[PUBLIC BETA] Veeam Monitor 5.0

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam Monitor 5.0 Beta
Released: July 13, 2010
Build version: 5.0.0.240

To download the latest version, please follow this link:
http://www.veeam.com/go/monitor-50

For complete list of enhacements, please refer to the What's New document:
http://www.veeam.com/veeam_monitor_5_be ... new_wn.pdf

Upgrade from previous versions is not supported with this beta, we recommend that you install this beta on a separate VM for evaluation.

If you have some feedback about this new release, please post it in this thread.

[whynotq]

Have Downloaded and installed, did a complete removal of previous version including SQL components but get an error with the DB:

"can't deploy database due to the following error: IDispatch error #3092: create database failed. some filenames listed could not be created. check related errors"

any one seen this as well?

[Gostev]

Hello, please use clean VM which did not have earlier Veeam Monitor versions installed previously. Upgrade will only be supported in the release version.

[survive]

Hi Gostev,

Maybe I'm being a little silly, but doesn't a full reinstall of windows seem to be a bit much to run the beta?

If nothing else I would expect the bulk of your existing customers will be updating their existing installs so this would seem to be something you would want tested now, in the beta stage, instead of holding off and trying it when you release the product!

Is there anything a user can do to run the beta wihtout doing a full system reinstall?

-Will

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Will,

You may completely uninstall the previous version of Veeam Monitor including all MDF and LDF files and then install the beta, that should also work.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

If nothing else I would expect the bulk of your existing customers will be updating their existing installs

We highly recommend to wait for the official release before upgrading any existing installs, and instead install this beta on a separate VM for evaluation. Of course, in the end it comes down to you accepting risks of replacing stable and supported production code, with unsupported beta code. Potentially, there could be bugs resulting on some important alerts not working as expected, resulting in you being unaware of some issues with your VMware environment.

Also, please note that workaround that Vitaly proposed above kills your existing Veeam Monitor 4.5 configuration database files, so if you ever need to go back to this version, you will have to configure Monitor 4.5 from scratch. Also, your existing custom alerts won't be migrated (something that release version of Monitor 5.0 will handle for you). So, I recommend that you at least backup your Monitor 4.5 VM before getting into this.

[survive]

Hi Gostev & Vitaliy,

I was able to install the beta by uninstalling all the bits of SQL that were left over after uninstalling Monitor 4.5, cleaning the system using CCleaner to freshen up the registry and finding & deleting all the directories SQL left behind. After that the beta installed cleanly.

Thanks for the suggestion to purge the .mdf & .ldf files!

I'm just a home user using the free version to monitor an ESXi free version server so the loss of all the historical data wasn't a big deal for me.

The beta looks great.

-Will

[drbarker]

Hi guys - it looks like 5.0 is going to be a good upgrade.

A few comments:

- When can we see a beta with power stats in there?
- Can we extend some of the 'top 5' bar charts to include everyone?
- It's great to see storage used (Gb) being tracked - can that be integrated with business view so we can see Gb used per department over time?
- At the moment, it's only pulling in 1 year of history - can this be extended? (e.g. 5 years?)

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

-This functionality will be included in the RTM version.
-I think it might be looking a little bit messy if you include all the objects here. Probably, Top 10 option would be a better choice for you?
-Could you please clarify about Business View, as there is a datastore usage per category and group at the Summary tab already available today.
-As far as I remember vCenter stores performance data only for 2 or 3 years by default, so we could potentially pull the data for that period if you need it.

Thank you for your feedback!

[Gostev]

Top 5 limitation also has to deal with performance issue I believe (need to check with devs).

[drbarker]

Hello,

-This functionality will be included in the RTM version.
-I think it might be looking a little bit messy if you include all the objects here. Probably, Top 10 option would be a better choice for you?
-Could you please clarify about Business View, as there is a datastore usage per category and group at the Summary tab already available today.
-As far as I remember vCenter stores performance data only for 2 or 3 years by default, so we could potentially pull the data for that period if you need it.

Thank you for your feedback!

- Thanks for the powerstats - in the mean time I'll go editing /usr/share/sensors/* for a while
- I can live with 10 - it's fairly low down on my list of 'wouldn't it be nice if...'
- The summary is good, but tracking the change over time would be better. e.g. Here's our cluster wide CPU usage for the last 2.5 years. http://www.flickr.com/photos/drbarker/4798820373/ Wouldn't it be cool if we could do that for storage too on a per-department basis? vCenter tracks VM size now - veeam monitor just needs to log it & graph it.
- We've increased ours to 5 years - yes the DB will get bigger, but we find the extra info useful.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I fully agree with you about having the historical information on the graphs, but it could take too much time to generate on-the-fly such a trend and display it in the GUI summary page. I believe It might be better to see this kind of information in the trend reports. What do you think of it?

[drbarker]

I guess the on-the-fly numbers will depend on the workload. What does the average veeam monitor customer look like?

I'd prefer on-the-fly graphs, but I'm in a SME with fewer but bigger VM's - so less stats to process. Web-hosting companies would probably struggle to analyse the stats from thousands of small VM's.

[doluck]

When doing a Client Only installation and connecting to a 5.0 Beta Server the GUI to the application doesn't load properly.

