Network General tool peers inside virtual machines

Product Test and Buyer's Guide This newsletter is sponsored by NetApp BEYOND BACKUP: DISK-TO-DISK BACKUP COMES OF AGE Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, we compare disk backup solutions and offer guidance for evaluating the different types of advanced data protection solutions and provide guidance for identifying the solutions that will meet your needs. Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 07/17/07 By Tom Henderson, Rand Dvorak The Holy Grail of "holistic" application platform monitoring has been picked up by Network General. To its NetVigil monitoring product, the company had added modules that let IT personnel peer into the workings of two popular virtualization products: VMware's ESX and Microsoft Virtual Server. As virtual machines propagate throughout the enterprise at astonishing rates -- industry analysts have predicted that this market will ring in close to $30 billion next year -- IT is scrambling to manage virtualized resources alongside traditional physical resources. Until now, the ability to keep a close on on the hypervisor layer in virtual-server environments has been elusive. By tapping into the virtual-service messaging processes, NetVigil now aggregates information about hosted operating systems and applications running on them with physical and network data points. NetVigil is targeted at IT administrators who require a comprehensive view of application behavior, ranging from responsiveness to underlying virtual-machine platformance to network conditions typically reported on by the wider NetVigil network-monitoring functions (see a test of those capabilities). Wireless Products Buyer's Guide From wireless adapters to WiMax repeaters, we've got detailed information on hundreds of products that will quickly help you pinpoint the hardware or software you're looking for. We've categorized each product into one of 10 specific wireless market segments, so you can drill down, compare and contrast products in only the areas you need. Click here for more.> The NetVigil modules also can be anchored to the virtual machines' popular rapid-rehosting and resource-tuning capabilities, to provide IT personnel with information about when they should be reallocating business-application resources to gain optimal performance. In this testing of virtual-machine-monitoring capabilities (see How we did it), we found it takes a lot of preparation and configuration work to yield useful data. But once that work was done, we became addicted to its easily discernible monitoring interface, which provides a view-of-views for all major applications running on our systems. For more on this test, please click here.

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Contact the author: Henderson is principal researcher and Dvorak is a researcher for ExtremeLabs in Indianapolis. They can be reached at thenderson@extremelabs.com. This newsletter is sponsored by NetApp BEYOND BACKUP: DISK-TO-DISK BACKUP COMES OF AGE Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, we compare disk backup solutions and offer guidance for evaluating the different types of advanced data protection solutions and provide guidance for identifying the solutions that will meet your needs. BONUS FEATURE IT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE You've got the technology snapshot of your choice delivered to your inbox each day. Extend your knowledge with a print subscription to the Network World newsweekly, Apply here today. International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: security.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007