Project startup (monitoring)

[guusmeeuwis]

2 weeks ago I started a project as a trainee, (more of a research at this point) in serverconsolidation and VMware for a big production company. At this moment I'm making an inventory of the current IT infrastructure, wich wasnt available at this point. This inventory consists of server specifcations (cpu, memory, diskspace, os, type (print/file/app) and monitoring information ( ~ IO, CPU, memory, bandwidth).

With this information we can catogorize the servers and determine wich applications need wich recources, and wich servers are ineffective at the moment.

I am wondering wich other specifications i should monitor, needed to choose a suitable solution in the near future (ESX, SAN e.d.) ?

[dkfbp · Accepted solution]

I think you have it covered pretty good. What tool are you going to use for the inventory and collecting of monitoring information?

You could take a look at Powerrecon from platespin:

[guusmeeuwis]

At the moment I'm thinking about using PA Server Monitor Pro, wich doenst require you to install agents. Its possible with Dameware too, but that didnt looked as great as PA so I probably stick to my first choice

Any other comments about the inventory ? It has to be full covered in order to come to a acceptable result!

[Rob_Bohmann1]

One other thing you might record per server is the amount of disk space allocated/free and number of partitions per server so when you start planning the deployment, and storage strategies you have that info handy.

Also, if you can capture the rate of growth in number of server instances, that might be helpful too.

[meistermn]

http://www.cirba.com/news/press_releases/2007/070917.htm