Monitoring KVM Servers with VMs Hosting Desktop Applications
In some environments, the virtual guests hosted on KVM VDI servers may be used to support desktop applications. Administrators of such virtual environments would want to know the following:
- How many desktops are powered on simultaneously on the ESX Server?
- Which users are logged on and when did each user login?
- How much CPU, memory, disk and network resources is each desktop taking?
- What is the typical duration of a user session?
- Who has the peak usage times?
- What applications are running on each desktop?
- Which ESX Server is a virtual guest running on?
- When was a guest moved from an ESX Server? Which ESX Server was the guest moved to?
- Why was the guest migrated? What activities on the ESX host caused the migration?
Using the KVM VDI server model (see Figure 1), administrators can find quick and accurate answers to all the queries above, and also receive a complete 'desktop view', which allows them to get up, close with the performance of every guest OS hosted by the KVM server and detect anomalies (if any) in its functioning.
