VMware and Hyper-V best practises

[techtivitysupport]

Hey all,

A few questions regarding VMware and Hyper-V. I am trying to get my head around the concept of virtual monitoring. I am currently all over the place...

I need to monitor virtual machines as well as the hypervisor itself for VMware and Hyper-V.

1. How hypervisor monitoring works? I guess I cannot install agent on hypervisor itself so how do I monitor physical hardware? CPU, hard drive space, ram...

2. Is it possible to monitor all virtual machines on VMware and Hyper-V without installing agents?

3. Regarding red "Discovered VMs" in Administration > Hosts section. Is this the way it is supposed to be? I cannot assign groups or change other parameters. Also it overwrites any changes to triggers if they are assigned to another application. Would I need to manually create hosts in order to make changes?

I would really appreciate if somebody would point me to the right direction.
Thanks.

[ovas]

Hello techtivitysupport!

1. How hypervisor monitoring works? I guess I cannot install agent on hypervisor itself so how do I monitor physical hardware? CPU, hard drive space, ram...

In case of VMWare built-in monitoring, it is done using VMWare API calls.
In case of Hyper-V, there should be a command line utility that may be run by zabbix user for some requests and responses to be gathered.
More information:
VMWare - https://www.zabbix.com/documentation.../vm_monitoring
Hyper-V - https://github.com/ameiji/Zabbix-HyperV-Templates

2. Is it possible to monitor all virtual machines on VMware and Hyper-V without installing agents?

On VMWare - definitely possible. You could really see what is possible to be received from VMWare monitoring and from agents. There are differences.
Hyper-V - haven't searched properly, but the same logic applies.

3. Regarding red "Discovered VMs" in Administration > Hosts section. Is this the way it is supposed to be? I cannot assign groups or change other parameters. Also it overwrites any changes to triggers if they are assigned to another application. Would I need to manually create hosts in order to make changes?

You can adjust templates that would then propagate changes on discovered hosts/items. Or you can make new templates with your items/triggers/etc. Manual host management doesn't pay off in long term, because of the lack of scalability.