The process of running numerous operating systems and programs on a single computer or server is known as virtualization. Companies can save space, money, and energy by running multiple operating systems and apps on a single physical device. The concept of virtualization is thought to have originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the mainframe era. The terms virtualization and virtual machine are frequently used interchangeably. Virtualization’s key benefit is that it increases the amount of computing power accessible on a single physical system, allowing businesses to save money and lessen their environmental impact. It is a method of increasing the efficiency and capacity of IT systems. It also improves data security by isolating data from the operating system of the computer or server on which it is stored. Virtualization is used by some of the greatest names in technology, such as Apple, Facebook, and Google, to run their critical services and computer systems, which are often in the form of virtual machines.
Market size
The global virtualization market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 7.17 percent to USD 110.42 billion by 2027, from USD 67.99 billion in 2020 to USD 72.57 billion in 2021. Solutions for monitoring and managing virtual environments will continue to grow in response to such a large market.
Virtualization Monitoring and Management Tools
The number of virtual computers has grown in tandem with the adoption of virtualization. When it comes to monitoring and controlling virtualized systems, the size and quantity of virtual machines have created issues. Organizations can use virtualization monitoring and management software to detect and respond to virtualization-related security issues faster than they can with traditional techniques, reducing the risk of data loss and downtime. Users and IT admins must monitor and manage large numbers of virtual machines, which is a difficult task in itself. Therefore, having dedicated software or tools will make monitoring and managing virtual machines easier. Performance is always a concern in the virtualization world. The most powerful virtualization technologies can be pretty slow, and the greatest virtual machines aren’t always the most efficient. Monitoring the performance of your virtualization system is the best approach to figuring out what’s going on. However, there are various techniques to monitor virtualization systems, and deciding which is best for your purposes can be tricky. Let’s look at some of the best virtualization monitoring and management tools/software in the below sub-sections.
Opsview Monitoring
Opsview is designed to meet today’s business difficulties by recognizing them and delivering the necessary automation, scanning, reporting, and alerting. It is a single console to monitor all VMware-related components, including infrastructure, cloud, containers, applications, network, and more. One of its uniqueness is that it automatically scans and imports hosts into the Opsview environment, allowing it to accommodate today’s dynamically evolving enterprise infrastructure. Its wizard-based feature streamlines and automates the scanning and configuration stages, allowing you to maintain continuous monitoring of your widespread enterprise quickly and reliably. Automonitor enables users to discover and import hosts into the Opsview environment fast and easily, resulting in complete Virtual insights with minimal configuration. Top Features
Supports Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisors, VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V VMware vSphere Express Scan to quickly discover VMware objects. An alert mechanism for breaching thresholds.
The Opsview software is quite flexible to run either on-premise or on a cloud to monitor and track all VMware virtual machines.
Solarwinds
Solarwinds Virtualization Monitoring offers end-to-end solutions for monitoring, managing, and optimizing virtualization from small to large enterprises. VMAN (Virtualization Manager) is a SolarWinds proprietary tool that provides complete virtualization monitoring to help IT professionals take control of their VMware, AHV, Hyper-V, or SQL Server environments. VMAN is a powerful virtualization monitoring tool that can easily monitor on-premises, hybrid, and cloud systems. It also aids in the resolution of issues with virtualization’s general performance, hosts, datastores, virtual machines, containers, vSANS, and clusters. Using the tool, administrators may determine which virtual machines are running on a given physical server, monitor their operating system and application versions, see a list of users who are currently logged into those virtual machines, and perform other related actions. Top Features
Aids in precise troubleshooting and performance optimization. The easy PerfStack dashboard provides detailed monitoring stats. Predicts future usage data and sends out alerts when usage is high or low. Remove orphaned VMDK files and reclaim virtual resources.
