Foglight® for Hyper-V 5.8.3
Developed for Foglight Management Server 5.9.8/ Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.9.3/ Foglight Evolve 9.3
Release Notes
December 2020
Welcome to Foglight for Hyper-V
Resolved issues and enhancements
Getting started with Foglight for Hyper-V
Foglight for Hyper-V allows you to monitor the health of your Hyper-V virtual infrastructure by tracking resource consumption such as CPU, network, and memory consumption for individual clusters, servers and virtual machines in your integrated environment.
These Release Notes cover the features, system requirements, and other important information about the 5.8.3 release of Foglight for Hyper-V. Review all sections before starting installation.
This 5.8.3 release of Foglight for Hyper-V accompanies the release of Foglight Evolve 9.3 and Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.9.3. This release includes the following new features and improvements:
This 5.8.3 release of Foglight for Hyper-V includes the following resolved issues and enhancements:
The following is a list of issues known to exist at the time of Foglight for Hyper-V release.
Defect ID |
Known Issue |
HV-1958 |
When discovering Hyper-V servers in Agent Creation wizard, the discover will fail and declare password incorrect in some cases. |
HV-1770 | Due to permission issue, the Move operation will fail for virtual machines running on the Windows 2012 R2 Server and Windows 2016. |
VFOG-12141 | The Virtual Switch Topology View does not display any data on the Federation Master. |
VFOG-11608 | Only powered on virtual machines are displayed on the virtual switch views in the Quick-View. |
VFOG-8801 |
When a virtual machine running on a Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2012 or Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V server creates a snapshot without shutdown, the virtual machine's disk I/O metrics are not collected. Workaround: Restart the virtual machine. |
HV-196 |
On the Hosts dashboard, the virtual machine disk and network utilization metrics are not populated. This happens because these metrics appear as percent values while the cartridge collects these values using different units. Workaround: There is no workaround available for this issue. |
Foglight Evolve 9.3 and Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.9.3 include a new version of Foglight for Hyper-V 5.8.3.
For complete information about the upgrade procedure, see the Foglight Upgrade Guide.
When upgrading from version 5.7.4 or earlier (included with Foglight for Virtualization 8.7 or earlier, or Foglight 5.6.7 or earlier), Hyper-V Agents are automatically transitioned to use credential management. This transition requires that all agents be upgraded through the Hyper-V Environment Administration tab.
Using other methods to upgrade Hyper-V Agents results in agents without configured credentials and requires additional configuration before collections can resume.
The following is a list of Foglight product versions and platforms compatible with this release.
Product Name |
Product Version |
Platform |
Foglight Management Server |
5.9.8 |
All platforms supported by this version of the Foglight Management Server |
Foglight Agent Manager |
5.9.8 |
All platforms supported by this version of the Foglight Agent Manager |
Foglight Evolve |
9.3 |
All platforms supported by this version of the Foglight Evolve |
Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition |
8.9.3 |
All platforms supported by this version of the Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition |
To upgrade to the latest version of Foglight for Hyper-V:
For more information, see the Foglight Upgrade Guide.
Before installing Foglight for Hyper-V, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:
Operating System |
Foglight for Hyper-V can be installed on any supported Foglight Management Server configuration. Monitored Hyper-V servers must be running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019. Monitored SOFS servers must be running on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019. Monitored SCVMM servers must be SCVMM 2012, SCVMM 2012 R2, or SCVMM 2016. |
Platform, Memory and Hard Disk Space | The platform, memory, and hard disk space requirements for the monitored servers must match the Agent Manager requirements. For complete information, see the System Requirements and Platform Support Guide. |
Note: 32-bit Windows and Linux Agent Manager installers are not included in the Foglight Evolve installer. New installations should use 64-bit Agent Managers. If you are upgrading 32-bit agent hosts, you can obtain 32-bit Agent Manager Installers from Quest Support.
For a complete list of system requirements, refer to the Installing the Hyper-V Management Capabilities guide.
On 64-bit hosts meeting the minimum system requirements, the embedded Agent Manager can be used to run Hyper-V Agents to monitor up to 500 virtual machines. If the total number of virtual machines to be monitored from a single agent host is greater than 500, an Agent Manager should be installed on a separate host.
Important: Foglight Evolve Virtual Appliance comes pre-configured to support up to 4,000 virtual machines. If you are using this product, there is no need to follow the configuration procedure described in this section.
If additional cartridges and agents are added to the environment, product performance should be monitored and agents moved off of the embedded Agent Manager to reduce the load.
Minimum CPU | Minimum Memory | Minimum Host Memory | Total Monitored VMs | |
Windows 64-bit |
2* |
2 GB |
4 GB |
500 |
Linux 64-bit |
2* |
2 GB |
4 GB |
500 |
* Additional CPUs may be required for larger environments.
The following calculations are guidelines for setting the amount of connections required for the Agent Manager.
Note: The following sample is for the calculation of Hyper-V agents only. If there are additional agents to be monitored by the Agent Manager in your environment, update the existing connection quantity to add this number that is required for the Hyper-V agents.
The Agent Manager JVM usually requires additional memory to monitor more than 4000 virtual machines. The total number of virtual machines is the total from all Hyper-V Servers that will be monitored from all Hyper-V agents running on the Agent Manager.
