VDI Monitoring solution comparison chart

[freestyle]

For those of your that are using VDI what do you use to monitor your environment ?

Do you monitor ESX?

Do you monitor the SAN?

Do you monitor the Guests?

D you monitor the apps in the Guests?

This is becoming a big factor that a few companies are addressing. I am interested in people who have a solution for these questions or have at least tested a few monitoring tools linked to their VDI setups.

Ultimately I am considering creating a comparison chart that would serve to help people looking to deploy VDI in their environment. I am sure many of you have found the VDI Broker comparison chart very useful. This would be useful for the same people after they have decided which broker to use.

[AlbertFish]

vcharter is a good all around product.

[simonlam]

This is a useful and a timely topic! We have recently set up a VDI environment - 64 ESX servers, about 30 VMs per server spread across 4 locations.

One vCenter server per location. I have been looking at different monitoring options. We want a solution that could monitor the hardware, the hypervisor,

storage (netapp), network (switches, SAN switches), connection brokers, virtual center servers, SunRay servers

used to connect to SunRay terminals that users access from. We also require details of what is happening

in the virtual desktop (VM - e.g., what applications are users running?).

Besides the end-to-end view, we need reports on how the VDI setup is being used - who are the most active users,

which users are most memory/CPU intensive? This is the piece we found lacking in many other products -

we are not able to get an idea of which user had logged into which VM and which terminal session. Need this for troubleshooting

helpdesk calls from users.

We are considering vKernel, Uptime, eG Innovations VMware product, and Quest's product. We like Uptime for price, eG Innovations

for functionality and reports, and VKernel for its "what if" features. Sigh Since we are already using the eg Citrix solution in our team,

this may be the way we go so we can get all the Citrix and VDI reports from one place.

Interested in others' experiences.

Cheers,

Simon.

[Roanry]

nworks (now Veeam) as the SPI to proxy all alerts and perf data to HP OpenView servers.

ESX is being monitored via either one of the three following: HP SIM, Dell OpenManage, IBM Director all sending alerts to HP OpenView.

SAN is being monitored by the HDS tools and the NetApp Onaro.

All the applications are being monitored via a ton of different standards depending on the BU, OS and App... either custom scripting, HP OVO agent or NetIQ.

Hope this helps..