nworks Management Pack Plus and Smart Plug-in Plus for VMware

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1 Reference Code: TA001990IMT Publication Date: November 2010 Author: Roy Illsley TECHNOLOGY AUDIT nworks Management Pack Plus and Smart Plug-in Plus for VMware Veeam Software SUMMARY IMPACT Managing a holistic data center that consists of both physical and virtual elements is rapidly becoming a major problem for CIOs, particularly as the organization becomes more mature and increases its use of virtualization to more than 50%. There is a growing need to have: A mature, yet evolving, suite of capabilities to address key virtualization management issues. The capability to manage VMware technologies through Microsoft System Center or HP Operations Manager (HP OM). KEY FINDINGS Strengths: A simple one-solution suite of products for VMware management. Deep integration with the Microsoft and HP infrastructure management solutions. Certified by VMware, Microsoft, and HP. Weaknesses: Currently only supports VMware technologies. Key Facts: i Mature solution, monitoring and managing VMware since Virtual Center 1.0. i i i Collects more than 300 metrics, 400 vcenter events, and 50 status changes. Collects all 25 object types and the nearly 600 configuration parameters in VMware. 17 built-in management tools (e.g. power the virtual machine (VM) on/off, remove snapshots, etc.). Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 1

2 OVUM VIEW nworks enables organizations to manage their VMware virtual environments using ubiquitous infrastructure management tools from Microsoft and HP. Many organizations have been disappointed to learn that they will incur significant management costs in addition to investments in their virtual infrastructure, mostly due to the lack of integrated management tools available. nworks targets organizations that are using VMware VI3 or vsphere 4 and are managing an IT environment with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, or HP OM for Windows/Unix. nworks enables the management of VMware infrastructure from within the Microsoft or HP management console by gathering an extensive range of more than 500 metrics and events and nearly 600 configuration settings without the use of agent software in the virtual infrastructure. nworks then publishes the data to the relevant management solution. Any organization that has made a sizable VMware investment and has infrastructure management solutions from Microsoft or HP would be well advised to evaluate nworks. Recommendations Scenario 1: nworks is a good solution for any organization that operates a mixed VMware and Microsoft virtualization environment. Scenario 2: nworks is a good solution for organizations that use the HP infrastructure management solution and have virtualized with VMware. It provides a mature virtualization management capability that can be used to drive full infrastructure automation through the use of its comprehensive out-ofthe-box metrics. Scenario 3: As the Veeam ONE solution also features a standalone version, Veeam remains a valid solution even if an organization has neither invested in an infrastructure management solution nor intends to integrate virtualization into its infrastructure management solution. However, the benefits are less obvious and are centered on the capability that Veeam offers to advance an organization s virtualization management maturity. FUNCTIONALITY SOLUTION OVERVIEW VMware, which is still by far the leading server virtualization vendor, has built interfaces into its management systems that allow third-party solutions to access detailed information about the state and performance of the virtual environment. Using the application programming interfaces (APIs) in VMware vcenter (VMware s management technology), nworks provides metrics, events, and alerts on the state and performance of the guest operating system, ESX hypervisor, hardware, power infrastructure, data center, cluster, host and VM topology, and network and storage infrastructure. nworks converts the data collected from vcenter into a form that can be used by broadly implemented infrastructure management solutions, including: Microsoft SCOM 2007 Microsoft MOM 2005, SCOM s predecessor HP OM Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 2

3 For each of these management systems, nworks publishes the data recorded via a native method of distributed proxy agents, providing administrators with a common management view across their virtualized and non-virtualized server infrastructure. Veeam has simplified and enhanced the range of available virtualization management capabilities by providing three versions of the Veeam ONE solution (see table below), each of which now comes with built-in analytics, reporting, capacity planning, and chargeback, as well as advanced performance monitoring. In particular, Ovum notes that organizations can migrate between solution offerings in order to scale up any deployment quickly and easily. There are three versions of Veeam ONE: Veeam Monitor Plus, nworks Management Pack Plus and nworks Smart Plug-in Plus. Veeam Monitor Plus is a freestanding solution that requires no existing management framework, while the nworks solutions allow system information from the VMware infrastructure to be integrated into the management functions in Microsoft SCOM (or MOM) and HP OM. The available versions of Veeam ONE are summarized in the table below. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 3