The following calculations are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Memory requirements can vary greatly from installation to installation with similar VM counts. If insufficient memory is configured, the failure mode is easily recognizable: all agents on the Agent Manager host will go into a broken state after the agent(s) were activated for a short period of time, usually within 24 hours. In addition, the Agent Manager log will contain a line similar to the following:
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
If this is the case, add memory greater than what is shown in the calculations below, in increments of 512 MB until the agents stabilize.
JVM memory requirements for Hyper-V agents are calculated using the following formula:
512 MB + 0.5 MB x VM#
According to the above formula, monitoring 4000 virtual machines requires 2560 MB of memory:
512 MB + 2048 MB = 2560 MB
The default setting for agents deployed on 64-bit systems is 2560 MB, which suffice this environment.
Similarly, monitoring 8192 virtual machines requires 4608 MB of memory:
512 MB + 4096 MB = 4608 MB
This requires the default Agent Manager settings to be changed.
When monitoring larger Hyper-V environments, the Agent Manager machine hosting the Hyper-V agents should be dedicated to this task. No other Foglight agent types should run on the host and the host should not run any other applications.
Regardless of the values set for JVM memory above, Agent Manager never allocates more than 80% of system memory. So the machine hosting the Agent Manager and Hyper-V Agents must have sufficient memory. Beyond the memory requirements of the Agent Manager, a minimum of 2 GB should be free for the operating system. In the example above for 8000 VMs and an Agent Manager memory requirement of 4608 MB, the host should have a minimum of 6656 MB - the greater of:
1.25 x 4608 MB = 5760 MB
Or:
2048 + 4608 MB = 6656 MB
If the Foglight Agent Manager is configured on a virtual machine, it is recommended that the VM use a memory reservation to ensure maximum performance.
CPU usage on the Agent Manager host is relatively low most of the time.
However, usage peaks dramatically during the performance metric collection. This
is normal and expected. CPU utilization consistently over 50% is an indication
that additional processing power is required. As with memory, usage can vary
between different installations with similar numbers of virtual machines. The
following guidelines should be followed:
Up to 1000 VMs |
2 CPUs |
1000 – 4000 VMs |
4 CPUs |
4000+ VMs |
add 1 CPU per 1000 VMs – round up when necessary |
When the Agent Manager and Hyper-V agents are running on a virtual machine, the VM should be configured with CPU reservation whenever possible to ensure best performance. Lack of processing power on the Agent Manager manifests in missed collections and gaps in the data usually noticeable in various graphs throughout the Foglight for Hyper-V dashboards.
# of virtual machines | Memory* Foglight JVM settings |
1000 |
Xms|Xmx=4G |
2500 | Xms|Xmx=9G |
5000 | Xms|Xmx=17G |
10000 | Xms|Xmx=32G |
20000 | Xms|Xmx=62G |
* Edit the Foglight Management Server JVM settings in the server.config file located under Quest\Foglight\config\. When running Foglight on a virtual machine, full memory needs be reserved at the hypervisor level.
Foglight includes a licensing capability that restricts access to those features that are defined in the license. Any Management Server installation requires a license that grants access to server-specific parts of the browser interface and the features associated with them. Foglight cartridges are also license-protected. While some cartridges are covered by the base Foglight license (such as Foglight Agent Manager cartridges and Foglight for Infrastructure), others may require an additional license.
Foglight for Hyper-V is covered by the base Foglight Evolve license and Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition license. A separate additional license is required for installation in the base Foglight product.
To activate a trial or a purchased commercial license:
The Foglight for Hyper-V release package contains the following:
Foglight Evolve 9.3 or Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.9.3 includes a new version of Foglight for Hyper-V 5.8.3. This new version of Foglight for Hyper-V is installed with Foglight Evolve 9.3 or Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.9.3.
After installing all of the cartridge files, the following cartridges appear on the list of installed cartridges:
For more information, see the Foglight for Hyper-V Installation Guide.
To collect the complete data of virtual machines that are resided on the SMB server, make sure to do the following:
Additional information is available from the following:
This section contains information about installing and operating this product in non-English configurations, such as those needed by customers outside of North America. This section does not replace the materials about supported platforms and configurations found elsewhere in the product documentation.
This release is Unicode-enabled and supports any character set. In this release, all product components should be configured to use the same or compatible character encodings and should be installed to use the same locale and regional options. This release is targeted to support operations in the following regions: North America, Western Europe and Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Far-East Asia, Japan.
This release has the following known capabilities or limitations: This release is localized for English only but supports the Unicode character set.
Quest creates software solutions that make the benefits of new technology real in an increasingly complex IT landscape. From database and systems management, to Active Directory and Office 365 management, and cyber security resilience, Quest helps customers solve their next IT challenge now. Around the globe, more than 130,000 companies and 95% of the Fortune 500 count on Quest to deliver proactive management and monitoring for the next enterprise initiative, find the next solution for complex Microsoft challenges and stay ahead of the next threat. Quest Software. Where next meets now. For more information, visit https://www.quest.com/.
Technical support is available to Quest customers with a valid maintenance contract and customers who have trial versions. You can access the Quest Support Portal at https://support.quest.com.
The Support Portal provides self-help tools you can use to solve problems quickly and independently, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The Support Portal enables you to:
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