Monitoring Virtual Machine activity

[lostmachine]

I have been assigned a task of monitoring a ESX server with multiple virtual machines installed at any one time. This server is a hosting platform for a software test environment which is used by multiple users with various OS's and applications under test. My issue is that I need visability into the network traffic passing on the virtual network switch infrastructure to resolve networking issues and between the various testbeds. At the moment I use the promiscous port capability of the virtual switch to gather network flows using Wireshark but analysing pcap files is way too slow and time consuming. Are there any virtual appliances out there that make this task possible?

[escapem2]

maybe one of these monitoring network tools like nagios, cacti or zenoss

[lostmachine]

Hi

After trying a few products to monitor my servers I tried the following and got a version to evaluate. Install was straight foward and I just needed to configure the virtual switch in Promiscous mode. This product combines a traffic analyser and IDS system which has proven to be very usefull to analyse the issues that were causing me so many problems.

http://www.netforttechnologies.com/downloads/free_trial.html

Another bonus was I could configure a number of 'slave' units which allowed me monitor multiple ESX servers from a single central unit. This was very usefull.

[RockoBlaster]

Here's another one that has similar capabilities; lightweight footprint, promiscuous sniffing of guest-VM traffic, distributed architecture, natural language search, breach detection, and deep forensics. http://www.PacketSled.com