4 Table 1: Contact Details Version Includes Customer environment and requirements Veeam Monitor Plus nworks Management Pack Plus nworks Smart Plug-in Plus Veeam Monitor Veeam Reporter Veeam Business View nworks Management Pack and Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) Pack Veeam Reporter Veeam Business View nworks Smart Plug-in Veeam Reporter Veeam Business View The customer does not have an existing infrastructure management solution (such as Microsoft SCOM or HP OM), but wants a framework-independent point solution for VMware management, including monitoring of performance and availability, capacity planning, change management, chargeback, and other reporting capabilities. The customer has invested, or plans to invest, in the Microsoft infrastructure management solution framework and requires a native solution for VMware for this framework, to enable VMware management, including monitoring of performance and availability, capacity planning, change management, chargeback, and other reporting capabilities. The customer has invested, or plans to invest, in the HP infrastructure management solution framework and requires a native solution for VMware for this framework, to enable VMware management, including monitoring of performance and availability, capacity planning, change management, chargeback and other reporting capabilities. Source: Veeam O V U M Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 4

5 In addition to the functionality described above, nworks has a command-execution capability that enables an administrator using the Microsoft or HP infrastructure management solution to manage the VMware environment from these tools. The net result enables the management of a mixed physical and VMwarebased virtual infrastructure using the Microsoft or HP management console with which many system administrators are familiar. Currently, nworks supports only VMware s server virtualization technology. The latest version of nworks has some significant improvements that Ovum believes demonstrate Veeam s commitment to continued product development. nworks PRO Pack Veeam has introduced a new capability that allows nworks to extend its reach into System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) so that it can automatically optimize where VMs are moved under VMware s vmotion capability based on specific ESX host and VM resource factors. The nworks PRO Pack works with SCVMM 2008 R2. Configurable data collection Veeam has also introduced the ability to configure intelligent data collection intervals by data class. Ovum believes that this improves the scalability of the solution significantly, as it reduces the total amount of data captured, without affecting the detail and granularity of the visibility of VMware health. For example, if a measure precision is not very important for the specific data class, nworks will aggregate and record performance values once per multiple intervals. nworks Enterprise Manager nworks collectors can be grouped into high availability pools, which enables organizations to manage large geographically dispersed or otherwise logically partitioned environments. When this is combined with a new load-balancing algorithm that recommends the number of collectors, organizations can ensure full flexibility in job placement within the new failover groups. Advanced SCOM features Through its close working relationship with Microsoft, Veeam has modified version 5.5 to use the advanced features in Microsoft SCOM 2007, including the following two important aspects: Consecutive sample monitors: This feature is designed to reduce console clutter as it alerts only on sustained or repeated threshold breaches. Optimized performance providers: These are designed to reduce the storage needed in the OM database. Derived metrics nworks includes derived metrics that extend the data supplied by the vsphere API. Veeam defines derived metrics as those that are calculated in the nworks collector. Version 5.5 includes graphs, dashboards, threshold monitors, and data warehouse reports on new or improved derived metrics. These are: Disk I/O operations per second: Total input and output operations per second for each VMware hot bus adaptor storage connection. It also provides rollup totals for hosts and VMs. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 5

