I have written previously about the vCloud Ecosystem (part1) (part2), which combines multiple products to make up a vCloud environment. What I want to cover in this article is VMware vC Ops and VMware vFrabic Hyperic integration into this ecosystem product stack. Where do these products fit in?
When we look at vC Ops and Hyperic, we need to look at two different aspects of monitoring. Availability and Performance. vC Ops gives us the ability to gather performance data, while Hyperic is used to provide application availability.
So how do they integrate?
The above diagram demonstrates the different integration points between the vCloud stack. This can be further expanded upon to also include availability monitoring of the other vCloud components, however this can also be achieved simply by having all these vCloud Management VMs running in a Management Cluster vCenter as per the vCloud Architecture Toolkit and using a vCenter adapter to monitor there availability.
As demonstrated in the diagram all the vCloud infrastructure components are monitored either through vFabric Hyperic relaying information to vC Ops, or through vC Ops adapters themselves.
Through the vC Ops vCenter adapters this allows us to monitor the virtual machine status of all cloud workloads. We can determine if these are up or down, however no information regarding the actual state of the application workloads running in these virtual machines can be monitored.
In the future I will be able to provide information around what application specifics within vCloud Director and Chargeback we can use to monitor actual availability.
[…] Although announced at VMworld it wasn’t publicly available until Jan 2012 when VMware formally launched vCOps v5. Coming less than a year after the release of the first version it’s apparent that VMware see this as an important product which is evolving fast. Steven Herrod, VMware’s CIO stated recently at the Italian VMUG (around the 5 minute mark) that vCOps ‘is becoming the most adopted new technology that VMware has ever had’. The vCenter Operations suite is still aimed at infrastructure monitoring as opposed to application monitoring (despite the addition of Infrastructure Navigator) – VMware’s solutions aimed at the application tier belong to the vFabric suite. For a good overview of where vCOps and vFabric Hyperic fit into VMware’s cloud suite read Dave Hill’s blogpost on the subject. […]
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