Vmturbo: Powerful tools for dealing with scattered virtual machines

With the growing sophistication of server virtualization, Virtual machine sprawl (VM sprawl) and host resource management are two of the most significant issues in the administrator's eyes for virtualized data centers. A viable solution to this situation is to use a product called Vmturbo (vmturbo.com), which was originally designed to help with virtualization management.

For Vmturbo, the installation process is not very complicated. It can be downloaded as a VMware virtual appliance or as a virtual device for Hyper-V. If you select a VMware virtual appliance, you must install Vcenter. In order to write this article, I chose to use a Hyper-V virtual appliance.

When I started with Vmturbo, I couldn't find the content in the documentation that describes how to import a virtual device. It's not a big problem for me, because I use and touch Hyper-V every day, but I think it might be a problem for a virtualized administrator who lacks experience.

Places to note for Hyper-V users

For those of you who intend to use Hyper-V version vmturbo, I have two points to remind. First, when you import a virtual machine, the import process allocates 4GB of memory. This should not be a big problem for most people, but you do want to make sure that your Hyper-V server has enough resources to support Vmturbo.

Another reminder is that when you import a virtual machine, the virtual machines are not connected to your virtual network by default. This is due to the way Hyper-V is designed and has nothing to do with Vmturbo. You can connect the virtual device to your network, just right-click it in Hyper-V Manager before the virtual machine starts, then choose the Settings command from the shortcut menu. Then select the Ethernet port (Ethernet port) option and select the network to which the Ethernet port should be connected.

installation process

Once I have imported the virtual appliance, I start it, and I see a screen asking if I want to use a static IP address or a dynamically assigned address. Since I have several different DHCP servers on my network that support multiple lab networks, I decided to use a static IP address so that I can make sure that the virtual device is connected to the correct subnet.

Although I was able to build a session with the VMTURBO device almost effortlessly, the login process was a bit confusing. The splash screen displayed requires a user name and password to be entered. I decided to review the documentation because the markup on the screen did not indicate a default user name or password. The description document does not specifically indicate what the default login credentials are. It just says, "Give your account a username and password." Your system administrator creates a user account. For information about logins, contact your system administrator. The screen in the manual shows that the user name is administrator, but as far as the default user does not provide any hint information.

I spent about one head on Google to find the password. A Web site indicates that a password consists of 12 asterisks, but the result is not correct. However, through the brute force of repeated attempts, I finally found that the user name and password are "administrator" (all lowercase letters).

After I started and ran Vmturbo about an hour later, I noticed that I had an e-mail sent by Vmturbo. Good luck, the mail contains a license for the software, instructions for importing the Hyper-V virtual machine, and administrator login credentials. This information is provided through a series of easy-to-follow steps; Vmturbo provides such an easy-to-follow e-mail, which is commendable, but I hope this information is already in the documentation. That would have saved me a lot of time.

Start and run

Once I finally signed in to Vmturbo, the monitor screen, which contains a wizard, is designed to help you step through the rest of the configuration process. The wizard's splash screen prompts me to enter the license information. I gave the software a license that I had previously obtained, so I went to the next step.

Next, let me specify the targets that I want to monitor. In addition to the user name and password, this process also requires that you provide the host name or IP address of the virtualization host for the software. You also have to specify the user name and password that the monitoring process may use.

The dialog box shown on the screen in the description document is relatively simple. So I expect this process to be easy. In retrospect, the process was not easy at all. No matter how I try, I can't get the software to connect to those Hyper-V hosts, although I followed the instructions strictly and enabled DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) access on the Hyper-V server.

Frustrated, and the urgency of the time, I had to contact the technical support staff. Vmturbo's technical support staff set up a WebEx session with me so they could see the problems I was having. The technical support staff took a few minutes to try different methods, and after reviewing my server logs, it seemed that they were also stumped. The man who spoke to me promised to give me a solution in a few days. A few days later, Vmturbo gave me a patch, the problem seems to be solved.

After I let the software identify my virtualization host, I was finally able to use it. The Vmturbo interface opens a series of dashboards designed to show you the health of your virtual datacenter.

These dashboards are designed to provide you with a comprehensive view of your data center. I'll be the first to admit that the way information is presented takes time to adapt. I'm monitoring three virtualization hosts, but if you just glance at the summary screen, there's no way to know that there are three virtualization hosts. However, the Inventory (inventory) section of the screen allows you to view a single physical host, a single virtual machine, and an entire data center.

For the summary (overview) screen I do like the fact that there is a large section in the middle of the recommended actions (recommended action). This section tells you how the server is running and what should be done about it. Also, you can get a brief status report by clicking the status link directly above the top row of the dashboard. If you get a status report, you can see the severity reports and problem logs for the host, virtual machine, and storage system. Of course, you can drill down and look at individual hosts and virtual machines.

In my opinion, the best features of Vmturbo are planning (planning) and Optimization (optimization). If you click on the Plan tab, you can see the current workload distribution and some future workload forecasts. You can use this information to assess the impact of operations such as adding a new host.

The Optimize tab works like the Plan tab, except that the software shows how your resources are being leveraged, and gives you recommendations that you should take to optimize your use of the host.

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Vmturbo: Powerful tools for dealing with scattered virtual machines