World Congress on Sustainable Technologies (WCST-2015)

Performance Monitoring of Virtual Machines (VMs)

of Type I and II hypervisors with SNMPv3
Asif Iqbal
School of Computing, Creative
Technologies and Engineering
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, United Kingdom
a.iqbal8836@student.leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Colin Pattinson
School of Computing, Creative
Technologies and Engineering
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, United Kingdom
c.pattinson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Ah-Lian Kor
School of Computing, Creative
Technologies and Engineering
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, United Kingdom
a.kor@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

Abstract - Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is
the protocol which has the capability to monitor the
performance of IP based devices. Also it can monitor
components installed on these devices to determine whether
they are working or not. In an environment with hundreds of
installed servers, it is not possible to check if each machine is
working properly. SNMP can also be a used in cloud
computing environment for the monitoring of the hardware,
infrastructure or virtual machines. To date, not much work
has been done on cloud computing monitoring with SNMP. In
this research, empirical results of using SNMPv3 to monitor
Virtual Machines configured on Type I and II hypervisors and
the hypervisor itself vmware ESXi 5.5 resources. Additionally,
this research involved the exploration of efficient ways for
monitoring the resources and this will lead to the customisation
of MIB with Agent X to provide some management features
using SNMPv3. The completed research work will consists of
four components: (1). Network Management System (NMS),
where Zabbix will be used as NMS; (2). SNMP Agent, which
will be installed on the devices which need to be monitored; (3).
Virtual Machines; (4). Type I and II Hypervisor.
Keywords: SNMP; Virtualization; Hypervisor; Zabbix; Cloud
Computing;
I. INTRODUCTION
Monitoring of the virtual machines with high security
and minimal overhead is always very important, especially
in those environments where hundreds of Virtual Machines
VMs are running on dozens of physicals servers. This paper
presents the results of monitoring the VMs configured on
hosted and bare metal hypervisors with SNMP version 3.
Also it is identified that either monitoring hypervisor only
will be enough to collect detailed resources consumptions or
VMs monitoring will also be required.
And to monitor the VMs of Type II hypervisor, two
laptops are used, where Ubuntu and Windows Server 2012
are the VMs on Windows 8 host Operating System. Open
Source Sun Virtualbox is used as a Type II hypervisor. Type
II hypervisors cannot run directly on the hardware, they
require an Operating System (OS), that is why Windows 8 is
used as host OS for experiment.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Hypervisor
Hypervisor is also called Virtual Machine Manager. It is
a software which creates and runs Virtual Machines (VM).
B. SNMP
SNMP stands for Simple Network Management
Protocol. SNMP is used to monitor the IP based devices
installed in the network.
C. MIB
A management information base (MIB) is a formal
description of a set of network objects that can be managed
using the SNMP.
D. Zabbix
Zabbix is Linux based open source software which
provide feature to store SNMP results in mySQL database.
III. RELATED WORK
Peng and Chen use two standard MIBs, MIB-II and Host
Resources MIB to monitor the performance and to obtain
the information for VM [1].

To complete the experiment of resource monitoring, HP
ProLiant DL380 Gen8 server is used, where VMware ESXi
5.5 bare metal hypervisor is installed. Bare metal hypervisor
does not need any Operating System because it runs directly
on the machine. Two of the virtual machines are configured
on Hypervisor and Zabbix is installed in the laptop.
Swarna introduced the concept called auto discovery of
the hosts. This experiment was completed by extending
custom MIB through the AgentX functionality. To test,
they used NMS, MibParser and AgentX [2].
Hillbrecht develope a MIB, called Virtual-Machine-MIB
which conducts performing control operations: create,

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 World Congress on Sustainable Technologies (WCST-2015)
delete, restart, turn on, pause and shut down virtual
machines [3].
Blanquicet and Christensen evaluate a new SNMP power
state MIB and its agent to expose equipment power state to
the network [4].
Short summary of research work of by 4 different
researchers are provided. One important point is that none
of them have not mentioned in their research papers the
version of SNMP used.
IV. CONFIGURATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SNMP
AGENT AND ZABBIX
A. Zabbix Installation
To install, Zabbix, Ubuntu OS was installed on the
physical machine. PHP and MySQL were compulsory to
install because, Zabbix frontend is designed in PHP which
can be accessed in http://localhost/zabbix
B. Configurations of SNMP v3 agent on VMware ESXI 5.5
hypervisor (Type I)
It is important to enable the snmpd package on the
hypervisor before the configuration is carried out.
C. SNMP Agent on Windows Server 2012
All the operating systems provided by Microsoft, does
not support SNMP version 3. So SNMP agent was
configured with version 1.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A. Hypervisor Vmware ESXi 5.5
Specifications and utilizations of processor, memory,
storage and network are monitored. Moreover it was found
the load on all cores of processors.
B. VM Ubuntu Monitoring
To monitor VM, SNMP commands are run on the
SNMP server to find out the resources utilization of Virtual
Machines.
C. Display Result in Zabbix
All the information or values which are collected with
SNMP commands in terminal are displayed in a graph by
using Zabbix.
D. Hypervisor vs VM Monitoring
Resource monitoring of hypervisor and virtual machines
has performed separately. While monitoring hypervisor, it
can be revealed how much amount of memory is utilized by
server, but it is not possible to identify which virtual
machine is consuming what resources. To find out the
resources consumed by virtual machines, an agent is
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configured on them and virtual machines resources are
monitored by the agent.
E. Hosted Hypervisor (Sun Virtual Box and VMs)
Sun Virtual Box which is a hosted hypervisor, and it is
not possible to monitor the hosted hypervisor, because it is
not itself an Operating System. Resources of VMs running
on this hypervisors are monitored.
F. Zabbix and MIB
To perform monitoring with any MIB object, it is
compulsory to add it into Zabbix templates. To make, setup
look professional, five templates are created in this
experiment. Each template has different MIB objects.
G. Graphs
Graphs are actually used to display data with timeline.
Various graphs are created to display data.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Resource monitoring is performed with SNMP v3 of
Type I and II Hypervisors including VMs. And it is found
that monitoring the hypervisor only will not allow us to
know that what recourses are being consumed by each
virtual machine. Each Virtual Machine individually needs to
be monitored, in order to find out their respective resources
consumption.
Load Balancing and VM migration will be a great idea
after this monitoring setup. VMs can be migrated to other
hypervisor if resources allow us to do and turning off one
physical machine will enable us to save energy
consumption. But for all this future work, accurate
monitoring of the system is very important.
REFERENCES
[1] Peng, Y., & Chen, Y. (2011). SNMP-based monitoring
of heterogeneous virtual infrastructure in clouds, 1--6.
[2] Swarna, J., Raja, C.S. and Ravichandran, K.S. (2012)
'Cloud Monitoring based on SNMP', Journal of Theoretical
and Applied Information Technology, 40(2), pp. 188-193
[Online]. Available at: http://www.jatit.org/volumes/
Vol40No2/11Vol40No2.pdf(Accessed: 18 November 2014).
[3] Hillbrecht, R., Carlos, de Bona, L. C. E. (2012) 'Utility
and Cloud Computing', A SNMP-based Virtual Machine
Management Interface, 5(), pp. 279-286 [Online]. Available
at:(Accessed: 16 November 2014).
[4] Blanquicet, F., & Christensen, K. (2008). Managing
energy use in a network with a new SNMP power state
MIB, 509--511.
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