Editor: Maarten Goet MVP- OpsMgr Editor: Pete Zerger, MVP- OpsMgr System Center Forum

Transcription

1 Working with Rules, Monitors and Views for VMware ESX Virtual Machines Leveraging object discovery and performance data collection in the nworks management pack in Operations Manager 2007 Editor: Maarten Goet MVP- OpsMgr Editor: Pete Zerger, MVP- OpsMgr System Center Forum Some Rights Reserved: You are free to use and reference this document and it s, so long as, when republishing you properly credit the author and provide a link back to the published source.

2 Introduction There s a good discussion going on as to whether or not to disable certain rules or monitors for virtual machines running on VMware technology. Some people tend to say that those rules for instance: logical disk avg. disk sec/read do not represent any useful info, because they are measured by the agent at the virtual level. When you use nworks VMware management pack, you also collect similar counters, but at the physical (ESX) level. I ran into a situation the other day where a client of mine wanted to disable those rules and monitors, which were in his eyes unnecessary. While my personal opinion is that it will not hurt to collect all counters (you never know when you will need them), I ve written a short guide on how to do this. NOTE TO READERS: This short guide is targeted at people using ESX virtualization technology and have the nworks management pack in place. Step 1 Check that the nworks MP is working When you have the nworks MP correctly configured, the Virtual Machines that have an OpsMgr agent installed will be tagged with a property called Virtual Machine, set to True, as shown in figure 1. Select the Monitoring, Computers option in the Operations Console to verify (some details are cleared for privacy reasons): Figure 1 - Computer View of a VM Guest in Operations Con sole 2 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

3 Step 2 Create a Group to hold the (VM) classes For flexibility reasons we do not want to target every class separately for an override. We will create a group with a dynamic rule to hold all classes (and thus objects) that we want to target with our override. For this example we will target the class called Windows Server 2003 Network Adapter. 1. Go to the Authoring pane (you must be an OpsMgr administrator or Author to do so) and select the Groups node. Right click and select Create Group. Enter the group name and description of your choice, as shown in figure 2. Figure 2 - Create Group Wizard 2. It is a best practice to create a separate management pack to hold customizations like Groups, Overrides, etc. We use the New button to create a blank new management pack called Overrides Virtual Machines. Give it any name and/or description you like and click Next. 3 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

4 3. Skip the step to add Explicit Members and click Next to go to the Dynamic Members step. 4. Click Edit/Create Rules and select the class called Windows Server 2003 Network Adapter and click Add. Click the dropdown in the Property Column and select Host and then Virtual Machine as shown in figure 3. Figure 3 - Query Builder in Create Group Wizard (for dynamic group population) 5. Select Equals from the dropdown function in the Operator column. Then type True (without the quotes) in the Value field, as shown in figure 4. 4 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

5 Figure 4 - Resulting Formula for custom VM Group 6. Click OK to save the query and click Next twice and then Create to create the group. Select the newly created group in the console and click View Group Members in the Actions pane: 5 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

6 7. If everything is correctly configured, it will show all Network Adaptors that are present on your virtual machines (double check to see that there are no adaptors present from physical machines): Figure 5 - Local Area Connection Properties in Operations Console 6 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

7 Step 3 Create an override 8. Now that we have all our objects correctly grouped, we can set overrides. Go to the Authoring Pane and go to Rules. 9. Select the Scope button from the top bar and put the radio button in View all targets. Type Windows Server 2003 Network in the Look For input box and select the corresponding Class, as shown in figure 6. Figure 6 - Scoping View to a Specific Class in the Authoring space 10. Now click OK. Three rules should be displayed now that are targeted at the Windows Server 2003 Network Adapter class and are Enabled by default. 7 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

8 Figure 7 Rules View in the Authoring Space 11. Select the rule that we want to disable for Virtual Machines and click Overrides in the Actions Pane, and then For a group Figure 8 - Creating an Override in the Authoring Space 12. Type Network Adaptors in the Input Box and select our newly created Group, (shown in figure 9). 8 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

9 Figure 9 - Dynamically Populated Group based on Custom Object Class 13. Click OK. Put a checkmark in the Override column for the line that has Enabled in the Parameter Name column. Flip the dropdown box to False for the Override Setting column for that line, as shown in figure Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

10 Figure 10 - Override Properties Click OK. Repeat this step for any other class and/or rule combination. 10 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

11 Step 4 So, how do I use alternate (performance) counters? The nworks management pack for VMware collects some decent counters on the virtualized hardware layer. In this example we will show similar counts for the Guest network interface, but from the VMware perspective. 1. Go to the Monitoring pane and select the _VM State node under the nworks VMware, VMware Guest Virtual Machine folder: Figure 11 - _VM State View from the nworks MP 2. Right click the server for which you want to see the performance and select Open Performance View. 3. Select the appropriate rule in the list and view the Graphs and counters: 11 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines

12 Figure 12 - Performance Counters in Custom Performance View Feedback We hope you ve found this article helpful. Your comments and feedback are welcome at administrator@systemcenterforum.org. 12 Tuning Monitoring of Virtual Machines