traditional management tools
Are traditional management tools good enough for virtual servers?
Management vendors would answer, “Yes!” and for the most part, they have stepped up their support for virtual environments.
From systems management market leaders such as CA to data center management players such as BladeLogic, vendors have partnered with or built APIs into VMware’s tools to enable the exchange of data and provide some metrics around the health and availability of virtual servers. Several vendors promise to provide virtual and physical management metrics such as CPU, disk and memory usage side by side, but IT managers need more than the basic information provided with some tools.
“Yes, my existing management tools work just as well with virtual servers as any other server. The difference, however, is you don’t have the advantage of seeing the whole machine and manipulating that in the same tools you do the [virtual machines],” says Cars.com’s Christensen. “Visual representations of environments and good dashboards are key in managing a virtual environment.”
Start-ups such as PlateSpin, Scalent Systems, Veeam, Vizioncore and several others have emerged to fill the virtual management gap they say incumbent vendors can’t address. For instance, some of the areas that start-ups focus on are identifying applications running on the virtual machines and gaining visibility into the requests and responses in the virtual stack. Innovative virtual server management tools can help IT managers more quickly identify which application on which virtual machines is performing poorly.
For IT managers who aren’t ready to invest in specialized software for virtual management, there are things they can do to make their tried-and-true techniques better suited to a virtual environment.
For instance, Ganzon increased his investment in Network General products to monitor traffic to and from virtual servers. He coupled the traffic analysis from Network General (recently acquired by NetScout) with physical server performance metrics from Compuware’s ServerVantage software.