Dell announced the release of Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (formerly vFoglight Pro). Building on the success of the Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell has re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to better align the solution as a core component of the Foglight family, and has added performance monitoring support for VMware View to the product.
Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (version 6.8) is an enterprise-caliber solution that delivers full visibility and control over virtualized environments via its “triple -A approach” - analysis, advice and automation - that provides virtualization admins with concrete, actionable and easily implemented answers to their management challenges. The Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition solution covers all forms of virtualization, including virtualized server, cloud and with this latest release, covers desktop virtualization, with added capabilities to track virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) performance from the application level all the way to the server and storage hardware level.
The new release expands Foglight’s ability not only to monitor the additional infrastructure area of VDI, but also to correlate metrics from VDI with performance for applications, the virtual layer, the network, and underlying servers and storage. “What we are showing is everything that is associated with your VMware View environment,” John Maxell, vice president of product management, Dell, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “We show you the connection servers, security servers and transfer servers.” Collectively, Maxwell explains, those three make up the infrastructure for the VMware View infrastructure. VMware View is now shown as a tile on the Foglight dashboard and provides features such as color coding to indicate the health of things like application connection servers, hosts associated with them and how many VDI user sessions are active. There is also the ability to drill down for historical views to understand issues such as peak utilization of the VDI to enhance capacity planning.
According to Dell, there is increasing adoption of VMware View, VMware’s virtual desktop product, in virtualized data centers, and VDI support is becoming a mainstay for IT departments and managed service providers. VDI and server virtual machines (VMs) often utilize the same hardware components but the two virtualized infrastructures serve different users and have separate requirements and resource demands. As a result, VDI and server VMs require dedicated performance monitoring systems, but they must also be connected because so many underlying resources are often shared. To address these issues, Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition offers virtualization administrators a single-source solution that identifies and fixes performance issues within VMware View, but also continues to run all features available in vOPS Server Enterprise with no affect on overall vCenter performance.
While the current release focuses on providing administrators with new information on the overall health of the VMware View VDI environment, later this year, Dell will add additional support for VMware View in Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition, says Maxwell. The new functionality will allow administrators to drill down into specific sessions so they can understand, when users are having a performance problem, what issues are specific to that user.
In conjunction with this release, Foglight for Storage Management 2.5, an optional cartridge to Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, has also been released. Foglight for Storage Management now offers physical storage performance reporting in addition to virtual reporting, providing customers with complete “VM to physical LUN” visibility. Additional enhancements in this release include LUN latency reporting, NPIV support, and the ability for customers to purchase the product either as a stand-alone cartridge, or as an optional cartridge to Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition.
Foglight is a unified performance monitoring platform that allows individual product solutions, delivered as sets of pluggable “cartridges,” to run stand-alone or to interoperate. Each individual product delivers functionality to the admin for a specific area, while simultaneously integrating with other cartridges to deliver end-to-end monitoring from end-user experience through to the underlying storage and server hardware layers.
For more information, go to www.quest.com/vops-server-enterprise.