Are you using Hyper-V 2012? If yes then you you’ll likely want VEEAM Hyper-V Management Pack, to monitor your Hyper-V environment. Otherwise, you’re missing out.
Disclaimer: I am just a user of the management pack, I am not affiliated with VEEAM in anyway and received nothing for writing about them, I just really like the management pack.
The management pack is simply fantastic. I won’t go through the whole management pack, but some of the key features I really like and recommendations for licensing selection.
After installation, this is what you see when you expand it under Monitoring.
That’s a lot of areas, like I said I’m not going to go through the whole management pack and some of them are self explanatory. From the top the first section I want to mention is the Heatmap – Host Compute.
You should see something similar to this.
Right now, I only have one host in my lab, but if you had more than one host you would see squares with their names and they could be green red or yellow depending on CPU and memory usage. Green is good. The Heatmaps for storage are similar, showing you how much storage all your VMs are using relative to each other.
The next dashboard is very useful, Top Hosts.
As you can see it gives you CPU, Memory, Memory Pressure and Memory Pages/Sec per Host.
And the same for Top VMs, with the addition of Storage Errors.
One of my favorite pieces to the VEEAM Hyper-V Management pack are the topologies. The topologies automatically update as you move VMs across hosts, or if there is a change to their network adapters or the move from one LUN to another. Here is a compute map of my lab.
Yes you can build this manually in SCOM or in Visio but VEEAM does it for you, its always up to date and you can export it to JPEG/PNG and Visio. Now when my boss asks for documentation of our Hyper-V environment I just export it to Visio and I’m done.
Another useful dashboard is the VMs by Dynamic Memory.
You can very quickly and easily see which VMs are using Dynamic memory and which are not(I am not).
One of the best parts of the management pack is all of the Widgets that VEEAM added are available for you to make you’re own Dashboards with. I actually made two Dashboards that track Host CPU and RAM usage over the last 30 days and over the last 4 hours.
Lastly, the reports that VEEAM has created are very informational and worthwhile. I believe you can only get the reports if you buy the Enterprise plus license, but unless you have someone that is very good with SQL reporting I would highly recommend buying the enterprise plus version for the reporting piece.
While this blog is about the Hyper-V management pack for SCOM, if the VMWare version is at all similar to it, I can highly recommend either one for monitoring your hyper-visor.
Check out the VEEAM management pack here http://www.veeam.com/system-center-management-pack-vmware-hyperv.html