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

Contents

Welcome to Foglight for Hyper-V

New in this release

Resolved issues and enhancements

Known issues

Upgrade and compatibility

System requirements

Product licensing

Getting started with Foglight for Hyper-V

About Us

Welcome to 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.

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New in this release

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:

• Adopted new style for all rules of alarm view in Hyper-V. (HV-1955)
• Changed Agent failure UI Notification to alarm. (HV-1959)

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Resolved issues and enhancements

This 5.8.3 release of Foglight for Hyper-V includes the following resolved issues and enhancements:

• Fixed an issue where Hyper-V agent might stop data collection after a period. (HV-1956)
• Fixed an issue where Hyper-V discover might show password incorrect in some case. (HV-1958)
• Fixed an issue where Hyper-V agent might stop data collection after FglAM restarts. (HV-1961)

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Known issues

The following is a list of issues known to exist at the time of Foglight for Hyper-V release.

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Upgrade and compatibility

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.

To upgrade to the latest version of Foglight for Hyper-V:

1. Deactivate all Hyper-V/SCVMM/SOFS agent instances.
2. On the Cartridge Inventory dashboard, install the following cartridge files. Do not remove the older version of these cartridges. Install version 5.8.3 over the older version.
   • vUsage-Feedback-5_8_3.car
   • DRP-5_8_3.car
   • Virtual-HyperV-5_8_3.car
     Note: Monitoring of Hyper-V and Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) is enabled by the Virtual-HypeV-5_8_3.car file.
   • Virtual-HyperV-Admin-5_8_3.car
3. To enable System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) monitoring, install the SCVMM-5_8_3.car file.
4. On the Hyper-V Environment dashboard, on the Administration tab, update all of the existing agent instances.
5. Activate all agent instances.

For more information, see the Foglight Upgrade Guide.

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System requirements

Before installing Foglight for Hyper-V, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:

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.

Hyper-V Agent and Agent Manager configuration

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.

Foglight Hyper-V Agent host system requirements

* Additional CPUs may be required for larger environments.

Deploying more than 10 Hyper-V agents

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.

To change the JVM settings:

1. Determine the amount of connections required for the Agent Manager. Each agent requires 15 connections. For example, if 12 agents are deployed in the Agent Manager, the amount of required connections is 15 x 12 =180.
2. On the agent machine, open the baseline.jvmargs.config file for editing. The file is located in the <Agent_Manager_home>/state/default/config directory.
3. Configure the pool size by adding the following lines in the Settings section:
   
   vmparameter.0 = "-Dcom.quest.connection.regulator.percentAvailableConnectionsThreshold=40"
   vmparameter.1 = "-Dcom.quest.connection.regulator.maxActiveConnectionsCap=300"
   
   The pool size will be maxActiveConnectionsCap multiplies the value subtracted percentAvailableConnectionsThreshold from 100%. In the sample above, this is 300 x (100-40)% = 180 connections.
   
   Note: If this file has been previously edited, increase the numeric parameters accordingly.
4. Delete the existing deployed negotiation configuration settings directory:
   
   <Agent_Manager_home>/state/default/config/deployments
   
5. Restart the Agent Manager for these settings to take effect.

Monitoring more than 4000 virtual machines from a single agent host

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.

To change the JVM memory settings:

1. Determine the amount of additional memory required. This will be the total from the last step above minus the default value of 2560 MB. In the sample above, this is 4608 – 2560 = 2048 MB.
2. On the agent machine, open the baseline.jvmargs.config file for editing. The file is located in the <Agent_Manager_home>/state/default/config directory.
3. Add the following lines in the Memory Settings section:
   
   vmparameter.2 = "-Xms2048m";
   vmparameter.3 = "-Xmx2048m";
   
   Note: If this file has been previously edited, increment the numeric parameters accordingly.
4. Delete the existing deployed negotiation configuration settings directory:
   
   <Agent_Manager_home>/state/default/config/deployments
   
5. Restart the Agent Manager for these settings to take effect.

Host system recommendations

Dedication

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.

Memory

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

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:

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.

Foglight Management Server minimum memory requirements

* 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.

