During the beta test of PRTG Network Monitor 7.1 I am posting a number of blog articles about new features in the new version. Virtualization has become a fundamental part of the IT eco-system. Many of our customers have already moved or will soon move considerable parts of their computer systems into virtual servers. Of course we also use virtualized systems heavily in our own software test lab together with a lot of real hardware. With version 7.1 we now officially support running PRTG Network Monitor on virtualized platforms. PRTG already supports native monitoring of VMware servers since last October. Now it is a logical step to support running PRTG virtualized, too.

Usage Scenarios

First let's start with two scenarios where it is not recommended (or not possible) to run PRTG virtualized:
  • For availability monitoring and alerting inside your LAN it is still the better choice to run the PRTG core server on a dedicated, non-virtualized system. The main reason is that you would make the availability of your monitoring dependent on the availability of your virtual server if you run PRTG virtualized. And such "chaining" of dependencies should be avoided: Your monitoring would go down when your virtual server goes down.
  • If you want to use packet sniffing you must also run PRTG on real hardware so that PRTG is able to access the drivers of the network card in "promiscuous mode"
But there are several other scenarios where it makes a lot of sense to run PRTG on virtual systems and make use of its many advantages like easy systems management and environmental aspects: For the last scenario PRTG 7.1 already comes with two custom sensors that perform simple load tests for CPU and disks (create a new Custom EXE sensor and choose "Load Test CPU 1 Mio Primes.exe" or "Load Test Disk Write Read 1000 Files.exe"). Keep in mind that these sensors make heavy use of CPU and disk system and therefore should not be run too often to keep system load low. And both a very simple tests that are only intended to be a proof-of-concept. It may be a good idea to create your own load tests that more closely match your own usage of the server.

Supported Technologies

PRTG Network Monitor 7.1 was tested on the following virtualization technologies:
TechnologyClient OS
VMware ESX Server 3.5Windows XP, Windows 2003 (32/64 bit), Windows Vista, Windows 2008
VMware Server 2.0Windows XP, Windows 2003 (32/64 bit), Windows 2008
XEN Server 5.0Windows XP
Parallels Virtuozzo ContainersWindows 2003 Server (32/64 bit)
Amazon EC2Windows Server 2003
Note: Due to the virtualization of the hardware some sensor types of PRTG do not work inside virtual machines, e.g. packet sniffing and disk temperature monitoring using SMART


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