TotalView gives static view of some virtual servers

Insystek TotalView is designed to be a comprehensive environmental management tool for physical and virtual infrastructure. For the purposes of this test, it supports XenServer and VMware ESX and VirtualCenter and a few older virtualization environments not included in our test bed, but it does not support Hyper-V yet.

Insystek's VMware control is decidedly more effective than its control over XenServer. We started out testing TotalView 1.1, but an upgrade to 1.2 arrived during the middle of testing, so we upgraded to it. (View a screenshot.)

While it was quite buggy and crashed when performing certain tasks, TotalView does provide quite a bit of detailed -- but mostly static -- information about the virtual machines on VMs running atop of our XenServer and VMware ESX hosting platforms. The product does not do a good job of refreshing the information it initially finds. That said, the user interface is a mess, as switching between different -- but necessary -- areas of the GUI proved to be very painful.

TotalView has a Windows-based GUI that Insystek recommends should be run in an application hosting environment using Windows XP SP2 and SQL Express 2005. Also supported, but not tested -- hosting environments include Microsoft Windows 2000 with SP4 and Windows 2003 Server. Other supported databases include MS MSDE and MS SQL Server.

Installation was more difficult than it needs to be, and we had to manually select the SQL Server Express Edition to make things work, a process exacerbated by a strange licensing dysfunction and indecipherable error messages.

With TotalView 1.2 deployed in the test bed (Version 1.1 was wrought with installation issues pertaining to managing XenServer VMs so we had to upgrade) we could complete all VM operational basics such as starting and stopping XenServer machines and cloning and uninstalling VMs. However, attempting to suspend VM operation repeatedly yielded the same opaque error message: Failure SR_HAS_NO_PBDS.

We switched to testing how TotalView could manage VMware's ESX machines. TotalView can manage VMware ESX-based VM whether or not VMware's VirtualCenter application is present. After successfully adding an ESX host to the management system, we attempted to create a new VM on that host using the TotalView interface using all methods available to us.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine