Getting ready

In the last few years, a significant amount of servers are moving to virtual environments—that is a large amount of servers on a single hardware device.

First, to put some order in the terms. There are two major terms to remember in the virtual world:

• A virtual machine is an emulation of a computer system that is installed on single or multiple hardware platforms. A virtual machine is mostly used in the context of virtual servers. The major platforms used for server virtualization are VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix XenServer.
• A Blade server is a cage that holds inside server cards and LAN switches to connect them to the world.

In this section, we will look at each one of these components and see how to monitor each one of them.