitor the hardware through Operations Manager. Those MPs are free when you buy hardware from the respective vendors. There are also third-party vendors that sell MPs to monitor non-Microsoft solutions―MySQL, Oracle, and BlackBerry―and vendors such as Veeam® that sell an MP to monitor and manage VMware vSphere infrastructures. This white paper examines Hyper-V management and monitoring provided by Veeam Management Pack within Microsoft System Center. Hyper-V monitoring Microsoft has its own MP for monitoring key components in the Hyper-V stack. MPs such as the clustering MP, Hyper-V MP and the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) MP can be used for monitoring Hyper-V, Hyper-V clustering and SCVMM and its components. Veeam has its own Hyper-V monitoring that comes with Veeam Management Pack™ v7 for System Center and delivers more value and insight into your virtual environment compared to the Microsoft standard management packs. 2 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Why do you need the Veeam MP to monitor Hyper-V? If Microsoft has its own MPs for monitoring Hyper-V, why and when should you consider Veeam Management Pack for monitoring Hyper-V? The answer: Veeam Management Pack for System Center provides deep visibility with dashboards, monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and more. Microsoft’s MPs monitor some of the same aspects as Veeam MP, but Veeam MP extends System Center, collecting critical information from all related resources involved in running a complex virtualized environment. Rather than focusing on the differences between Veeam MP and Microsoft MPs, this white paper addresses some key areas where you can use Veeam Management Pack for System Center in your environment. Deep visibility One of the biggest challenges in an IT environment is visibility into the infrastructure. In many cases, multiple point solutions are used and although these provide visibility of a part of the infrastructure, it is a very challenging way to manage your environment. Such tools do not give you all the components in a single view, so when something goes wrong, it becomes very difficult to search for the root cause. For example, if you run Exchange in a virtual machine on Hyper-V, underneath Hyper-V there is a hardware server attached to a Storage Area Network. Now imagine that the service desk gets a call from an end user complaining that email is not working. And after that, many more calls come in confirming there is a significant issue. The IT team would open Operations Manager and see that the Exchange application is in a critical state. At the same time, they also see that the operating system is in a critical state. Then they open a point solution to investigate the hypervisor layer. They see that it is in a critical state also. This continues until the technician finally finds the root cause related to the issue, which could be at the bottom of the stack. As you can imagine, it would take significant time before they find this problem because they don’t have a single view of the environment or correlation between the different tools to show dependencies and relationships. In fact, the Operations team often does not even know that the virtual environment is part of the problem because they don’t have insight in that layer. And when they look at the email server, it isn’t obvious that it is a virtual machine. 3 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center With Veeam MP’s app-to-metal view¹, you get a full view of your environment, from the hardware to the application (see Figure 1). Because of the correlation between all the components, the help desk or service desk can pinpoint the root cause very rapidly and notify the right team for the fastest time to resolution. It also gives the service desk an overview of the environment, even if they lack permissions to administer all the various parts. Having a full view of the environment is critical for being able to understand what is going on. Figure 1: App-to-metal view Monitoring Veeam MP delivers more monitors, rules and performance collection for Hyper-V compared to Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Clustering MPs. Veeam MP correlates all parts of your virtual environment. If there is a problem on your clustered storage, Veeam MP understands that this is virtual machine (VM) storage and lists the impacted VMs that use that storage. On the performance side, Veeam MP collects the metrics that matter and that you need to maintain your environment (see Figure 2). 1. Full app-to-metal functionality requires a SCOM agent in the virtual machine, and a hardware MP delivered free from the hardware vendor. 4 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Figure 2: Performance charts But there is more. Instead of just alerting, Veeam MP uses smart analysis techniques to enhance the alert with the necessary information. An example of an alert is shown in Figure 3. Besides reporting the alert, Veeam MP automatically gives you more information on the root-cause of the high memory pressure; for example, the cause could be that VM memory allocation is too low or that the host memory resources are exhausted. Veeam MP performs that analysis and provides the root-cause right in the alert description. This gives you much faster resolution times without the need for further troubleshooting. 5 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Figure 3: Smart Analysis monitor Knowledge base When reviewing alerts or warnings, it is important to have a good knowledge base (KB) to review possible solutions and/or to get more information on the type of counter, monitor or rule that triggers the alert. Veeam MP comes with an extensive knowledge base that provides insight into the alarm and presents information on probable causes and possible resolution steps. And every KB article also comes with links to external information such as the Veeam help center and Microsoft documentation (see Figure 4). 6 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Figure 4: Knowledge base article Dashboards, widgets and much more! Alerting alone isn’t enough. It provides the information you need when your environment is approaching or already in an unhealthy state. However, you need proactive monitoring to keep your environment healthy and to solve potential issues before they arise. This requires deep visibility within your environment. Veeam Management Pack for System Center provides this with multiple unique views. Global dashboards Veeam MP’s global dashboards display top-10 information for different assets in your environment and give you a quick view of performance in your environment. An example is the Top Virtual Machines dashboard, which shows the top 10 virtual machines for CPU usage, storage errors, memory pressure and IOPS in a single view (see Figure 5). 7 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Figure 5: Top virtual machines dashboard If you want to investigate more deeply, select an object and right-click to get more detailed dashboards. Figure 6 shows an example of drilling down into an object (VHVMP1) to view more details on the memory pressure of that virtual machine. Because Veeam MP correlates data among all the different management packs, you see all alerts and warnings to help quickly pinpoint the potential issue. Figure 6: Drill through dashboard Veeam traffic light widget System Center 2012 brings a standard Top N widget to the framework. Veeam MP v7 enhances that standard widget by adding a traffic light feature. In the blink of an eye you can see whether objects in your environment are performing well (green), not so well (yellow) or poorly (red), based on customizable thresholds (see Figure 7). 8 Hyper-V Monitoring and Reporting with Veeam Management Pack for System Center Figure 7: Top N widget for virtual machines Veeam heatmap widget Heatmap widgets and dashboards give you at-a-glance visualization of multiple metrics and are color-based so you’ll quickly see how your environment is performing.