Monitoring KVM instances with Opsview

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Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Thilo Uttendorfer , By Valentin Höbel , By and Markus Feilner

In emergencies, administrators need to know as quickly as possible whether computers in a private cloud are failing. A simple setup with KVM, Pacemaker, DRBD, and Opsview will help keep watch.

Since the Linux kernel 2.6.20 release in February 2007, the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, KVM [1], has made much progress in its mission to oust other virtualization solutions from the market. KVM also frequently provides the underpinnings for a virtualization cluster that runs multiple guests in a high-availability environment, thanks to Open Source tools such as Heartbeat [2] and Pacemaker [3].

Very Little Monitoring

Many system administrators still don't monitor the hosts and virtual guests in their clusters. Heartbeat and Pacemaker have built-in alert functions, and many admins are happy with email notification of cluster status. However, a standardized, centralized monitoring system that also covers the virtual guest systems in a private cloud can give admins an impressive operations center for monitoring all of the systems at a glance. Before you think about monitoring, you need to consider a couple of basic things about your cluster setup: A simple combination of Heartbeat and Pacemaker, with virtualization based on KVM, logical volumes, and DRBD [4] may not match the feature scope of VMware, but it won't cost you nearly as much either (Figure 1). With minimal effort, this simple Heartbeat solution provides a system in which a virtual instance is always available.

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