HP vPV - my own take

HP's Virtualization Performance Viewer, in short vPV, has been stirring up some dust in the past few weeks. I first learned about it from my good friend Amitabh, a passionate HP Infrastructure and Virtualization engineer with, what it seems to be a very broad view on current and up and coming technologies. When I first read his post I had just started playing around (and quite enjoying myself doing so too) with VMware's Operations Manager after hearing about it on several occasions such as the 1st Singapore VMUG meeting of 2013. I dug around some and setup a demo installation to let vPV and Operations Manager go head to head, talked to one of the managers at my employer and just got to know what it is and what it does.

I held a small presentation to some of my colleagues including the vPV aware manager at my company's headquarters recently. We had a look at both products side by side and talked about first impressions and ideas.

Just minutes ago I read Ben's take on vPV which prompted me to say a few words about the product and my experiences with it as well.

vPV - The ugly truth 

 

To understand, what vPV is, I think its quite helpful to know how it came to be. The afore mentioned manager had a chance to talk to one of the HP guys at the last GPC in Las Vegas and revealed an interesting detail: HP's vPV was initially developed as a helper for their internal operations, more or less "by accident". They realized the potential and showed it off, got a few interested visitors and decided to release it as a product.

vPV - What it does!

 

As both Amitabh and Ben pointed out the installation is dead simple. Download and deploy the virtual appliance, point it at your vCenter and you're ready to roll. You get an instant and, depending on your environment, rather colorful picture.

vPV supports Hyper-V (though not tested by any of the three of us, as far as I can tell) and vSphere. It offers a general overview and drill down capabilities and makes good use of HP's uCMDB to visualize the structures of your environment and qualities and properties of your managed objects. It allows you to access the very same real time metrics that can be found in the vSphere client, with the added bonus of 24 hours retention (for the free edition, 30 days for the licensed product) as opposed to just 1h. You get every last value (including the infamous CPU Co-Stop) in a cute little graph, can arrange them to correlate issues in the workbench or just rely on the dashboard to get the grand total.

To me its easier, and as Ben pointed out, a lot snappier than using vSphere client to access performance graphs of your vSphere environment. A major benefit is the ability to easily place a half dozen of graphs on one screen.

vPV - What it does not!

 

Same as the vSphere client itself, strictly speaking, its not a real time performance analysis tool (or rather visualizer). vPV retrieves its data from vCenter. vCenter retrieves its data from the connected ESXi hosts, which in turn retrieve data from the VMware tools in each VM and measure the individual VM's performance metrics from the hypervisor side. This chain alone adds multiple delays in itself, the overhead of drawing a fancy graph (and possibly using a lot of RMS to connected the dots without making the graphs bounce up and down like crazy) is not even included in that one yet. In order to visualize the data and make it humanly processable true real time is out of the question, as with most other tools and helpers in this field. You rather get the past 24 hours of everything that was going on, in nicely smoothed lines.

Unlike vCOPS, vPV does not process the data to generate, what I like to call a "management compatible dashboard". vCOPS, even the free edition, stands out for its health level visualization. It will correlate CPU ready times along the number of assigned vCPUs to a host's workload and generate dynamic thresholds where vPV will only show the individual values. Thus vPV will also not free you from analysing dozens of metrics on multiple objects to find the true source of an ongoing performance issue.

On the side there is one major issue with the free edition. It does not support any means of access control. By default it is open to anyone and everyone within your network. As it allows you to view the entire vSphere environment (up to 200 managed objects in the free edition, of course) it surpasses your vSphere permissions and provides an interesting source of information for the sneaky attacker in your own network. So be sure to at least work out some sort of .htaccess protection.

Unlike vCOPS, it does support Hyper-V in the free edition. However to my understanding the paid version does not integrate AWS (and potentially other Cloud vendors and OS'ses) at the moment.

At the end of the day ...

 

vPV is a great if you're serious about vSphere performance analysis and trouble shooting and a good helper when vSphere client itself does not provide the data you're looking for. I agree with Ben's resume that its a great addition to your preferred set of tools and being free for 200 managed objects should be on any aspiring VMware admin's list of favourites.

HP has done a great job in putting their modules together to aggregate already available data and visualize it in an attractive manner. However I have my doubts that this tool alone helps "to rapidly analyze bottlenecks", as they put it. In my very humble opinion you have to already know what you're looking at (and for) to make good use of vPV.

In that sense it is no real competition to vCOPS, it simply plays in a different field. Integrate it with BSM and I'm sure a trained and able HP consultant will be able to generate reports and dashboards that will blow your mind away. If you're looking for an all-in-one multi purpose solution, vCOPS might be the better choice as vPV itself may evolve somewhat, but as a stand alone tool it can and will only be one out of many to assist you in your virtual performance trouble shooting journey. It sure should come in handy when you train yourself to be a VCAP.