Over the last couple of weeks I received multiple questions around Application Monitoring. Application Monitoring is part of the HA stack. Application Monitoring is a feature of VM Monitoring and similar to VM Monitoring the VMware Tools heartbeat mechanism is used to detect outages.
Currently the API is only available to a select group of partners who are delivering a solution based on the App Monitoring API. However in the future it should be available to everyone as part of the Guest SDK, but unfortunately I can’t give you a time frame or more details around that. Some of you might have seen one of the recent announcements by Symantec. Symantec’s solution is actually based on VMware App Monitoring and I believe they were the first to announce that they would be using it. If you have seen other announcements let me know!
I have been told that VMware is currently looking into integrating some of it’s app with App Monitoring. In my opinion the most obvious ones that would benefit from this integration would be vCenter, SRM, View, Zimbra, vShield etc. However that is pure speculation and I seriously don’t know if VMware is planning anything around these products.
So in short, Application Monitoring uses the VMware Tools Heartbeat mechanism to detect an app failure. App Monitoring relies on the application to tell it if it needs to be restarted or not…. It is the responsibility of the application developer to utilize this functionality. I am trying to dig up more details around the innerworkings but unfortunately there isn’t more I can disclose at this point in time.
Hopefully this tiny bit of extra info is useful.
Phil Maynard says
Hi Duncan,
Neverfail has also announced support for the VMware Application Monitoring API, which can be seen here: –
http://extranet.neverfailgroup.com/www/download.asp?id=180caf
Support for this API is an extension to the existing vAppHA product, which was released back in March 2010.
We’re currently providing a 60 day free trial download (Supports Exchange, SQL, IIS etc.) if anyone would like to try it out.
You can find more details on the following site: –
http://www.neverfailgroup.com/virtualization/vapphatrial.html
Best regards
Phil Maynard
Senior Director, Product Marketing
Neverfail
Frantisek Ferencik says
Please what is the price for Neverfail vAppHA? Is it per VM as Symantec ApplicationHA?
Frantisek Ferencik says
Hi Duncan,
please what is current state regarding “However in the future it should be available to everyone as part of the Guest SDK”?
Thanks.
Frantisek
Duncan Epping says
I cannot comment on that unfortunately….
Tom Fenton says
Duncan, it looks like (according to the What’s New in VMware vSphereTM 5.0 – Availability
Technical WhiTe PaPeR v 1.0/UPdaTed June 2011) that the API is now available to regular users. Is this correct?
Duncan says
Yes that is correct