The principal benefits of virtualization – cost reduction, efficiency, speed of deployment, and energy saving – are well-known to IT and business managers. These benefits have inspired a virtuous circle of increasingly sophisticated VMware technology and increasing adoption of that technology. Despite this, less than 50% of enterprise data center workloads have been virtualized and, while the figure is increasing all the time, it is clear that physical servers will have a significant footing in enterprise IT for many years to come.

The growth in virtualization presents a problem for the IT, network, and security staff who are responsible for keeping the network in good shape. The entire VMware environment appears as a single device on the physical network, so the monitoring tools that are so effective on the physical network are unable to provide any insight into what is happening inside the VMware network. Of course, vSphere provides comprehensive management tools for the VMware environment, but it does not provide the same level of network monitoring capability that is available in the physical environment. And often, the VMware environment is managed as a standalone entity separately from the physical network. The result is, network managers and engineers cannot get a single view of overall network activity.

But, this single view of overall network activity is exactly what network managers need (after all, applications and operating systems hosted in a VMware environment are susceptible to the same network issues that arise in a physical environment), and the lack of this single view is a significant problem. In a 2010 survey published in Network World magazine, 36% of network engineers cited the lack of appropriate monitoring tools as the biggest problem with virtualization, while a previous survey in 2008 revealed that 40% considered virtualization as the technology that represents the greatest monitoring challenge.

This white paper outlines a traffic-based approach to network monitoring that enables network engineers to obtain a single view of network activity across their entire environment – physical as well as virtual.

NetFort Technologies provides a range of software products to monitor activity on virtual and physical networks. Headquartered in Galway, Ireland, NetFort Technologies was established in 2002 and has built up a global customer base in the enterprise, education, and government sectors.