Suggestions for monitoring larger VMWare environment

[westernuniv]

Looking for some discussion around the best method of monitoring guest VM system resources.

We have a fairly large VMware environment with a mix of Linux and Windows guests as well VCenter to manage everything. I see 2 options for monitoring system resources of the guests:

Option 1: Install NRPE/Windows NRPE on each VM and monitor that way
Followup to Windows NRPE client - does anyone know the impact of installing the client on several hundred VMs? The linux one seems lightweight but don't have much experience with the Windows version

Option 2: Collect resource usage via VCenter plugin
Again, does anyone have experience using the VCenter plugin successfully and effectively?

[mberkley]

I am curious to your solution for this too.....

[abrist]

Option 1: Install NRPE/Windows NRPE on each VM and monitor that way
Followup to Windows NRPE client - does anyone know the impact of installing the client on several hundred VMs? The linux one seems lightweight but don't have much experience with the Windows version

This is a fine method, but requires deploying the agent to all the guests.
As for the follow-up - what agent are you using? nsclient, ncpa, other?

Option 2: Collect resource usage via VCenter plugin
Again, does anyone have experience using the VCenter plugin successfully and effectively?

This method is fine as well. It has the advantage of being "agentless", but also has the disadvantage of only offering a hardware/resource view. If you need to run custom scripts on the guest, option 1 is the way to go.

[Box293]

For monitoring VMware environments using a plugin, check out box293_check_vmware.

box293_check_vmware can be downloaded here:
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Pl ... re/details

The box293_check_vmware plugin is designed to be offloaded to a vMA appliance. Which means the resource intensive VMware SDK is taken off the Nagios box and does not cause the Nagios host to experience high loads (this happens as you scale up your VMware Monitoring).

Check out the documentation and it's aimed at making things clear and easy to understand.

Let us know if you have any questions about this plugin.