A couple weeks ago at VMworld, I stopped by the HP booth to see what they had new for this year and I was introduced to HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). Â Presented as a virtual triage tool, the idea behind vPV is to quickly let a virtualization administrator identify host spots of CPU or Memory that deviate from their baseline so they can pinpoint and fix problems quickly.
vPV comes in two editions – a free edition supporting up to 200 VM objects and a paid for edition with no limit.
The interface is clean and shows an overview of the entire environment, color coded – with shades of greens being good and oranges and red representing the problem areas. Â What is even better is you are able to drill down into a specific host or VM by double clicking one of the blocks. Â Drill down is simple and acts as it should, filtering the results to a specific cluster, resource pool, datastore or host to view what is happening inside of that object. Â This provides quick information about why a particular object is deviating from its norm.
A simple toggle radio button on the right side allows users to switch between vSphere and Hyper-V in the interface.
Screenshot of the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer dashboard —Â click for larger image
Hypervisor Support
vPV documentation says the system supports both VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Xen hypervisors. Â In addition, it supports OpenStack OS in a private cloud deployment and HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service (Paas).
In the free edition that I downloaded, I was able to see where I could configure against VMware vCenter or Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but not against the other hypervisors or hosts listed.  vCenter requires no agent. For Hyper-V, it appears SCVMM is required and to communicate with SCVMM an additional data collector must be installed.  I did not see a requirement for SCVMM in the documentation, however.
HP is very big on the message of customer choice and support across heterogeneous virtualized environments. Â This is another product supporting the message, in my opinion.
Installation
HP documentation says that deployment should take about 15 minutes and I found that to be true. Â vPV is packaged as a virtual appliance, so the installation into VMware was quick and simple from an OVA template. Â After spinning up the OVA, configuration against vCenter was simple, too, except I had too many VM objects for the free edition and so vPV presented an error. Â I was able to begin testing against a subset of VMs by creating a special username and limiting permissions to specific hosts, so the free tool can be useful even in a larger environment against a subset of virtual guests.
Free versus Licensed
The free edition of vPV does not provide any security for the application. Â If you can get the URL for your browser, you are in and able to make configuration changes. Â The licensed edition includes AD integration and password protection for the application. Â The licensed edition also includes 3 months of data retention, while the free version only includes 1 day.
Integration
The licensed version of vPV has integration points against other HP management software packages – HP Performance Manager and HP Business Software Manager (BSM).
Support
For the free edition, community support is available from an HP support forum.
Video Overview – How to install vPV in under 15 minutes
More Information
