Managing Sync / vSync
To take full advantage of integrated virtual and physical monitoring, it is important to understand how to manage VMware vSphere virtual machine inventories in up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor, and how vSync keeps up.time Sync (Hyper-V) and vSync (VMware vCenter) keep Uptime Infrastructure Monitor abreast of them.
When a Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server is added as an Element to up.time, its Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, all component ESX servers and (by default) VMs are also added as Elements. It is at the Hyper-V host and vCenter - Element level that you can tweak what is monitored. Additionally, you can “promote” VM Elements to be monitored with greater depth using the up.time agent Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Agent or WMI.
The dynamic nature of a VMware vCenter host server’s configuration is easily managed by up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor through automated profile monitoring; whatever you have included in your inventory as parent-level items, up.time vSync will maintain Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Sync/vSync maintains an accurate mirror. See vCenter Virtual System Configuration MirrorringMirroring for more information.
Managing
vCenterVirtual System Inventories in
up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor
After a Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server has been is added as an Element to up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor, you can manually manage all of its inventory. By default, all of a VMware vCenter’s components—ESX hosts and clusters, and their child VMs—are monitored by up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor. The same is true for a Hyper-V host server's guest VMs. As a central monitoring configuration point, the VMware vCenter host Element gives you the ability to determine which VMs are monitored in up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor and as a consequence, which Hyper-V or VMware vSphere metrics are kept in the DataStore.
You can select VMs or a Hyper-V or an ESX host to be "ignored" by up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor. When VMs are ignored, their topological relationship to other VMware vCenter virtual system components is retained, but their metrics are no longer recorded to the DataStore, and they no longer count toward your license.
As the topology of your virtual infrastructure changes, you can change the contents of the ignore list. Historical data for VM Elements are retained in the DataStore, regardless if they are currently being monitored or ignored, allowing administrators to continue to perform diagnosis on a continuously changing virtual environment.
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If graphs or reports are generated that include time or date ranges where no data were collected for a VM Element, those ranges in the charts will show no data. |
Although there are no resource-related reasons why you would not want up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor to monitor all Hyper-V host and ESX servers in your virtual infrastructure, other factors may dictate your monitoring policies:
- since because the VMs on your Hyper-V or ESX servers count toward your up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor license, you may have resource monitoring restrictions that require prioritization
- you are not interested in keeping performance metrics for some parts of your virtual infrastructure (e.g., some VMs are being used for testing, and are not considered mission-critical)
- similarly, as ignored VMs do not appear in live monitoring pages in up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor such as Global Scan or the Resource Scan dashboards, you may want to exclude non-essential VMs to avoid cluttering the views
On the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter Element’s Info page, you can view its complete inventory, broken down by logical groupings created in the vSphere Client (e.g., by datacenter). It is here you can add or remove Hyper-V or ESX hosts or VMs (as individual machines, or in groups at the datacenter or cluster level) from the ignore list.
For license management, ignoring or monitoring a parent object will correspondingly free frees up or use uses license spots for all of its child objects, provided there is space. For example, if the VMware vCenter Element has been is configured to Collect Virtual Machine data, adding an ESX host will automatically include includes its VMs, each of which will count counts toward your license. Consider the following outcomes:
- if there is enough license space for the Hyper-V or ESX host and all of its VMs, they will be are monitored
- if there is no more license space, the ESX host and all of its VMs will be are added (with its hierarchy intact) to the list of ignored Elements
- if there is license space for some of the Elements, the ESX host will be hosts are added and monitored, and each child VM will be is added to the monitored list until license space has run out; the remaining VMs are added to the list of ignored Elements
Once VMware vCenter these objects have been are added, you can manage license usage by moving Elements from monitored inventories to lists of ignored Elements, or vice versa.
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If you configured the VMware vCenter server to not collect and report on VM data, and only work with ESX hosts and clusters, inventory management will obviously is done only be done at that inventory level. |
Viewing vCenter Inventory Summaries
To see an overview of your VMware vCenter Element’s inventory, do the following:
- In the My Infrastructure panel, click the gear icon beside the VMware vCenter server, then in the pop-menu, select View.
- On the VMware vCenter Element profile page, ensure the Info tab is selected.
- Click Inventory Summary.
On this page, you will can see your VMware vCenter server’s total available resource counts, further broken down by datacenter.
Removing Elements from Monitored Inventories
To stop VMware vCenter Uptime Infrastructure Monitor from monitoring virtual server Elements from being monitored by up.time, do the following:
- In the My Infrastructure panel, click the gear icon beside the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server, then in the pop-menu, select View.
- On the VMware vCenter Element profile page, ensure the Info tab is selected.
- Click Inventory for Hyper-V or Inventory Detail for vCenter.
- In the vCenter Inventory Detail page, select the checkboxes that correspond to the ESX hosts or clusters , or (if applicable), or individual VMs that you want to stop monitoring.
- Click Add Selected Elements to Ignore.
The inventory page will refreshrefreshes, with your selections appearing in the Ignored Elements section.