Solarwinds is a good choice if you need a comprehensive monitoring and management tool for your virtual application stack.
eG Innovations
The virtual monitoring solution from eG Innovations gives you 360-degree insight into your virtual environment. One of its distinguishing features is that, rather than treating virtualization as a single standalone platform, it auto-discovers inter-application, application to VM, and VM to physical machine dependencies and maps them all together to provide deep insights. This allows IT administrators to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before end users notice them. IT administrators can monitor a variety of verticals related to virtualization, including the network, database, application, virtualization platform, and storage, in real-time. eG Innovations offers a single plane to monitor heterogeneous environments, with a single license per server that is not reliant on cores or sockets, providing excellent value for money in large organizations. The platform also forecasts consumption and capacity, which assists Virtualization architects in planning for future scalability, which in turn benefits seniors in proper sizing and future investments. Top Features
Root cause detection is automated across the infrastructure, allowing for speedy remediation of performance issues. Supports more than ten of the most popular virtualization platforms. Executive reports with the drill-downs they require for problem diagnosis. The comparison of workloads between VMs and physical servers aids in resource rebalancing.
eG Innovations is a single solution that improves user experience by monitoring complete performance across your physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure, regardless of where it originates.
Turbonomic
IBM Turbonomic uses an AI-based platform to provide complete insight over apps, platforms, and infrastructure, as well as optimized resources to enable them to function in any virtualized environment, reducing the impact of overprovisioned resources. Its application resource management evaluates application resource use in real-time and directs admins to the applications with the highest demand spikes for further analysis. It manages resources automatically depending on real-time demand to provide a continual performance improvement. According to a Forrester TEI study, implementing Turbonomic yielded a 471 percent ROI (Return on Investment). As it is AI-based architecture, it thoroughly understands the resource connections and performance risks, as well as precise strategies to avoid resource depletion. Top Benefits
Understands the entire stack, from apps to hardware, and supports Kubernetes, cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments. In a hybrid cloud environment, automate tasks and avoid resource congestion. AI-powered automation for intelligent app resource management. Allows apps to run on autopilot, allowing administrators to focus on enhancing user experience or innovation.
Turbonomic transforms data into actions for companies, ensuring continuous application performance by identifying resource dependencies at every layer of the environment. Turbonomic would be a good choice for a business searching for a multi-dimensional solution to monitor and manage virtual networks based on an AI platform with a sense of automation.
Citrix Hypervisor
Citrix Hypervisor is the industry’s most cost-effective platform for desktop, server, and cloud virtualization infrastructures. For today’s data center requirements, Citrix Hypervisor enables enterprises of any size or type to consolidate and transform computational resources into virtual workloads. It simplifies virtualization management while supporting your most demanding workloads and safeguarding virtual infrastructure against modern threats. It streamlines operational management while providing a high-definition user experience for high-volume workloads. Citrix Hypervisor is used by Formula One racing organizations to remotely monitor and assess the health of the car in real-time, according to the Citrix website. Top Features
It’s simple to integrate with existing networking and storage systems. Live migration of VMs between Citrix Hypervisor hosts ensures zero downtime maintenance. In the event that one server fails, the VMs are quickly available on another.
Citrix Hypervisor is capable of handling a wide range of workloads, operating systems, and storage and networking needs, as well as the most demanding business use cases.
Paessler PRTG monitoring
Paessler PRTG is a diversified monitoring system that is compatible with well-known virtualization platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Nutanix. PRTG is a VMware alliance partner. VMware is a world-renowned virtualization platform. With a wide range of capabilities, user-friendliness, and economical pricing, it is well-suited for VMware virtual servers. PRTG uses sensor technologies to keep track of a variety of services and devices. One sensor typically monitors one measured value in your network, such as switch port traffic, server CPU load, or disc drive free space. It has a large number of sensors that allow it to track both hardware and software parameters in a virtual environment. It uses pre-configured sensors to start monitoring right away. It collects information on host status, cluster health, storage device, memory capacity, data traffic, and application performance statistics, among other things. The platform features a powerful notification system that is highly customizable and sends out timely alerts to prevent failures and service interruptions by detecting problems in advance. Top Features
Proactive troubleshooting with alerts and detailed reports. Website metrics and VoIP services are supported. Due to auto-discovery and pre-configured device templates, monitoring is simple and rapid. Centralized console and app to monitor complete infrastructure.
