NetIQ Manager for Vmware

[meistermn]

Anybody using NetIq Manager for Vmware. What other solution are you using? Is it easy to implement?

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[AWo]

Are you already familiar with the AppManager Suite?

[meistermn]

No. What about manageiq?

What a bout b-hive, vminsigt, akorri products?

I don't think netiq can provide all features in their solution:

[dcap]

also check out Fortisphere (www.fortisphere.com)

[AWo]

I only now the Appmanager Suite from NetiQ. It is very powerful and you can do a lot of things, but I would say that this is a large to enterprise level tool. You have a lot of monitoring counters and you can start "Knowledge-Scripts" to react or pro-actively do things. Our experience was that you often had to edit these scripts (Visual Basic, Perl) as they contained errors or to adjust them. They offer a Knowledge Script depot, where you can download scripts from other people and thereby expanding your scripts. They also offer preconfigured best-practice packages of scripts, for AD monitoring for example, to start with.

Regarding the Windows performance monitoring scripts I'm not sure on how much you can trust them when monitoring virtual machines, as these rely on WMI.

Depending on the size of your installation you will neeed more than one database (or NetiQ Appmanager Installation) to manage the objects but these databases can be managed by another NetiQ console (Control Center), which consolidates these single databases into one view.

If you add the NetiQ Analysis Center (needs its own database; based on Microsoft SQL Analysis Services) you can generate a huge amount of custom reports for all parameters and counters monitored.

I added a PDF, where you can get an overview of Knowledge Scripts offered, so you can compare it to the other products.

[David_Shephard]

For full disclosure, I work for NetIQ. We actually use NetIQ AppManager for VMware ourselves and you can find a quick usage overview on our site and we'd happily connect you with current users if you'd like.

AWo is correct, AppManager for VMware is an Enterprise level solution so your environment size will be a consideration in your choice. B-hive is pretty easy to install, configure and maintain with automated discovery and mapping and a lack of agents. It should provide sufficient information if you are a VMware administrator looking for a point solution, but I would certainly consider a more comprehensive solution if you are concerned with overall service quality. B-hive is also well priced for the level of solution provided. It might be right for you.

B-hive discovers, maps and measures the network-level response time of distributed applications. It can span virtual ports on an ESX host to monitor network traffic and

measure performance. Importantly, it is not designed to monitor VMware ESX Servers and virtual hosts directly, but to measure the performance of networked applications. It offers integration with VMware Virtual Center in order to automate responses, such as moving virtual machines to different ESX Servers or rebooting VMs to recover from incidents.

I would posit that NetIQ's Operational VMware Management solution is more complete, providing fuller system and application monitoring, plus hardware monitoring (Virtual Center can monitor hardware of ESXi platforms), it will also monitor Virtual Center. This helps as identification and resolution of many problems you might face will require a more holistic view of the technology stack, from the network to the ESX Server to the VM operating systems and applications. NetIQ achieves this by instrumenting and monitoring the performance of the hardware, hypervisor (ESX), operating systems, and applications; monitoring end-user experience through application response times and generating reports to support diagnostics, problem management, capacity planning and VMware tuning. NetIQ monitors and manages the hybrid physical/virtual environment by providing a consistent solution across the enterprise.

If you are able to provide a few pointers on the size of your environment and what you are looking to achieve, we can concisely advise if NetIQ AppManager for VMware is right for you, or whether you might be better off with an alternative solution not neccesarily from our portfolio.