CA has top option for cross-platform VM management

Of the products we compared, CA's NSM/ASM pairing served up the best combination of VM management components. But it wasn't problem free.

NSM provides the base systems management infrastructure, while the ASM piece serves up the virtualization and cluster management wares. CA's virtualization management support for VMware's VirtualCenter/ESX and Hyper-V is only one aspect of the package used to manage large networks of systems. But for our purposes, we limited the scope of testing to the virtualization components only.

We set up NSM/ASM to run on a Windows 2003 Server R2 machine (it can also run on a Unix server) with a SQL Server 2005 server using mixed-mode authentication.

As for physical resources necessary, CA recommends 4GB of memory and at least 20GB of hard drive space in total. For CPU, minimum requirements are 2 GHz Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP 2000+. We then had to install NSM and ASM management and performance agents on each machine and also ASM virtual agents for it to work with Hyper-V or VirtualCenter host machines we wanted to manage.

Starting up
CA recommended that we download a best practices utility which should have enabled us to install NSM and ASM together but the installer utility would not run. CA technical support walked us through a manual install that took four hours. When installing NSM, we had to select things such as Management Database, Agent Technologies, WorldView (a visual representation of your network showing all machines and devices connected to the network), Enterprise Management, Notification Services, Configuration Manager and Web Reporting options.

To get the CA combination to discover our VMware VMs, we had to use the command line to point the management system in their directions. To connect to the VirtualCenter host machine, we had to configure some text files manually for CA's distributed intelligence analysis engine, which uniformly retrieves information from all managed devices.

We did notice that NSM/ASM was a bit sporadic about rediscovering VMware VMs. For example, a cold reboot of a VMware instance was not displayed in the CA GUI. Other times, we needed to stop and start some of the NSM/ASM services on the VirtualCenter host machine in order for the NSM/ASM services to collect the data from it.

According to CA tech support, we needed to setup an SNMP trap on the VirtualCenter host machine so that NSM would rediscover VMware VMs after we'd shut them down and restarted them. But even after we set the SNMP trap, when we were checking out performance monitoring, there would be a similar problem where we had to stop the performance agent on the VirtualCenter-based machine and start it again. The use of SNMP in this case could also open up the installation to known security issues surrounding SNMP and community naming strings.

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