VirtualIQ 525 Tour
Awhile back, I came across a product from ToutVirtual, Inc. called VirtualIQ 525. The product is a free virtual machine monitoring and management solution which allows for you to track performance information for up to 5 CPUs or 25 virtual machines. It’s packaged as a virtual machine and the interface is entirely web-based. I finally got a few minutes to load the product up and run it through some paces to see what it was all about.
Installation was pretty straightforward. Since VirtualIQ 525 is packaged as a virtual machine, installation consisted simply of copying the appropriate configuration and hard disk files to my VMware Server host, adding it to my inventory and then starting it up. On first run, the VM asks if you would like to configure information such as network settings and time zones. Once this is done, subsequent reboots will remember those settings and start up without any intervention or configuration. At this time, the product runs as a VMware virtual machine (ESX, GSX, VMware Server and VMware Player) only.
Once I had the virtual appliance up and running, I had to install an agent on my VMware Server Windows host. The virtual machine has a built-in agent for monitoring ESX and Linux-based hosts, but Windows hosts must be monitored via an installable service. Installing the agent was straightforward as well – a Windows installer walked me through the entire process. I did have some issues with logon information for the service that it created – my machine was running in WORKGROUP mode and for some reason, I had to manually change the logon account for the service to get it to function properly.
The management interface is very clean and easy to navigate. The VirtualIQ Dashboard is your starting point and provides an overview of your environment’s hosts and virtual machines:
Drilling down into specific hosts, allows you to see Host/VM usage trends and any alarms. Policies can be configured to create alarms based on certain thresholds like CPU utilization:
Digging further in by clicking on a specific virtual machine provides additional details such as the virtual machine’s state, CPU utilization, memory usage, uptime, disk activity, network activity, etc:
Lastly, a variety of different reports are also available from the VirtualIQ Control Center including host inventory, VM inventory, alarm reports, usage trend by host and usage trend by VM. Here’s an example:
For a free tool, VIrtualIQ 525 delivers quite a bit of functionality. The fact that it works as a virtual appliance makes setup and configuration very easy and the web-based management console is well laid-out. While it’s clearly an opportunity to “up-sell” users to the company’s ShieldIQ package, it’s still worth taking a look at as it provides some significant capabilities regardless. It appears the focus right now is on VMware’s virtualization technologies – there’s no support for any of Microsoft’s tools like VirtualPC and Virtual Server 2005. If you were a heterogeneous shop, using both companies’ products this tool wouldn’t help you centralize monitoring and reporting across all virtual machines in your environment.