PRTG is a comprehensive monitoring tool that gives you a complete picture of your virtualization environment, from the virtual machines to the host server and applications. PRTG offers the best balance of feature set, user-friendliness, and cost-effectiveness.
Veeam ONE
Veeam ONE is an easy-to-integrate component of the Veeam Availability Suite that monitors, manages, and administers a virtual environment. It gives intelligent solutions to help your business with the automation and control it needs to maintain availability by preventing potential problems from affecting your operations. Veeam ONE is a self-supporting intelligent diagnostics platform that proactively detects known issues and warns users with self-support reconfigurations and hotfixes. One of its uniqueness is that it uses self-healing and policy-based fixes to reduce admin overhead by triggering automatic adjustments or approvals of operations. The software also facilitates determining the cost of VMware and Hyper-V by forecasting resource usage and utilization trends. Top Features
Proactive alerting and reporting to warn admins about potential problems before they become a failure. Backup heatmaps provide a quick and easy way to see how much of your backup infrastructure’s resources are being used. Determine which VMs and physical servers aren’t protected to save downtime and data loss. To avoid unauthorized changes, use automated backup and VMware change tracking.
Veeam ONE is a comprehensive tool that provides real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting to assist enterprises in keeping an eye on their virtual and physical infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to avoid SLA breaches and provide consistent uptime for their customers.
VMware vSphere
VMware’s vSphere virtualization software is the industry’s most popular. Customers can modernize the 70 million or more workloads running on vSphere with Tanzu. vSphere is made up of two main components: ESXi, which is a virtualization platform on which virtual components run, and vCenter Server, which is used to manage the entire virtual infrastructure, including virtual machines ESXi hosts and all dependent components. On a modern vSphere infrastructure that allows container-based application development, managing complicated and modern apps and VMs is highly flexible. It also streamlines maintenance tasks such as software upgrades, patching, and firmware updates, resulting in less downtime. Customers and vendors can scale without sacrificing operations with the vShpere, which is utilized for enterprise-level platforms. High-performance applications and memory-intensive databases can both benefit from vSphere’s ability to scale the infrastructure. Top Features
HA (High Availability) to minimize downtime and improve resilience. TKG service enables self-service provisioning of Kubernetes clusters within a few minutes. Protects hybrid cloud infrastructure from malware and ransomware in its tracks. vSphere Native Key Provider makes it easier to provide encryption and additional security.
vSphere is an AI- and Developer-Ready Infrastructure that helps AI and Kubernetes applications achieve efficiency, scale, and security.
Benefits of virtualization monitoring tools
Virtualization monitoring has a number of critical benefits that add to the overall efficacy and performance of an enterprise’s IT infrastructure.
Scalability Planning: Monitoring aids IT administrators in better capacity planning. Capacity planning is determining whether the server or resource capacity is sufficient for the VMs, as well as how much additional capacity will be required in the future. Easy Management: The information can be used by infrastructure monitors to manage resources better. It greatly improves the efficiency of resource allocation in the virtual environment. There isn’t a single idle VM hogging resources and preventing others from using them. Load Balancing: The servers are never overburdened with resource requests. The performance of a single server might be severely slowed if too many virtual machines are running on it. Performance Improvement: Virtualization monitoring increases the virtualized infrastructure’s overall performance. It aids in the detection of issues by providing crucial performance metrics. Reporting, Automation, and Alert mechanism are other significant benefits of implementing Virtualization monitoring.
Conclusion
Virtualization performance monitoring is the act of verifying those virtual environments and underlying infrastructures are operating at maximum capacity and efficiently utilizing resources. Virtualization monitoring best practices, when followed regularly, can assist remove or preventing bottlenecks, managing security threats, and keeping a virtual environment running smoothly. Choosing the right virtualization tool entirely depends on the infrastructure need, budget, and features the organization would like to incorporate.
