Monitoring Virtualized Solutions

As virtualization is poised to affect almost every aspect of IT, some people have raised questions about the future of monitoring. Will monitoring become obsolete when companies make substantial shifts from physical machines to virtual machines? Are new monitoring solutions required to help companies adapt to and maintain their new IT infrastructures? Some IT insiders have suggested that virtualization techniques will eliminate traditional monitoring. However, the need for high visibility and increased uptime ensures that effective monitoring solutions aren’t going anywhere.

“I think there is still a need for monitoring with virtualization because monitoring is about being pro-active which hopefully prevents any downtime at all. And what about troubleshooting issues? If there is an issue with your virtual machine and you restart a copy of that same virtual machine it will also crash because the cause of the problem is replicated to the copy of the virtual machine. Virtualization will not help you solve issues in your IT infrastructure it will only help you keep the downtime to a minimum.” (Innovative Technology)

When discussing the future of monitoring in virtualized environments, people keep coming back to that word: “proactive.” Virtualized machines won’t eliminate the need for monitoring, but it will expand the parameters. With the right solutions in place, IT departments should be able to recognize the root of a problem in a shorter period of time. In essence, you’re moving past the symptoms and getting to the cause more quickly. Effective monitoring also enables faster recovery and easier maintenance, limiting downtime and keeping employees and clients up and running in the process:

“Like with security, the door is open for a new type of monitoring system that can be more proactive about not only monitoring systems, but also playing a hand in recovering them. You’ll also be able to partition your monitoring needs and utilize the different information to help better diagnose where the real problem lies. For example, if one of your virtual machines loses its network, but all the other virtual machines on the same physical machine still function, then you automatically can rule out a hardware failure on the network card.” (Virtualization Daily)

PC Blade solutions further increase virtualization monitoring capabilities. They provide remote monitoring and maintenance from a centralized location and in a compact form. Just as with physical machines, this enables IT to foresee problems before they arise and to quickly correct problems that do surface without ever encroaching on the work an employee is doing. This results in increased productivity and reduced downtime.

Monitoring solutions will transform alongside the overall IT environment as virtualization becomes a larger part of day-to-day operations. However, companies will still need to view, maintain, and manage all machines at all times, whether they’re virtual or otherwise.

For more information on PC Blades, virtualization, and monitoring please visit ClearCube’s business and industry solutions.