Installing Nagios Server on a Virtual Machine

[Terry.Rankine at csiro.au]

Hi

We have an esx pool of about 120 VMs, and about 4-5 service checks per vm (disk/stock web/ssh/ldap/ssl certificate expiry/tomcat web apps/etc etc). The nagios monitor (also a vm) hits them all.

Only ‘unique’ issue we have since the vms are in a really aggressive load balancer, outages in networks with effect different VMS as they have vmotioned somewhere else in the cluster. We haven’t won that battle – and are happy to just live with it for now.

As for scaling – its a debian box with 256mb of memory also running our LDAP slave server, and looks at 600 different things. And we run nagiosgrapher to disk.
I think thats a win for nagios ☺

Terry



From: gmartin [mailto:gmartin at gmartin.org] 
Sent: Friday, 13 November 2009 9:19 AM
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Installing Nagios Server on a Virtual Machine

This definitely a question of scale.  I suspect a virtual solution could support a couple thousand services or even more in a distributed environment.  For a smaller environment it would be a no-brainer.

We virtualize everything by default so the next nagios server will go virtual in our MS Hyper-V pool.

\\Greg
On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Frost, Mark {PBG} <mark.frost1 at pepsi.com> wrote:
This was a year or two ago, but we found that when we ran Nagios in this way it worked in general, but because of the sort of variable size of a second on VMware, the latencies were kind of screwed up.  This was clearly evidenced when we looked at the performance statistics.  Nagios indicated that a lot of checks ran earlier or later than it had expected them to.

I don't know if somehow that's gone away or not, but it was a big issue for us and not within the realm of things we were able to tolerate so we want back to physical servers.

One of the arguments I know I've seen before on this list is the idea that you're doing your critical system monitoring inside an abstracted layer (the VM) which might alter your view of the world or fail to work should there be an issue with the ESX server.  But all possible acceptable depending on your site's needs.

Mark

>-----Original Message-----
>From: DE/HAM Hoppe, Leif [mailto:Leif.Hoppe at hartrodt.com]
>Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:00 AM
>To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Installing Nagios Server on a Virtual
>Machine
>
>Hi Juki,
>
>No problems here, either.
>OpenSuSe on Vmware ESX.
>
>regards from Hamburg
>
>cheers
>Leif
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Christian Schneemann [mailto:cschneemann at suse.de]
>Sent: Donnerstag, 12. November 2009 13:03
>To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Installing Nagios Server on a Virtual
>Machine
>
>Hi,
>
>On Thursday November 12 2009 12:42:47 pm Juki wrote:
>> Hello people,
>>
>> I would like to know if it is advisable (or best practice) to install
>and
>> run a Nagios monitoring server on a virtual machine (in this case,
>with
>> OpenSuSE as the OS) with
>> the intention of monitoring physical hardware client machines on the
>same
>> LAN.
>
>we have our Nagios testsystem and some distributed Nagios' running in
>Xen
>guests. We are seeing no problems with doing that.
>
>>
>> If so, what known issues should I look out for in this case?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Juki
>
>Greetings,
> Christian
>
>--
>Christian Schneemann
>Operations & Services
\\Greg
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