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Product licensing

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:

1. On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click Administration > Setup > Manage Licenses.
2. Click Install.
3. In the Install License dialog box, click Browse.
4. In the file browser that appears, specify the location of the license file.
5. In the Install License dialog box, click Install License.

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Getting started with Foglight for Hyper-V

Contents of the release package

The Foglight for Hyper-V release package contains the following:

1. Cartridge files:
   • vUsage-Feedback-5_8_3.car
   • DRP-5_8_3.car
   • SCVMM-5_8_3.car
   • Virtual-HyperV-5_8_3.car
   • Virtual-HyperV-Admin-5_8_3.car
   Note: Some of the Foglight for Hyper-V browser interface elements are defined in the vUsage-Feedback-5_8_3.car, DRP-5_8_3.car, SCVMM-5_8_3.car, and Virtual-HyperV-Admin-5_8_3.car files. All of the available CAR files need to be installed on the Management Server.
2. Product Documentation, including:
   • Foglight for Hyper-V Release Notes (this document, in HTML format)
   • Foglight for Hyper-V Installation Guide (PDF)
     Note: This document was not updated for this release. The previous version of this document is relevant for the current release as well.
   • Foglight for Hyper-V User and Reference Guide (PDF and online help)
     

Installation instructions

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.

To install the cartridge files and deploy agents:

1. Navigate to the Cartridge Inventory dashboard, and install the following cartridge files:
   • vUsage-Feedback-5_8_3.car
   • DRP-5_8_3.car
   • Virtual-HyperV-5_8_3.car
   • Virtual-HyperV-Admin-5_8_3.car
2. To enable System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) monitoring, install the SCVMM-5_8_3.car file.
3. On the Hyper-V Environment dashboard, open the Administration tab.
4. On the Agents area, click Hyper-V Agents, SCVMM Agents, or SOFS Agents, and then click Add.
5. Follow the Agent Setup wizard to create and deploy Hyper-V agent, SCVMM agent, or SOFS agent instances, as required.

After installing all of the cartridge files, the following cartridges appear on the list of installed cartridges:

• SCVMM 5.8.3
• SCVMM-Agent 5.8.3
• Virtual-HyperV 5.8.3
• Virtual-HyperV-Admin 5.8.3
• Virtual-HyperV-Lite 5.8.3
• Virtual-HyperV-Base 5.8.3
• Virtual-HyperV-Intelliprofile 5.8.3

For more information, see the Foglight for Hyper-V Installation Guide.

Configuration prerequisites

User privileges required for monitoring agents

1. Privileges of Monitor Account for Hyper-V® or SOFS Agent:
   • The user is a member of a local group administrators.
2. 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.
     Notes:
     • Follow the Microsoft documentation to add a user to the SCVMM administrator role: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh341475(v=sc.12).aspx
     • Follow the Microsoft documentation to add a member to a local group: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772524(v=ws.11).aspx
3. Privileges of Hyper-V Optimizer (Hyper-V® environments):
   • Hyper-V Optimizer is using the Hyper-V agent credentials (which is the local administrator).

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:
   1. Run the following command on Active Directory. Visit Enable-SmbDelegation for details.
      Enable-SmbDelegation [-SmbClient] <Hyper-V server name> [-SmbServer] <SMB server name>
      Notes:
      1. The Active Directory forest must be at the Windows Server 2012 functional level and above.
      2. This cmdlet relies on Active Directory Windows PowerShell cmdlets to perform its actions. To install the Active Directory cmdlets, run the following command: Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-PowerShell
   2. Enable the SMB delegation through the Active Directory Users and Computers console.
      1. Browse to select the default container named Computers.
      2. Select the computer on which you want to configure constrained delegation (your Hyper-V host server), right click on it and select Properties.
      3. 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.
      4. 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.

Additional resources

Additional information is available from the following:

• Online product documentation (https://support.quest.com/technical-documents#F)
• Foglight Community https://www.quest.com/community/products/foglight/

Globalization

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.

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About Us

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 resources

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:

• Submit and manage a Service Request.
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• Sign up for product notifications.
• Download software and technical documentation.
• View how-to-videos.
• Engage in community discussions.
• Chat with support engineers online.
• View services to assist you with your product.

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