Anyone else getting this ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Steve,

As this is only a beta code, I believe it might be expected to see. Could you please send me a private message with the screenshot, so I could reproduce it in my lab?

Thank you!

[Vitaliy S.]

I guess the on-the-fly numbers will depend on the workload. What does the average veeam monitor customer look like?

We have both SMB, and Enterprise customers with hundreds of host per single Monitor server.
We'll see what we can do with the graphs, thanks again.

[dasherrill]

I have been running the beta for 2 days now but still getting "No data available" for almost every metric on every level (datastore, cluster, datacenter, host, etc). Any recommendations?

[Gostev]

See if this thread helps, this is for the same issue with 4.5 release and possible resolutions:
http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... t=30#p9919

[tobin1]

Looks promising - I have two questions.

1. I noticed the beta requires a license (sent automatically via email). Will there still be a free version?

2. Will 5.0 install on a domain controller?

Thanks in advance!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Jeremy,

1. Yes, we will have a free version for Veeam Monitor 5.0, in the same way we had it for 4.5.
2. Yes, using SQL authentication should allow you to install Veeam Monitor either on the DC or the clustered SQL server.

Thank you!

[adamyager]

We have just closed a case with VMware and root cause of the problem was related to Veeam 5.0 Beta.

We are a 4.5 Veeam Customer and were trying out 5.0 on a seperate little VM to see what was new and what changed.
Once we upgraded to Virtual Center 4.1 we began having some major issues with ESX hosts of all versions of 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 not able to communcate with Virtual Center 4.1.
The error in the VC console for the "Host cannot synchronize host(Host name here) operation timed out."
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what happened and have 100% certainty that Veeam 5.0 was the cause.

We connected to the Virtual Center Server with Veeam and not the ESX Hosts. It looks like some calls made by VC on behalf of Veeam 5.0 caused the vpxa agent to spike the ESX Console resources so they stopped functioning.

The main error messages were noted in the vmkernel logs and they are below. Looks like some SAN or disk calls you are making are causing this problem.
Sep 2 14:59:56 bcesxi101 vmkernel: 12:23:06:41.956 cpu4:4118)FS3: 2988: [Req mode: 1] Checking liveness of [type 10c00001 offset 40626176 v 91, hb offset 3650048
Sep 2 14:59:56 bcesxi101 vmkernel: gen 297, mode 1, owner 4c7412b5-bf3edd51-940a-d8d385c37f01 mtime 3846] on vol 'vmax-lp-008'

Once we stopped the Monitor 5.0 the problems goes away. When we start it again the problem comes back.

There is no doubt this is the cause. I have uploaded many, many GB of Logs to VMware and they are writing a KB article on this issue.

You may want to get with them to prevent this issue in the 5.0 Prod release.

[Gostev]

How large is your environment? This is really strange because I have not heard about this issue from other customers, and we have a few (very) large infrastructures having beta code deployed. Also, we are not using anything but public VMware APIs designed, and I would not expect public APIs to cause issues with that.

Anyway, I will route this information to devs and QC, and if they need more info I will have support contact you for additional information. Thanks for this information!

One idea I have is that there could be a bug in vCenter 4.1 causing it to query older versions of ESX hosts for some information they are not able to provide (such as new performance counters introduced in ESX 4.1), which may be causing the issue...

[adamyager]

We have about 300 CPUs of ESX running with 1 VC.
I was not really "running" the beta code as you may think. I am still using 4.5 and we just sood up a 5.0 to see if there were any performance improvements and better reporting. I did like what we saw...
About 2 weeks ago we upgraded to VC 4.1 and that is when the problems started. I spent a lot if time trying to figure out what was going on. We thought it was a problem with the upgrade, but in the end we ruled this out.

There is another possability that I have not tested. Both 4.5 and 5.0 making calls to VC that turns around and makes calls to the ESX host. This may create too many requests for ESX Console to handle.

This problem existed on ESX 3.5, ESX 4.0 and ESX 4.1 so I doubt the bug theory is accurate.

Are your other customers testing on VC 4.1? There were zero issues until I upgraded to VC 4.1. Monitor 5.0 Beta was running the whole time.
I guess another possability is that my VC server is a Blade with 10GB connections. I may be asking for information too quickly for the Host Console to process.

[Vitaliy S.]

Adam,

Though I'm running vSphere 4.1 in my own labs with Veeam Monitor, I haven't seen such a behavior. I've just sent you the private message with all the information we need to further troubleshoot the issue you experience with Veeam Monitor 5.0. Please have a look.

[TristanTodd]

Trying to get v5 beta running in my environment. Server install works just fine (server 2K8 std R2). Client install and functionality on Windows XP is just fine.
However, I cannot get the client to function properly in Win7. Client freezes when I start it. I can sometimes get to the point where I can enter the name of my Monitor server. However, I can never make a connection.

Anyone have any tips/tricks for running the client in Win7?

Thanks much, Tristan

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Tristan,

Could you please look through the GUI log files for additional information on the error? The log file can be found if Help->About->View log...

[Vitaliy S.]

Thank you everyone who participated in Veeam Monitor 5 beta program, we appreciate your feedback which was very relevant and helpful. Many of the requested enhancements are implemented in the GA code that will become generally available next week.