Re-adding Ignored Elements to Monitored Inventories
To resume monitoring VMware vCenter virtual server Elements in up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor, do the following:
- In the My Infrastructure panel, click the gear icon beside the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server, then in the pop-menu, select View.
- On the VMware vCenter Element profile page, ensure the Info tab is selected.
- Click Inventory for Hyper-V or Inventory Detail for vCenter.
On the vCenter Inventory Detail page, from the Ignored Elements list, select the checkboxes that correspond to the ESX hosts or clusters , or (if applicable), or individual VMs that you want to start monitoring.
Info To streamline the process, you can only select or remove VMs or datacenters as they were added. For example, if you added an entire datacenter to the ignore list, you cannot select individual VMs.
Click Remove Selected Elements from Ignore List.
The inventory page will refreshrefreshes, with your selections appearing in the active monitoring section.
Sync/vSync Settings
From the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server Element’s Info page, you can configure how up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor polls the server’s topology for changes, and what up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor does when changes are encountered.
Using alert and action profiles, you can configure an extensive set of behaviors depending on what changes occur with the VMware vCenter topology. This means you can bundle VMware vSphere virtual server events with the those you normally track in your physical infrastructure.
For example, if your VMware vSphere environment is configured to dynamically allocate more compute resources to a specific department at a specific time of year (e.g., the end of the fiscal year for the accounting department), you can use up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor to detect CPU changes to the appropriate resource pool, and confirm this action in a log.
See vCenter Virtual System Configuration MirrorringMirroring for more information on the types of VMware vSphere virtual system events that up.time will watch Uptime Infrastructure Monitor watches for.
vSync Configuration Settings (vCenter)
The following settings are used to configure a VMware vCenter server’s vSync behavior:
Alert Profiles | A list of alert profiles (listed in alphabetical order) that are triggered when new VMs or ESX hosts belonging to the VMware vCenter server are discovered when vSync scans the VMware topology. |
Action Profiles | A list of action profiles (listed in alphabetical order) that are triggered when new VMs or ESX hosts belonging to the VMware vCenter server are discovered when vSync scans the VMware topology. |
Default Basic Performance Data Polling Interval | The amount of time, in minutes, that |
| Uptime Infrastructure Monitor waits between metric data retrieval operations for newly discovered ESX servers. Select the Apply to Existing ESX Servers check box to have this modified polling interval applied to all ESX servers that are part of the VMware vCenter server’s topology, and the |
Uptime Infrastructure Monitor inventory. Any ESX server whose polling rates |
are individually changed |
conforms to this new global setting. | |
Default Advanced Performance Data Polling Interval | The advanced data settings perform the same functions as those above, but are for advanced VMware vSphere metrics |
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Sync Configuration Settings (Hyper-V)
The following settings are used to configure a Hyper-V server’s Sync behavior:
Automatically remove deleted elements | A switch that allows you to set Sync to automatically remove deleted elements form inventory upon discovery. | |||
Collect Virtual Machine data | A switch that allows you to control the discovery and monitoring of virtual machines and their performance data.
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Alert Profiles | A list of alert profiles (listed in alphabetical order) that are triggered when new virtual machines belonging to the VM server are discovered when Sync scans the Hyper-V topology. | |||
Action Profiles | A list of action profiles (listed in alphabetical order) that are triggered when new VMs belonging to the VM server are discovered when Sync scans the Hyper-V topology. | |||
Changing Sync/
ChangingvSync Settings
To modify how Sync/vSync mirrors a Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server Element’s configuration in up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor, do the following:
- In the My Infrastructure panel, click the gear icon beside the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server, then in the pop-menu, select View.
- On the VMware vCenter Element profile page, ensure the Info tab is selected.
- In the Sync or vSync section, click Edit Settings.
- Make changes to Sync/vSync settings as needed:
- modify the alert profile or action profile lists for newly discovered VMs in the specified My Infrastructure group
- modify the alert profile or action profile lists for newly discovered Hyper-V host or ESX servers in the specified My Infrastructure group
modify the ESX server polling intervals, and indicate whether this change is to be retroactively applied to all known ESX servers
Info The polling intervals modified here will apply only to newly-discovered ESX servers via vSync. Whether individually configured, or from a previous global setting, existing ESX server Elements in up.time will Uptime Infrastructure Monitor use older intervals, unless you use the Apply to Existing ESX Servers option.
- Click Save.
Manually Resyncing
up.timeUptime Infrastructure Monitor with a Hyper-V or vCenter Topology
To force up.time Uptime Infrastructure Monitor to resync with a Hyper-V or VMware vCenter server (i.e., search for new VMs and ESX servers, metric data for monitored Elements, and changes to the topology), do the following:
- In the My Infrastructure panel, click the gear icon beside the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server, then in the pop-menu, select View.
- On the VMware vCenter Element profile page, ensure the Info tab is selected.
- In the Sync or vSync section, click Resync Now.
A Resyncing status update will persist until up.time persists until Uptime Infrastructure Monitor has completed the Sync/vSync process. Once the sync operation has been completedis complete, the polling intervals configured for this VMware vCenter server will be the server is reset.