I’ve had a lot of virtualization customers ask me, both large and small, if Vizioncore’s vFoglight will run in a VM or as a virtual appliance. My reaction, of course, is it will run just like on a physical host. vFoglight has always been supported running in a VM by Vizioncore. Like any application you virtualize, there are things you can do to ensure proper performance and more importantly get the most out of the environment.

Let’s look at the different parts of vFoglight and talk about each one. There are three components that can be installed together or installed separately. They are the: collector, management server and the database.

The collector is just what it sounds like, it’s an agent that collects data remotely from vCenter and forwards that information into the management system. It’s supported on Windows only, since it currently uses .NET to talk to vCenter.

The second component is the management server. Currently, Vizioncore has a download and go version of vFoglight that runs on Windows x86 or x86_64. This is designed to be the typical easy install with Next -> Next -> Done. There are versions of vFoglight that run on Linux (most 2.6 flavors) and Solaris as well! Also, it’s good to note that vFoglight runs on top of a JVM, which creates pages written mostly in AJAX and served out by Apache.

The last component is the database. vFoglight ships with an embedded version of MySql for use. This is sufficient for most implementations, but once you get into thousands or tens of thousands of VMs, it can be advisable to break the database off. Which is why vFoglight supports external versions of MySql, Oracle, and new with the 6.0 release SQL Server 2005+.

So… all of the components and applications used inside of vFoglight are supported in a VM and there are plenty of success stories from VMware customers & Vizioncore customers that speak to how well each one runs in a VM. vFoglight is no different in that respect. If you plan properly, as with any project, it will run just as well as on a physical host.

For a quick example, I am currently running a test environment with a customer with about 8100+ VM’s being pushed into a single vFoglight VM running SLES 10.2 and the embedded MySql database.

Up next on my plate is to detail out some of these configurations and what some of the largest VMware customers are doing with vFoglight to monitor their virtual & physical infrastructure.