I while ago I’ve been playing around with VMTurbo Operations Manager, a solution for virtualization management and datacenter control. VMTurbo offers insight information on how your virtual infrastructure is performing, and lets you prevent problems by pro-actively managing your virtual machines. VMTurbo Operations Manager is available for a wide variety of virtualization & cloud platforms, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM.
VMTurbo comes as a virtual appliance (for the platform you prefer) which is available for download, deployment is very easy. Notice the system requirements for the vApp: VMTurbo requires 16 GB of RAM and 2-4 vCPU’s…although a smaller configuration (for lab usage) will work.
After deploying the vApp you have to complete a few configuration steps:
- Set the IP configuration for the virtual appliance; typically by logging in to the appliance with username ipsetup and password ipsetup.
- Connect the VMTurbo to your favorite virtualization platform.
Connecting to a virtualization platform
After you’ve completed IP configuration, open the VMTurbo application in a webbrowser. It’s a flash application, so you’ll need flash installed. First you have to select which version of VMTurbo you want to use:
- Free Community edition – The Community Edition of VMTurbo Operations Manager product is provided at no cost and with no infrastructure limitations. It provides basic real-time visibility across all virtualized hosts and virtual machines, helping you identify issues and understand the breadth of problems in your environment. The product also provides a set of infrastructure reports that can be used to show historical performance across your virtual datacenter. You will need a free key which can be requested online.
- Enterprise edition – This edition includes the Economic Scheduling Engine functionality which drives intelligent and automated decision-making for your virtual environment. This edition prevents performance issues, tune the environment to perform optimally, ensure business critical applications have the resources they require, intelligently plan for future capacity and hardware changes – all without manual intervention. VMTurbo Operations Manager is for on-premise datacenters without multi-tenancy or cloud architecture requirements. Enterprise edition is available as 30 day trial, or as a payed version.
- Cloud edition – VMTurbo Operations Manager Cluod Edition integrates directly into VMware vCloud Director and the Open Source CloudStack offering to enable enterprise private cloud builders and cloud service providers to build and manage cloud infrastructures. The product understands priority and makes resource allocation decision across Organizational and Provider Virtual Datacenters in a vCloud Director deployment, helping you to tier and assure service across a multi-tenant environment. Cloud edtion is available as a 30 day trial, or as a payed version.
(description of the editions taken from the VMTurbo website)
After you have selected a version you can link a virtualization or cloud platform to VMTurbo. I would advise to create a seperate VMTurbo user to connect to vSphere (or any of the other platforms):
- A user with read only + browse datastore privileges for the monitoring feature;
- A user with administrator privileges to enable the execution of real time recommendations. This is not required for the Community Edition because this version doesn’t include the recommendation feature.
After a successful connection, you’re ready to rock ‘n roll. I will discuss the free community edition, which focuses on monitoring and reporting. The full featured enterprise edition includes some intelligent and automated decision making, which I will discuss in a future article.
In the community edition you have the home and inventory tab available in the interface. You also have a (limited) set of reports available which can be accessed through the reports option. Reports included are (i.a.):
- Storage Top Disk Consumption
- Storage Top Snapshot Consumption
- VM Rightsizing Recommendations
- VM Over/Under Provisioning 90 Days
- Utilization Levels by Hour
- Etc.
It takes at least one day before the reports are available, because they’re created in a batch job that runs every day/week/month.
The home and inventory tab display actual live data; there some graphs/gauges show information after a batch job has run.
VMTurbo Operations Manager of course monitors CPU, memory, network and disk. VMTurbo also show a figure called the Utilization Index (UI) which is explained as: “A measure of the risk to Quality of Service (QoS) that a consumer will experience. The higher the UI on a provider, the more risk to QoS for any consumer of that provider’s services. For example, a physical machine provides host services to one or more VMs. The higher the UI on the provider, the more likely it is that the VMs will experience QoS degradation. Note that for optimal operation, the UI on a provider should not go into double digits. In the above example, if the PM has a UI of 16 or more, the VMs are very likely to suffer QoS degradation.”
Apart from performance data, VMTurbo Operation Manager also displays capacity information; try the “Project Cluster Resources” and the “Monthly Summary” for example. The latter dashboard offers some information on the growth of your virtual environment.
The inventory option in VMTurbo is pretty extensive. You can get insight information on the various objects in your vSphere inventory. Select the inventory object or a object group, and relevant information is shown on the right side of the screen.
For example; selecting the storage object will offer information on used capacity, iops and latency. By selecting one of the available storage volumes, you will actually drill down to this particular volume. The datacenter option will show you information on the datacenter as a whole, nice to know how many GB’s of RAM, Ghz of CPU’s and disk storage is used. Just play around in the interface and you will find the dashboard that are relevant for you.
I hope this article gives you an impression of VMTurbo Operations Manager. You can download the free community edition (or any of the other versions) here.
Also check these other “What is?” articles on viktorious.nl:
