EarlyBert

Application Performance Management binnen een virtuele machine kun je niet meer baseren op tijdmetingen van de klok van die machine. Immers, het operating systeem heeft niet langer de volledige controle over de klok, maar de hypervisor. Er is daarom een nieuwe generatie tools nodig voor deze functie. Voorbeelden daarvan zijn B-hive (recent door VMware overgenomen) en vmSight. Deze laatste werd door Bernd Harzog onder de loep genomen.

vmSight houdt vier primaire metingen bij:

1. Network Response Time.
   Dit is de performance-vertraging die door het TCP/IP verkeer van de applicatie wordt veroorzaakt.
2. Application Response Time.
   Dit is de tijd tussen het starten van een TCP/IP transactie door een applicatie en het beantwoorden ervan.
3. Failed Connections.
   Dit zijn de TC/IP connecties die niet goed tot stand zijn gekomen.
4. Service Levels.
   Dit is een door de beheerder samen te stellen maat voor het service niveau van de performance.

Deze informatie wordt zowel op dashboard- als op detail-niveau aan de beheerder getoond en gerapporteerd.

Omdat vmSight sterk georiënteerd is op metingen per gebruiker is de tool met name geschikt voor Virtual Desktop Infrastructuren. De prijs is dan ook per gebruiker gedefinieerd ($50).

Bernd Harzog maakt uiteindelijk de volgende balans op:

The Good
vmSight is one of the most comprehensive performance and access management solutions for virtualized environments that I have seen.  In particular I am impressed with the following aspects of the vmSight product:

1. The ability to accurately measure user experience based upon using the Connector ID technology to always know who the users are makes this, IMHO, a no-brainer for virtualized desktop implementations. [...]
2. The ability to control which users go where with Connector ID is the second reason why I think vmSight is a no-brainer for VDI implementations. [...]
3. The release of Hyper-V creates a situation where most of the enterprises that have standardized upon VMware are now going to take a look at Hyper-V. [...]. vmSight is uniquely positioned to meet these needs.
4. As enterprise move beyond the “low hanging fruit” to virtualize more business critical applications, the response time information and access control provided by vmSight becomes much more critical. [...]
5. Unlike so many legacy APM products that collect data the “wrong way”, vmSight is clearly built from the ground up to be accurate and provide value in virtualized environments. [...]
6. As I mentioned above, Application Response Time is a significant step forward in the industry in terms of providing a metric that is closely correlated to actual user experience, which automatically and seamlessly works for all TCP/IP based applications. [...]

The Caveats
You should be aware of the following caveats when evaluating vmSight or any other APM solution for your virtualized environment:

1. There is also no single product that provides a complete picture. While vmSight provides a great picture of applications response time across the user and server tiers of the virtualized applications systems, it does not tell you how and when things like I/O contention or SAN configuration are in fact the root cause of problems. This is what Akorri specializes in, and a true solution to the problem of how to performance manage a virtualized system from end to end may in fact require both vmSight and Akorri.
2. Right now vmSight supports VMware and Citrix Xen. I fully expect support for Hyper-V to get added quickly. Once this occurs, vmSight will be one of the few tools that can measure anything meaningful about applications performance in multi-platform virtualized environments.
3. B-hive strongly touts the service level automation aspects of their product. While the idea of automatically driving a V-Motion action off of a response time number makes for a good demo, in a complex production environment, it is often not clear what layer of the application system is the issue when a response time problem occurs. While vmSight does not have B-hive’s Service Level Automation features, and this might be viewed as a negative, I think that most folks are not ready to put significant aspects of their operations on autopilot in this manner.

Lees de volledige review hier.