vFoglight training

My week started on a down with me being ill for two days but it finished on a high with two days of Vizioncore vFoglight training.

The training was given by Paul Jackson, an external consultant, with a bit of support of Danny Claproth from Vizioncore Benelux.

vFoglight is derived from Quest’s Foglight which is a tool to manage and monitor a physical environment and is designed as a virtualization management solution that provides performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback for virtual and physical infrastructures.

It is offered in two editions - vFoglight Standard (SE) and vFoglight Pro. vFoglight SE is monitor the performance of their virtual infrastructures and the Pro version adds advanced capabilities for Capacity Planning, Chargeback, Physical Operating System Monitoring, Third-Party Integration, etc.

During the training we used the vFoglight Pro (5.2.6) version and we quickly found out that it is a very very powerful tool. With vFoglight it’s possible to extract information and metrics from the vCenter database which aren’t shown in vCenter itself. For example, it’s possible to show how much data goes in and out through a specific HBA. Very convenient when troubleshooting storage and/or performance issues.

Besides the high level of detail you probably know vFoglight from the monitoring windows with red, orange or green indicators giving you the status of your virtual infrastructure and the nice graphs and spinners indicating how the load is on your virtual infrastructure. There are some finished dashboards in the product but one of the most creative things you can do is create your own custom dashboards tailor made for your environment.

More nice features were of course chargeback, os  monitoring and third party integration.

During the training there were many referrals to vFoglight  version 6 which will be released in two weeks. Here are the ones I can remember:

• Integration with System Center Operations Manager;
• Automatic population of the vFoglight structure based on vCenter;
• Improved vModeler to model more VMs at once.

Besides the new version Vizioncore is working on a database sizing tool based on sample rate, roll up strategy, history and detail level.

In short vFoglight is a very powerful tool with which it is possible to unleash the full potential of you virtual infrastructure and monitor the status real time.

You can download a 30 day full featured trial at the Vizioncore website. Watch this movie for an impression of the tool