Microsoft Management Summit 2012 was a major success for Savision! With dozens of our customers present, our team had the opportunity to learn first hand how our customers are using our products and how they intend to use them in SCOM 2012. Major Announcements from the Summit Included: Live Maps – Dashboards and Maps for System Center • Full support for System Center 2012 • Integration with System Center Service Manager o Automatically populate and maintain CMDB o Business services automatically correlated to incidents • Integration with Bing® Maps o View the health of your IT organization on interactive maps …

Hyper-V Management: Addressing the Top Nine Challenges A Hyper-V dependent fabric is complex and takes specialized teams working together in order for it to keep running at its best. Manually diagnosing, troubleshooting and resolving Hyper-V Server performance problems is not only  time-consuming, but also requires storage, server, and network IT teams to work flawlessly together. Without a common, real-time view into Hyper-V host’s health, storage sub-systems and underlying networks, IT Pros are left frustrated when trying to resolve Hyper-V problems. Virtualized infrastructure outages are costly because of complexity. Consider these facts: It takes two (2) hours per incident to recover …

We have a two-fold motivation for today’s blog post. First, it lets us close a small gap we have noticed in the monitoring of clusters and cluster shared volumes. Second, it lets us demonstrate some interesting tricks in creating relationships within Operations Manager. First, a bit of context. Microsoft provides the “Server Failover Cluster Management Pack” to monitor most aspects of clusters. However, the support for cluster shared volumes (CSVs) within the cluster is a little weak. You can find some monitoring of CSVs under the nodes in the cluster where they seem to be treated identically to local storage, …

Where Did My Disk Space Go? – Troubleshooting Virtual Machine Storage Issues in Hyper-V With Hyper-V, it is very easy to over commit your storage space by creating dynamic VHD files. It is also easy to consume all of your available storage by creating multiple, parallel snapshots, creating large fixed VHD files, and letting your dynamic VHD files expand as the guest operating systems demand more space. What happens when you hit the limit on your storage devices? Your virtual machines are placed into the dreaded “Paused Critical” or “Major Failure” states. According to Virtual PC Guy : If we …

As management tools for virtualization mature, the time and effort required to spin up a new virtual machine has decreased. And with Microsoft’s recent changes to their licensing model – eliminating the OS license fee for virtual machines – the monetary expense has decreased as well. From the perspective of application administrators, the cost of a virtual machine has become effectively zero. By now, everyone is likely familiar with the term “virtual machine sprawl”. Unfortunately, the problem is likely to worsen as investment in virtualization increases. Over time, virtual machines that are no longer used remain in the environment, and …

If you’ve ever tried to find out if your virtual machines are being constrained by a resource-starved Hyper-V host, you’ll know that this isn’t as straightforward as you might think.  Let’s use CPU usage as an example.  CPU usage is shown in: Task Manager on the Hyper-V host Task Manager on each virtual machine (assuming they are running Windows) Hyper-V Manager Performance Monitor through the Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor, and Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor object   It can be difficult to grasp what each of these mean, and ultimately determine if the processors on …

Previously, we blogged about the Hyper-V management pack we have written for Operations Manager. While the goal was to collect more historical performance data to feed our Vital Signs real-time monitoring product, we also included a number of performance-oriented dashboards. However, not satisfied to release a management pack consisting solely of dashboards, our development team then proceeded to bulk it up with a variety of new monitors. While Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMM Management packs do a great job of monitoring availability, they don’t include much monitoring around performance. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could receive alerts from Operations Manager …

Although you can run it in standalone mode, our new Vital Signs product line is a great addition to an existing System Center monitoring environment. One of the ways in which we leverage System Center is by pulling historical performance metrics from the Operations Manager data warehouse and displaying them alongside our real-time data. That way, you can instantly see where and when your applications and servers deviated from their normal operating envelope. Imagine our dismay then, when we went looking for historical performance metrics for Hyper-V. Our Vital Signs dashboard displays 18 different KPIs for the Hyper-V host alone, …

This is part two of an ongoing series in which we aim to share everyhing we’ve learned about managing and monitoring an Hyper-V based private cloud while developing our new flagship product, Vital Signs for Hyper-V. An entire paper could be written on capacity management planning and utilization for Hyper-V. We will focus on the aspects that matter most: processor, storage, memory, and network. Generally, you want to allocate the same level of resources to your VM as would be required in a physical server. For example, if the SQL server requires 4GB of RAM and 4 CPUs, then you …

While developing Vital Signs for Hyper-V we talked to many, many people about  Microsoft Hyper-V. We talked to experienced system administrators, Microsoft MVP’s and even some of the people at Microsoft that developed Hyper-V. We listened very carefully and learned a lot from them! We learned about the best practices when it comes to configuring, managing and monitoring Hyper-V hosts and guests. And we packaged as much of that knowledge as we could into Vital Signs for Hyper-V to make it the best tool for Hyper-V on the market. But not everything can be turned into a tool. And because …