6 Total disk traffic in kilobytes: Calculated for VMs, hosts, and at the cluster level. Total network traffic: Amount of data transmitted and received. Calculated for VMs, hosts, and at the cluster level. Memory swap file I/O rate: Now calculated for every VM, clearly showing which VM is causing any high host swap usage. Memory pressure: This enhanced metric now factors in memory over-commitment, transparent page-sharing, and memory utilization to give proactive warning of memory resource issues. Veeam has focused on providing management tools for virtual infrastructure environments since its inception in Complementary tools for VMware environments include the company s other specialist products: Veeam Backup & Replication: A specialist data protection and disaster recovery solution for VMware environments. Veeam Reporter: An automated approach for the discovery and documentation of VMware virtual server environments, including the virtual network and storage structure, its components and configuration settings for capacity planning, change management, resource utilization tracking, and chargeback. (This product is also offered as part of the Veeam ONE solution.) Veeam Monitor: Provides key performance metrics for the virtualized environment, and can do so across multiple vcenters. (This product is also featured in one of the Veeam ONE versions.) Ovum sees nworks as providing an excellent set of capabilities that enables effective management of VMware-based virtual environments from the well-understood enterprise management tools supplied by Microsoft and HP. See Figure 1 for an overview of where nworks fits into an organization s management infrastructure. The addition of Veeam Reporter to create the nworks Management Pack/Smart Plug-in Plus packages further enhances visibility and manageability of the VMware environment and combats the need for customers to purchase and maintain multiple tools from multiple vendors. However, given the increasing variety of virtualization in enterprise data centers, Veeam needs to widen its support for additional virtualization platforms in order to be relevant to as many customers as possible. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 6

7 Figure 1: nworks Architecture Source: Veeam O V U M SOLUTION ANALYSIS Operational and support nworks can provide VMware topology and configuration information, and dynamically update the topology (or the service maps) of the virtual environment, producing detailed documentation in various formats, such as Visio diagrams. nworks can graphically represent all relationships and dependencies, such as between VM and host, VM and network, host and hardware, or host and storage. It provides all of the capabilities expected from an infrastructure management system for VMware data centers, including graphing and historical reporting, thresholds for performance metrics, and monitoring of vcenter events. Standard infrastructure management solutions group-based rules and policy settings are provided. In addition, nworks provides a knowledge base that facilitates the root-cause analysis of events. Service management Another of nworks' noteworthy capabilities is Veeam Business View, which allows organizations to group, view, report on, and manage all VMs, based on user-defined criteria that reflect organizational structure. Business View supports the dynamic automated grouping of VMs, based on configurable requirements and priorities such as business unit, department, or other business criteria, reflecting the need to chargeback usage or monitor varying service level agreements. Veeam Business View allows VMs to be categorized based on VMware-defined attributes that are relevant for the business. For example, an automated rule could add metrics of any VM that has retail in its name into a retail banking category. Business View also allows the attributes of single or multiple VMs to be edited at the same time, either manually, or automatically based on predefined rules. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 7

8 Resource usage and analysis nworks gathers virtual infrastructure events and alerts remotely using the VMware API. The entire process is agentless, which Ovum believes provides a distinct advantage in terms of ownership and operational overheads. According to Veeam, nworks distributed and centrally managed deployment model can scale to manage the largest VMware environments. nworks offers full visibility of all vsphere 4 components, including vcenter, ESX hosts, clusters, resource pools, and VMs. It also analyzes more than 300 metrics, including data points relating to VMs such as central processing unit (CPU), memory, disk, storage, and network usage. nworks also accesses VMware-specific health and performance metrics, such as CPU ready time, balloon memory, and host memory swapping. Administration, reporting, and deployment nworks enables visibility of the full alerting and performance monitoring status of the VMware infrastructure, while its distributed architecture enables very granular performance and event data to be gathered for VMware ESX hosts and VMs. It also facilitates the collection of events and alerts of different types, such as those relating to security, status or a change in the state of the virtual environment, as well as licensing and other administrative actions that occur at the vcenter level. The software modules also help to represent and manage virtual infrastructure topologies. Using Veeam Business View, nworks can reorganize the topology by grouping VMs and ESX hosts based on custom business criteria. All of the gathered topology, events, and metrics can be used later for reporting or alerting purposes. The Microsoft or HP infrastructure management solution's built-in event management capabilities can be used to aggregate events and generate alerts, and can also route events related to status changes to the administrator. The data can be filtered and viewed at different levels, such as data pertaining to the resource pool, cluster, ESX host, VM or vcenter server. Detailed reports on configuration changes in the VMware environment can be produced, allowing change management and audit trail. Capacity planning reports can be run to plan future infrastructure scale-out, and to predict impending resource constraints. Virtualization and cloud management Because the Veeam solution was designed specifically for the purpose of managing complex virtualized environments, virtualization and cloud management are two of its major strengths. However, Ovum considers that, for true cloud management, Veeam will need to continue to extend its capabilities so that they include more governance features and some degree of interoperability orchestration. Planning and recovery nworks Enterprise Manager's web-based user interface enables the configuration and administration of nworks collectors, before organizing them into farms or clusters of high availability, load-balanced monitoring systems. The interface is platformed on the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server, and is directly accessible from a standalone browser or the VMware vcenter VI-Client. nworks Enterprise Manager enables the centralized configuration and management of all distributed nworks collectors, as well as a dashboard view that initially allows administrators to see the overall status of the nworks collectors. nworks provides statistics, including the number of installed nworks collectors, connected VMware systems, and monitoring job distribution, across nworks collectors. It also provides a centrally managed pool of licenses and is responsible for managing the process of distributing licensing credentials, as they are needed for each nworks collector. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 8

