Default Parameters for VmAccessTest

Sometimes, a VM could be in a powered-on state, but the failure of the VM operating system or any fatal error in VM operations could have rendered the VM inaccessible to users. In order to enable administrators to promptly detect such ‘hidden’ anomalies, the eG agent periodically runs a connectivity check on each VM using this test, and reports whether the VM is accessible over the network or not.

This page depicts the default parameters that need to be configured for the VmAccessTest.

• The TEST PERIOD list box helps the user to decide how often this test needs to be executed.

• Specify the size of packets used for the test (in bytes) in the PACKETSIZE text box.

• Specify the number of packets to be transmitted during the test in the PACKETCOUNT text box.

• Specify the time duration after which this test will deem a transmitted packet as lost (in seconds) in the TIMEOUT text box.

• The PACKETINTERVAL represents the interval (in milliseconds) between successive packet transmissions during the execution of the network test for a specific target.

• Administrators of some high security environments might not have permissions to internally monitor one/more VMs. The eG agent can be configured to not obtain the ‘inside view’ of such ‘inaccessible’ VMs using the IGNORE VMS INSIDE VIEW parameter. Against this parameter, you can provide a comma-separated list of VM names, or VM name patterns, for which the inside view need not be obtained. For instance, your IGNORE VMS INSIDE VIEW specification can be: *ubuntu*,*lin*,rhel*,*suse*. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside view of all VMs on a KVM host by default.

  Note:

  While performing VM discovery, the eG agent will not discover the operating system of the VMs configured in the IGNORE VMS INSIDE VIEW text box.

• By default, the eG agent does not support the inside view for VMs executing on Windows NT operating systems. Accordingly, the IGNORE WINNT flag is set to Yes by default.

• Administrators of some virtualized environments may not want to monitor some of their less-critical VMs - for instance, VM templates - both from ‘outside’ and from ‘inside’. The eG agent in this case can be configured to completely exclude such VMs from its monitoring purview. To achieve this, provide a comma-separated list of VMs to be excluded from monitoring in the EXCLUDE VMS text box. Instead of VMs, VM name patterns can also be provided here in a comma-separated list. For example, your EXCLUDE VMS specification can be: *ubuntu*,*lin*,rhel*,*suse*. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside and outside views of all VMs on a virtual host by default. By providing a comma-separted list of VMs/VM name patterns in the EXCLUDE VMS text box, you can make sure the eG agent stops collecting ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ view metrics for a configured set of VMs.

• By default, this test communicates with every VM remotely and extracts “inside view” metrics. Therefore, by default, the INSIDE VIEW USING flag is set to Remote connection to VM (Windows).

  Typically, to establish this remote connection with Windows VMs in particular, eG Enterprise requires that the eG agent be configured with domain administrator privileges. In high-security environments, where the IT staff might have reservations about exposing the credentials of their domain administrators, this approach to extracting “inside view” metrics might not be preferred. In such environments therefore, eG Enterprise provides administrators the option to deploy a piece of software called the eG VM Agent on every Windows VM; this VM agent allows the eG agent on the service console to collect “inside view” metrics from the Windows VMs without domain administrator rights.To ensure that the “inside view” of Windows VMs is obtained using the eG VM Agent, set the INSIDE VIEW USING flag to eG VM Agent (Windows).

• By default, the REPORTUNAVAILABILITY flag is set to No. This implies that, by default, the test will not report the unavailability of network connection to any VM. In other words, if the Network availability measure of this test registers the value 0 for any VM, then, by default, this test will not report any measure for that VM; under such circumstances, the corresponding VM name will not appear as a descriptor of this test. You can set this flag to Yes, if you want the test to report and alert you to the unavailability of the network connection to a VM.

• Once the necessary values have been provided, clicking on the UPDATE button will register the changes made.

When changing default configurations of tests, the values with “$” indicate variables that will be replaced by the eG system according to the specific server being managed - for instance, $hostName is the host/nickname of the target host, $port is the port number of the server being monitored. E.g., for a server xyz:80, $hostName will be changed automatically by the eG manager to “xyz” and $port will be changed to “80” when configuring a test.