Monitoring Hyper-V

Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight monitors a Microsoft Hyper-V virtual infrastructure. Better management of services can be achieved when you are alerted of infrastructure problems before end users are affected. This ensures consistent application performance at established service levels. Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight monitors the health of your virtual system by tracking resource consumption such as CPU, network, and memory consumption for individual clusters, servers and virtual machines in your integrated environment.

To view the Hyper-V Dashboard, click Monitor Hyper-V on the Welcome page, or click Hyper-V in the left navigation panel.

This section covers the following key areas:

• About your monitored environment
  
• Prerequisites: Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight configuration
• Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight WinRM GPO script
• Agent Administration

About your monitored environment

Microsoft Hyper-V provides an innovative mechanism for organizing a virtual infrastructure using a unique combination of physical and logical components. Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight accommodates environments of all sizes that leverage the Hyper-V virtualization platform by examining and enhancing the HyperV eminently knowledgeable view of the virtual world.

Microsoft Hyper-V allows for the configuration of a hierarchical organizational structure that resides primarily within the virtual domain. This enables organizations to easily configure physical Hyper-V servers and virtual machines to reside in logical groups that dictate various aspects of the virtual infrastructure, like physical object location, resource allocations and limitations for virtual machines, and high availability settings for physical and virtual components.

A Hyper-V infrastructure contains a collection of physical and virtual objects. The physical objects within the virtual infrastructure are those with which you can physically interact. The virtual components or objects that make up the virtual environment cannot exist without the presence of underlying physical components, such as Hyper-V servers. In addition, virtual objects, such as clusters and virtual machines, allow for the advanced configuration of resource management and of high availability settings. Each Hyper-V infrastructure contains a collection of the following object types:

• Clusters. A cluster object is a group of Hyper-V servers that share common storage resources and network configurations.
• Servers. A Hyper-V server is a physical component required to begin building a virtual infrastructure. Hyper-V servers provide hypervisor-based architecture for controlling and managing resources for the virtual machines that run on it. Virtual machines running on a Hyper-V server share the server’s resources.
• SCVMM Servers. A System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) allows you to manage host, networking, and storage resources when creating and deploying virtual machines to virtual clouds.
• Virtual Machines. A virtual machine resides on a Hyper-V server. Virtual machines share many of the characteristics of physical systems (like storage and network interaction), but they do not have direct access to the hardware that is used to process. Each virtual machine runs on a guest operating system, for example, Microsoft Windows XP, and is allocated access to a specific set of the server’s resources, that includes the number of processors and the amount of memory it can leverage.
• Storage. A Microsoft Windows Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) is a shared disk available for read and write operations by all nodes within a Windows Server Failover Cluster. A Windows Server Failover Cluster is a group of computers that provides continued service when system components fail.
• Virtual Switches. A Hyper-V virtual switch is a software-based layer-2 Ethernet network switch. The switch connects virtual machines to virtual and physical networks.
• SOFS Servers. A Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) allows the same folder or file to be shared from multiple cluster nodes.

Prerequisites: Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight

User privileges required for monitoring agents

Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight requires the following configuration prerequisites:

• Privileges of Monitor Account for Hyper-V Agent:
  • The user is a member of a local group administrators.
• Privileges of Monitor Account for SCVMM Agent (Hyper-V environments):
  • The user is SCVMM (Not Windows) administrator.
  • The user is a member of a local group administrators.

Privileges of Hyper-V Optimizer (Hyper-V environments):

• Hyper-V Optimizer is using the Hyper-V agent credentials (which is the local administrator).
• Privileges of Monitor Account for Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) Agent:
• The user is a member of a local group administrators.

Configurations required for collecting data from VMs resided on SMB server

To collect the complete data of virtual machines that are resided on the SMB server, make sure to do the following:

1. Open krb5.config under the FGLAM_HOM\state\default\config directory, set “forwardable=true” in libdefaults.
2. Enable SMB delegation on Active Directory using either of the following approaches:
   • Run the following command on Active Directory. Visit Enable-SmbDelegation for details. json Enable-SmbDelegation [-SmbClient] <Hyper-V server name> [-SmbServer] <SMB server name>

     The Active Directory forest must be at the Windows Server 2012 functional level. This cmdlet relies on Active Directory Windows PowerShell cmdlets to perform its actions. To install the Active Directory cmdlets, run the following command: json Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-PowerShell

• Enable the SMB delegation through the Active Directory Users and Computers console. a. Browse to select the default container named Computers. b. Select the computer on which you want to configure constrained delegation (your Hyper-V host server), right click on it and select Properties. c. Click Delegation, and then select the Trust this computer for delegation to specified services only option and ensure you select the Use Kerberos Only option. d. In the Service box, click Add and select the Hyper-V target host computer, and then select cifs from the list of services that show up.

Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight WinRM GPO script

The GPO script is provided to allow for a streamlined deployment, including how to configure Windows Remote Management (WinRM). Users must run the script as the Administrator on the AD controller which is enabled on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, or Windows 2022.

They must enable WinRM for all the Hyper-V servers through one time setup at Domain Controller, login to just one Domain Controller, and change the group policy by running an automation script.

The script creates a group policy object and links it to the specific OU (specified by running the script). The policy has the following settings:

• Create a firewall rule “Allow WinRM for FglAM Requests” which allows port 5985 on all network.
• Allow WinRM basic authentication.
• Allow WinRM unencrypted traffic.
• Set WinRM IPv4 and IPv6 filter to “*”.
• At the end of the script, users can chose to force the policy update. It runs an “Invoke-GPUpdate” method on all members in the specific OU.

These settings can be observed in the Group Policy Management console by selecting the policy object.

To undo the changes made by the script:

• Delete the group policy object. OR
• Remove the linked OU from the GPO scope