9 Achieving high availability on the nworks collector network is handled in one of two ways: providing hot standby nworks collectors; or utilizing the built-in load-balancing feature of nworks Enterprise Manager. Each nworks collector is monitored constantly, and any variation in well-being indicators triggers an automatic even redistribution of all management jobs from the affected collector, either across currently loaded collectors (utilizing the available headroom on those systems) or to those unloaded collectors on hot standby. nworks Enterprise Manager s load-balancing capability ensures the automation of the installation and the configuration of any nworks collectors needed, as well as the ongoing, dynamic assignment of workloads. PRODUCT STRATEGY nworks is primarily targeted at organizations that use VMware VI3 or vsphere 4 and manage their IT environment with Microsoft SCOM, MOM or HP OM for Windows/Unix. With the acquisition of nworks (the company) in June 2008, Veeam, which until then had focused solely on the SME market, gained a sizable installed base of about 500 customers in the large enterprise segment, and a number of resellers and partner relationships, including nworks status as a VMware Technology Alliance Premier Partner, a Gold HP Business Partner, and a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner. The route to market is mainly through channel partners of VMware, which increasingly also include Microsoft Enterprise partners and HP Business Software partners. Veeam s implementation and distribution partners include Lifeboat Distribution, Magirus, Business Generating Software, Infotronics, Dell/ASAP, SHI International, HP, and FCN Technology Solutions. Technology partners include VMware, Microsoft and HP. It is also important to note that Veeam is a strong Dell independent software vendor partner and that the nworks Management Pack is Dell OpenManage-certified. Veeam also plans to extend toward virtual desktop infrastructure with Dell when market demand makes this appropriate. Veeam offers nworks via a perpetual licensing model on a per-socket basis. The pricing is dependent on the size of deployment, with discounts available for the public sector. Veeam says that the average deal is about $50,000. The company usually releases updates simultaneously with major VMware vsphere, ESX/ESXi, vcenter, Microsoft SCOM and HP OM releases. It plans to continue to enhance scalability and service management within nworks. IMPLEMENTATION In terms of deployment, configuring nworks is relatively simple and primarily involves integrating the solution and associated practices with the existing infrastructure management solution and specific systems management practices. A pilot project typically involves installation, verification, and initial configuration of the solution components. Implementing nworks involves two sets of skills: VMware vcenter administration and Microsoft (nworks Management Pack Plus), or HP OM (nworks Smart Plug-in Plus) administration. A typical 30-user departmental implementation would require these administration skills, and the deployment process would involve tailoring event responses and severities in support of departmental operational procedures. For enterprise-level implementation, the effort required depends on overall enterprise systems management architecture. The more distributed the architecture, the more complex the nworks implementation process and the adaptation of operational processes. However, Veeam says that this does not usually involve many major changes and that a pilot project can typically be completed within a day, with departmental or enterprise-wide deployments taking up to three days. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 9

