Chapter 4. Auditing and Monitoring

In the previous chapters, we discussed the differences between versions of ESX and ESXi, hardware on which the OS can be installed and installation, and upgrades. But a large part of your planning should be around auditing and monitoring not just a single ESX host but the entire virtual environment. Auditing and monitoring of the entire virtual environment is becoming much more important as more and more workloads are transferred to virtual machines across multiple clusters. However, what does auditing and monitoring actually mean? When I ask people what they want to audit or monitor, there are varied and distinct answers. The most common answers are that a customer wants to monitor the following:

• State of a virtual machine

• State of an ESX host

• Performance

• Hardware

• Security

• Compliance

• Applications running within VMs