ThinkVirt

It's no secret that I've been a big fan of VMware vCenter AppSpeed since it was a B-Hive product. It's one of those products that sells itself when shown to the customer. It is extremely useful in any environment that wants to identify or monitor SLA's or have a finer-tooth comb for troubleshooting purposes.

If you're running a Sharepoint farm on VMware vSphere4 infrastructure without AppSpeed, you can troubleshoot via memory, disk i/o, CPU, network and the other canned metrics available with vCenter.

However, if you are running AppSpeed in your environment, you can understand items like web page latency, latency between front end web servers and backend database servers, DB load, impact of a specific query, et cetera. I used this product to troubleshoot a web farm a year or so ago and was amazed at how well it worked. We were able to find the culprit that ended up being a poorly written query. The query was re-written and all was well.

Enough of the dialogue, on to the screen shots.

1) Download the appspeed-ovf-r36919 rar package. Extract the contents which should produce three files

• appspeed.ovf
• appspeed-ovf.vmdk
• appspeed-ovf-var.vmdk

2) From within vCenter, select Deploy OVF Template and point to the .ovf file from the rar you just downloaded.

3) Name the server, I chose, AppSpeed Server. Select the datacenter and cluster for deployment.

4) Confirmation of the deployment details.

5) Ready for business!

6) Turn on the AppSpeed Server.

7) Type setup to begin the configuration. I'd recommend taking the server off of DHCP and giving it a static IP address (and thereby entering in the appropriate IP details). Configure the timezone/region.

8) Enter in details with appropriate permissions for vCenter. Ideally this would be a service account, however, I am just going to use my account for test purposes.

9) Away it goes!

10) You should notice a few tasks in vCenter including the reconfiguration of the AppSpeed server.

11) Confirmation that setup has finished and we're ready for configuration of the client and probe environment.

12) From your vSphere Client, go to Plug-Ins and select download and install the AppSpeed plug-in. If you do not see the plug-in, it is likely because you had the vS4 Client open during the installation. Close the client and try again.

13) A reminder that Adobe Flash is a requirement for the AppSpeed plug-in.

14) You will need to close the vS4 client to complete plug-in installation.

15) Viola! AppSpeed plug-in success!

16) Under Home you should now see AppSpeed.

17) Launch AppSpeed and prepare for glory.

18) We are in the process of rebuilding our lab, so we only have one vS4 host dedicated to this current environment.

19) Click Install Probe and it will now do all of the magic you had to manually do before (namely, setting up a port group for the sniffing, enabling promiscuous mode, et cetera).

20) Once you select Install Probe, you must now enter in configuration details. Select the proper datastore for the virtual machine. You can name your probe (as I did) and probide IP details. Again, I recommend using static IP addresses for most environments. If you are building out a true cloud and have a proper scope for true datacenter wide DHCP, well, feel free to keep it DHCP.

Also notice that you can enable/disable sniffing on up to 3 vSwitches.

21) My info and confirmation.

22) Again you will notice some tasks in vCenter. Behold the power of Linked Clones!

23) Verify that the probe is now running.

24) Configure any SSL endpoints to monitor. These would include HTTPS websites.

25) AppSpeed can be configured to send email alerts when SLA's are breached. Do so here if you please.

26) Enter in your license key.

27) Rinse and repeat the necessary steps above to install and configure probes on all of the hosts in your cluster or datacenter.

28) I will be instructing one of the VMware vCenter AppSpeed labs out at VMWorld 2009 and will post an In-depth Use of AppSpeed article next week from San Francisco.