10 Veeam offers two support levels for nworks customers: standard support and premium support. Standard support which also includes product updates costs 20% of the licensing cost and provides telephone assistance during business hours. Premium support costs 25% of the licensing cost, with support available at all times. Support is provided for the installation of nworks components on Microsoft Windows Server platforms (2003 and bit or 64-bit versions, including R2). The solution can be deployed either as on-premise or onpremise-managed, where the monitoring activities are typically outsourced to a managed service provider. nworks works with VMware VI 3 and VMware vsphere 4. It would typically be deployed in an environment managed largely by Microsoft SCOM or HP OM for Windows/Unix. The product is certified VMware Ready, which means that it has been tested and certified by VMware as stable and readily available to be deployed to manage all VMware environments. Supported versions of VMware, Microsoft and HP products include: VMware: Virtual Center 2.x and vcenter 4.x, ESX 2.5, and ESX and ESXi 3.x and 4.x. HP: OMW 7.x and 8.x, and OMU 8.x and 9.0. Microsoft: MOM 2005 SP1, SCOM 2007 SP1, SCOM 2007 R2, and SCVMM 2008 R2. Deployment example one Monitoring scope: The customer environment contains 12 virtual farms with approximately 700 ESX hosts and more than 10,000 VMs. These farms are managed by different teams and provide read-only access for the monitoring team. The monitoring team uses HP OM for Unix to monitor both physical and virtual infrastructure, and HP Performance Insight for long-term reporting. Due to a fast-growing environment, the monitoring team required a solution that enabled the proactive monitoring of virtual resources and physical hardware, with a simple integration into existing monitoring products. nworks deployment: The customer installed nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware, together with the nworks OpenView Performance Insight (OVPI) report pack. The deployment contains nworks Enterprise Manager and close to 40 collectors. According to the customer infrastructure topology, the monitoring load is distributed across separate geographical locations, and is partitioned in nworks Enterprise Manager using failover groups. An additional spare collector is installed in each failover group in order to provide high availability support and headroom for new objects in the growing environment. For proactive monitoring, the customer uses nworks' set of out-of-the-box monitoring and event policies, as well as the graphical Service Map, giving a full virtual infrastructure topology overview. The customer uses the nworks OVPI report pack for long-term historical virtual resource usage reports, as well as for forecasting reports to plan the virtual infrastructure capacity. Monitoring scope: The customer has a massive and complex IT infrastructure that includes more than 2,000 servers, half of which are virtualized. The environment contains multi-vendor hardware and a virtual desktop implementation (VDI). The customer needed to find a hardware-agnostic monitoring and management tool for the VMware infrastructure that integrates into its existing monitoring solution, Microsoft SCOM. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 10

11 nworks deployment: The customer chose the nworks Management Pack for VMware. The deployment contains nworks Enterprise Manager and a set of recommended collectors. nworks provides a dynamic topology view for the virtual infrastructure, and integrates that data with the existing operations manager agents installed in the guest operating system on VMs. The customer uses the alert and state views to gain visibility of problems occurring on VMs or ESX hosts, as well as the vcenter server itself, and proactively manages the large VDI environment using a set of out-of-the-box rules and monitors in nworks. With assistance from Veeam system engineers and support, additional configuration was performed to optimize the monitoring, and collection intervals and performance monitors were configured to meet customer requirements. Table 2: Contact Details Veeam Software Americas Headquarters 6479 Reflections Drive Columbus OH US Tel: +1 (614) Fax: +1 (614) Veeam Software EMEA 400 Thames Valley Park Reading, RG6 1PT Berkshire UK Tel: +44 (0) Fax: +44 (0) Source: Veeam O V U M Headquarters Shirethorn House, 37/43 Prospect Street, Kingston upon Hull, HU2 8PX, UK Tel: +44 (0) Fax: +44 (0) Australian Sales Office Level 46, Citigroup Building, 2 Park Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia Tel: + 61 (02) Fax: + 61 (02) End-user Sales Office (USA) 245 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10016, USA Tel: Fax: Important Notice F or more information on Ovum s Subscription Services please contact one of Veeam Software nworks the Management local offices above. Pack Plus and Smart Plug-in Plus for VMware This report contains data and information upto-date and correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of preparation. The data and information comes from a variety of sources outside our direct control, therefore Ovum cannot give any guarantees relating to the content of this report. Ultimate responsibility for all interpretations of, and use of, data, information and commentary in this report remains with you. Ovum will not be liable for any interpretations or decisions made by you. Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 11