IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers V6.2.3 helps you proactively plan for capacity, and identify and resolve virtual server availability and performance issues

IBM United States Software Announcement 211-069
February 22, 2011

	Overview		Technical information
	Key prerequisites		Ordering information
	Planned availability date		Terms and conditions
	Description		Prices
	Program number		Order now
	Publications

At a glance

IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring for Virtual V6.2.3 extends the benefits of end-to-end performance monitoring in a virtualized environment by providing additional hypervisor support and new capacity planning reports. New features include:

New capacity planning reports
New Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) performance and availability monitoring
New Citrix XenServer performance and availability monitoring
New performance metrics for VMware

For ordering, contact Your IBM representative or an IBM Business Partner.
For more information contact the Americas Call Centers at
800-IBM-CALL (426-2255).
 
Reference: YE001

Overview

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual V6.2.3 extends the benefits of end-to-end performance monitoring in a virtualized environment by providing additional hypervisor support and new capacity planning reports. New features include:

New capacity planning reports: Provides workload analysis and what-if analysis reports to determine bottlenecks for adding additional workloads into the VMware virtual environment.
New Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) performance and availability monitoring: Provides availability and performance monitoring for KVM virtual machines and hosts.
New Citrix XenServer performance and availability monitoring: Provides availability and performance monitoring for Citrix XenServer virtual machines and hosts.

While virtualization can produce significant cost savings as a result of reducing infrastructure overhead, it does not address the single largest cost element for most data centers - the labor to manage this environment - which can be as high as 40 percent of the overall cost. If not controlled, management costs can negate the cost savings realized through virtualization. Specific challenges around managing a virtual environment include:

Capacity management and planning to include controlling virtual server sprawl, proactively identifying when critical resources will reach capacity, and identifying opportunities for further consolidation of resources.
Proactive identification and isolation of performance problems across server and storage environments.
Understanding the relationships between physical and virtual resources to help isolate performance problems to the correct resource.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers is designed to address the specific challenges described above. Performance monitoring and reporting are vital to understanding how virtual machines are utilizing resources. Utilization reporting can identify resources that tend to run out of capacity and what-if analysis can determine how many more virtual machines can be added to a cluster or host. In addition, availability monitoring can be used to help find problems with critical resources and alert operations teams before users are adversely affected. Specific benefits include:

Reduced labor costs spent on capacity analysis and planning through enhanced IBM Cognos based what-if analysis
Reduced time for problem resolution through launch in context problem identification
Improved application availability, using proactive problem identification features such as predictive trending and using historical baselines for performance alerts
Reduction in hardware costs by improving utilization and deferring hardware purchases

Key prerequisites

Refer to the Software requirements section.

Planned availability date

: February 25, 2011: Electronic; March 25, 2011: Physical media

Description

Proactive and predictive monitoring to ensure application performance

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers V6.2.3 includes the following agents for comprehensive monitoring of virtual environments:

Virtual Infrastructure Agent (VI): Remote performance and availability monitoring of VMware ESX, ESXi, and vCenter Server environments. The VI agent remotely monitors the VMware infrastructure by connecting to the Virtual Center or to standalone ESX and ESXi hosts. This agent has been certified by VMware in the VMware Ready program.
KVM Agent: Remote performance and availability monitoring to visualize availability, performance, and capacity trends for Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) and hosts. This agent remotely monitors KVM by connecting to each host.
NetApp Storage Agent: Remote performance and availability monitoring to visualize capacity, latency, and throughput performance metrics of NetApp and IBM N series storage systems. This offering monitors the DataFabric Manager Server (DFM) and remotely connects to the DFM server to obtain performance metrics.
Citrix XenApp Agent: Monitoring of Citrix XenApp environments: This agent is installed on the server or virtual machine running Citrix XenApp.
Citrix XenServer Agent: Remote performance and availability monitoring for XenServer pools, hosts, and virtual machines to include pool master transitions and XenServer license expiration notifications. Each agent instance connects to a XenServer Pool containing 1 to 16 XenServer hypervisors or optionally a standalone XenServer hypervisor. This agent has been certified by Citrix in the Citrix Ready program.

Proactively plan for capacity requirements

To effectively manage capacity requirements to ensure high availability and maximize resource utilization, capacity planning needs to occur at the resource level and from a workload point of view. Capacity planning at the resource level includes:

Virtual machine right sizing - Virtual machines are initially provisioned with allocated CPU and memory. By understanding real usage of computing resources over time, you can adjust the allocated computing resources to levels needed for the virtual machine. In addition, you can view virtual machines that are no longer active and de-provision these VMs to free up additional computing resources.
Predicting physical and virtual resource capacity bottlenecks - Preventing performance problems related capacity constraints includes understanding actual usage, allocated capacity, and available capacity for CPU, memory, network, and storage resources for clusters, hosts, VMs, datastores, volumes, host bus adapters (HBA), and network adapters.
Workload balancing - This activity includes comparing usage and available capacity across clusters and hosts to determine over or under utilized clusters and hosts.

Capacity planning at the workload level includes:

Determining how many more customers or virtual machines can be serviced with existing resources (including a specified buffer factor) in a cluster or host by using an average or peak VM profile or by inputing the size of the virtual machines that are needed.
Determining if there is enough capacity on a server or cluster and what the delta gaps are for adding additional virtual machines. This analysis uses the average or peak VM profile or you may input the size of the virtual machines that are needed.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers helps organizations by collecting key performance metrics important for capacity planning such as CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization, warehousing this data, and reporting on capacity trends using Cognos-based Tivoli Common Reporting. Tivoli Common Reporting provides out-of-the-box what-if analysis reports for capacity planning in VMware environments but also provides drag-and-drop capabilities for ad-hoc reporting.

Program number

 
Program                Program
number         VRM     name
-
5724-L92       6.2.3   IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers

Education support

Comprehensive education for IBM Tivoli products is offered through Worldwide Tivoli Education Delivery Services. A wide range of training options are available, including classes led by instructors, learning on demand, on-site training, and blended learning solutions.

For additional information, visit

: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/education/

Offering Information

Product information is available via the Offering Information website

: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi

Also, visit the Passport Advantage® website

: http://www.ibm.com/software/passportadvantage

Publications

No publications are shipped with this program.

The IBM Publications Center

: http://www.ibm.com/shop/publications/order

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Technical information

Specified operating environment