Products VirtualWisdom Architecture

What Makes Up the VirtualWisdom Solution?

The VirtualWisdom solution is a combination of software and hardware that optimizes the performance, availability and utilization of your SAN and virtualized infrastructure.  It substantially eliminates the risk of deploying I/O-intensive business-critical applications.

VirtualWisdom Solution Components

VirtualWisdom SAN Availability Probe

SAN Availability Probe is a software probe that collects status from SAN switches via SNMP. The software probes collect metrics for each port, and these metrics are generated and reported to the VirtualWisdom Server by each SAN Availability Probe. Each SAN Availability Probe monitors all the ports of a particular fibre-channel switch and collects the metrics for each port, (such as the number of frames and bytes), as well as the key faults for each port, (such as loss of synchronization, link resets, link failures, packet discards, and CRC errors).

VirtualWisdom Virtual Server Probe

Virtual Server Probe is a software probe that collects status from VMware servers via VMware’s vCenter Server. It collects data on and calculates 100+ different metrics including CPU, utilization and status, memory utilization, disk I/O requests and capacity, network requests, and overall utilization, allowing for end-to-end performance analysis from virtual machines to the LUNs. It enables VMware administrators to get a comprehensive view of both the performance and utilization of the virtual servers, and when combined with other VirtualWisdom probes, the entire I/O subsystem.

VirtualWisdom SAN Performance Probe

SAN Performance Probe analyzes every frame header on a fibre channel SAN at line rates of up to 8 Gbits per second. The SAN Performance Probe detects application performance slowdowns and transmission errors by measuring every SCSI I/O transaction from start to finish, for every server/volume combination (initiator/ target/ LUN). It is the only true real-time SAN performance monitoring device in the industry and is essential for proactive SAN monitoring so that IT managers can avoid unplanned downtime.

VirtualWisdom Server

VirtualWisdom Server software resides on a Windows server platform, controlling and collecting metrics from Virtual Instruments hardware and software probes. It manages the database of metrics, handles integration with third party products via SNMP traps, and handles alerting. The VirtualWisdom Server co-resides with the Virtual Server Probe and the SAN Availability Probe software software on the same physical server.  Two important parts of the VirtualWisdom Server are the VirtualWisdom Dashboard and the VirtualWisdom Views reporting capability. 

VirtualWisdom Dashboard

VirtualWisdom Dashboard software is a real-time summary display that provides a customized overview of your virtual and physical infrastructure performance and transmission faults.  It relies on the metrics collected from the three types of probes.  The easy-to-use dashboard displays the activity between VMs, servers, storage network, and storage arrays, including measurements for percent utilization, reads, writes, events, and alarms, as well as signal and error status on the probe channels.  VirtualWisdom Views software is an extremely flexible, powerful, and easy to use report writer that allows users to access the VirtualWisdom SAN metrics and alerts from their workstations in the form of reports, graphs, and tables, in real-time or by historical trends.

SANInsight Hardware

The VirtualWisdom instrumentation, measurement, and analysis solution is designed to provide an unprecedented level of visibility into complex, heterogeneous virtual infrastructures deployed with Fibre Channel SANs. System and storage administrators can implement all or some of the SANInsight hardware components to achieve the appropriate breadth and depth of monitoring and analysis that meet their needs. To provide complete real-time path monitoring and analysis across your virtual infrastructure and multiple SAN tiers, instrumentation is essential. VirtualWisdom makes use of instrumentation hardware and SANInsight Traffic Access Points (TAPs) devices, to measure and record all transactions crossing the SAN. The VirtualWisdom Server software collects, aggregates and correlates all of the physical-layer and operational data.

SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System

The TAP Patch Panel System (TPPS) provide a passive, fail-safe access point to Fibre-Channel network traffic on a SAN for failure analysis, problem diagnosis, and performance monitoring. TAPs operate “out-of-band” by transparently diverting some of the signal through the TAP to another port, which provides a copy of the Fibre Channel frame headers. The agent-less TAP has no impact on application or SAN performance and is integrated with a Fibre Channel Patch Panel for simple deployment.

SANInsight Rover

The Rover physical layer switch extends the monitoring reach of each SAN Performance Probe to groups of SAN links. SAN Performance Probes and protocol analyzers can be attached to Rover physical layer switches and access any of the connected SAN links. Rovers provide a way to deploy a tiered monitoring architecture to lower the cost of monitoring and extend the investment in VirtualWisdom.